How to Engage Your Existing Customers for a Higher Marketing ROI
Every year, businesses spend about 56% of their marketing budgets on customer acquisition. Sure, it’s always a good idea to try and spread your influence by bringing in new customers, but it should never be your main focus. To put it bluntly, if you’re investing most of your time and money trying to bring in new customers, then you’re wasting it. You’re much better off focusing on the customers you already have — ultimately creating a stronger and more loyal base audience. More importantly, marketing to current customers will earn you a higher return on investment.
According to Bain & Company, it costs six to seven times more to acquire a new customer, than to retain the ones you already have. Furthermore, returning customers are more likely to spend 67% more on your goods and services. We could keep throwing facts and statistics at you all day, but it should be evident by now that engaging repeat customers is the way to go.
Engage Your Customers and Improve Your ROI
Blah blah blady blah. That’s what all of this looks like at the moment because a lot of you probably have no idea where to start when it comes to engaging your customers. How do you come up with a solid engagement marketing strategy? Where should you focus most of your attention?
It all boils down to one simple, yet vital concept: your relationship with your customers. If you want to capture their hearts, money, time and attention, you’ll need to build a solid relationship with them that remains even after they’ve spent their hard-earned money.
Put Your Customers Before Marketing
Don’t waste time organizing your workforce based on channel demand. Instead, adapt to your customers in order to provide a more seamless experience.
To put this point into perspective, a lot of firms have different teams managing separate channels. This may seem more productive sure, but it can negatively affect your relationship with your customers. These teams are likely unable to coordinate and synchronize events across channels, leading to a single customer interacting with your company in many different ways. That is, they get a different experience with each channel. It can also poison your marketing data because it’s difficult to discern how each customer likes to be engaged with when you have to sort through information from separate channels about a single source.
At the very least, you’re better off striking a balance between channels and customers. We’d certainly recommend putting your customers first, however by structuring your teams to match your audience.
Keep Your Correspondence Personal
Piggybacking on the point above, research from the McKinsey Global Institute shows that personalized interactions with customers are more effective. In many cases, it can deliver five to eight times more the ROI in terms of spending. It can also boost sales by as much as 10%.
What that means for your strategy is that you should structure your teams to match your customers. The best way to do this is to assign your employees or focus your own efforts on a customer by customer basis.
Deliver Content Your Customers Can Engage With and Use
Keeping your ROI acceptable is not just about your products and efficiency. It’s also about pandering to your customers in different ways, one of which is providing them useful information and content. More specifically, by delivering engaging content — which encourages them to interact with your brand and marketing teams — will naturally drive up your ROI.
Safer Brand implemented this strategy in a great way, by hosting a GMO test on their Facebook page which gives customers the chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card. Not only does this get Safer Brand’s customers involved, it also helps them become more knowledgeable about the company’s products.
Use Visual Stimulation to Your Advantage
On Facebook, photos are the most engaging type of content delivered with an 87% interaction rate from users. Furthermore, research conducted by Media Blog has shown that adding a photo to tweets will boost engagement ratings by as much as 35%. Images work, so start using them more often whenever and wherever you can. Use visual stimulation and attractive imagery to draw in your customers. The best way to do this is to create a marketing campaign that utilizes visual elements.
Here’s a great example, although, it’s just one of many you could use: take a photo of one of your products, then post a smaller cropped version of it on social media. Ask your customers to guess which of your products it is in a sort of mini quiz and then give the winner a prize. Not only does this get people talking about the image, but it also gets them interested in your products. Chances are they’ll research your inventory a little more to discover what could be in the photo and in the process they’ll learn a little something about your brand.
These Ideas Are Not Comprehensive
There are many more ways to engage with your customers, new and existing. Although, we’ve clearly outlined you’re better off focusing on your existing customers first and new customers as an aside.
The most important thing to remember is that your relationship with your customers will ultimately determine their involvement. Invest your time and effort into building a solid relationship and your ROI will naturally grow. The tips above should certainly help you get started, but we’re confident you can come up with plenty more on your own, too. After all, you wouldn’t be in marketing if you couldn’t.
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