Looking for Higher Marketing ROI? Engage Your Customers

Every year, marketers spend billions of dollars attracting new business – on average, marketers spend 56% of their marketing budgets on acquisition. But as we explore in our new ebook, Improve Customer Acquisition with an Engagement Strategy, there’s no point spending on new customers when – for a fraction of the budget – you could be focusing on customers you’ve already earned.

The ROI of Engaging Customers

The truth is that marketing to current customers gets you a higher return on investment. Consider the following stats:

• According to Bain & Company, it costs between six and seven times more to acquire a new customer than to retain ones you’ve already got.
• Repeat customers tend to spend more – as much as 67% more – according to the same study.
• Loyal customers are worth up to 10 times as much as their first purchase, according to the White House of Consumer Affairs.

All of this makes one thing clear: without a rock solid engagement strategy, your acquisition efforts largely go to waste.
And marketing to customers isn’t just about their individual value – it’s also about the value of their networks. According to Forbes, word-of-mouth recommendations influence 80% of purchases, and people referred by customers are 3-5 times more likely to convert to customers.

A Winning Customer Marketing Strategy

So how do you use an engagement marketing strategy to focus on customers? Capturing more time, attention, and revenue from existing customers is all about building relationships. Here are the three tenets of effective customer relationship-building:

• Your marketing organization must be customer-centric.

Organize your team around customers, not channels. Your customers should have a seamless experience of your band, regardless of what channel they’re engaging with.
Unfortunately, many marketing organizations are built around channels, with separate teams managing emails, display ads, mobile marketing, etc. This makes it difficult to coordinate efforts, and (more importantly) to take all of a customer’s behaviors into account across every channel – leading to disconnected, often irrelevant, marketing.

• Your marketing team must have a single view of customers than spans acquisition through engagement, across channels.

To develop a comprehensive profile of your customers, you’ll need a unified view. You can’t engage customers without an understanding of how they interact with you across channels, but 42% of CMOs recently told Accenture they agree that “technology is too siloed and too difficult to use” for cross-channel experiences.
Find a platform that can tell you about your customers’ initial engagement, which will give you insight into how that person likes to be engaged with/marketed to – and insight into their future buying preferences. This will help you deliver content that actually addresses their interests and stage in the customer lifecycle.

• You must have the ability to automate and personalize based on where the relationship starts, and where you want it to go.

It’s been proven that the most effective marketing occurs when messages and interactions are personalized. McKinsey’s research shows that relevant messages or offers when the opportunity arrives (also known as personalization) can deliver between five and eight times the ROI on your marketing spend, and can lift sales 10% or more.
With that in mind, you want to tap into a platform that makes it possible to “listen” to your customers’ activities and refine your message based on those behaviors. By engaging your customers in a way that helps them realize success, you lessen the chances that an acquired customer will become part of your churn stat. In fact, you boost the odds that they’ll make a follow-up purchase.