Marketing Automation

Personalization in Banking

  • Aanchal Agrawal
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  • 7 February , 2023
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    • 4 min read

Personalization overall helps in loyalty and engagement. As per Salesforce reports, 84% individuals want to be treated as a person, compared to phone number or email address.

Despite the necessity of driving individualised experiences, the banking industry is struggling to keep up with retailers, media and tech companies in delivering these highly tailored interactions and product offerings to their customers. They need to take care of prospects, customers, partners and also bank suppliers. Managing Data for all of them is a real challenge for the banks. And considering that millennial will comprise a significant part of future bankers banking transactions, it is important that banks appeal to them with emotion, branding and lasting connections. Plus the millennial will easily move away if the experience is not good.

Issues faced by the banks are:

Some banks may provide personal customer experiences; the vast majority cannot meet the high expectations of their customers, partners and distributor network.  The problem is that many banks position their customer journey and marketing efforts around common life moments or experiences.

For example, when a client transitions from high school to college to job, the bank will bombard that person with student-loan messaging. Later, when the consumer turns 21, the bank will send them marketing material related to purchasing their first house, a new car, insurance, or a holiday.

The following approach is definitely not personalisation.  It’s just lifecycle and lifestyle marketing. Just because the consumer turned 25, it doesn’t mean they automatically want to have a home loan or get married. By making broad assumptions about someone based on their age, consumers – especially millennia’s – will start to feel distant from their bank. The more they get communication which is non-relevant they will start moving away from the bank.  Reality is that banks are not doing the hard work of truly understanding their customers’ needs, and, as a result, their customer journeys feel too generic. Rather than marketing based on life moment segmentation, banks should instead work to target customers through contextualisation. Platforms like Salesforce Marketing Cloud along with Einstein AI capabilities will help understand the customer journey, customer transactions and help in personalizing the experience provided to the customer. Agencies like us we bring in strong experience in Banking space helping customer with the industry wide use-cases and experience ideas to be provided.

Personalization using Contextualisation

Financial companies should deploy a contextual journey, incorporating products seamlessly into the shopping experience. However, banks must analyse their data closely to support such a journey. Consumers want to buy at the right moment – not when the bank thinks they should buy, but when they’re ready to buy, which could potentially be anywhere in the larger customer journey. Banks must tailor financial offerings to the present needs of their customers, and predictive data can help them look forward rather than backward, allowing them to anticipate customer desires and goals more effectively.

A contextual approach recognises that the customer journey is never perfect and must be refined through data. This forward-thinking use of data allows banks to design the various touch-points of the customer journey timely and contextually, including conversations with customer service representatives or assistance applying for financial products. By providing these individualised interactions throughout the consumer journey, clients will be satisfied and engaged as they’ll feel that their bank truly cares for their unique needs.

What does the next generation want?

Banks are interested in attracting the next generation, and although they differ from their parents, they still have many similar requirements. However, one key difference is they desire a bank that can connect with them individually and solve their problems. Also they want the services to be provided online unlike visiting the bank thrice weekly as their parents used to do.  Beyond leveraging a contextual journey to reach these younger demographics, banks must take the time to define their desires, challenges and hang-ups with older methods and approaches.

Next Generation occupy a wide range of life stages, meaning they can’t be so easily thrown together into one giant pot. And whichever life stage they’re at, they want banks to support their current needs. These consumers are likewise open and willing to pay for personalised financial advice. As mentioned above, according to MoneyWise, 60% of next generation customers would consider changing banks for better digital capabilities, such as mobile apps, digital experience and transaction friendly technical support.

Similarly, this block of consumers wants to use the services of organisations that share their values. In other words, they want a sense of community. Traditionally, community and geography were tied together, but the contemporary idea is shifting toward other connections like belief systems, hobbies and passions. To target the specific needs of niche audiences within the next generation, banks should look to Fintechs. By empowering these small but exciting start-ups, big banks can service an even larger number of constituents without being too bland. Regional and local banks are also great partners, allowing one to tap into established markets.

Importance of leveraging a partner to support personalisation

Banks can deliver personalisation through a more contextual customer journey and by addressing the unique needs/challenges of the younger generations. However, banks must also manage their data scientists and portfolios efficiently. Research from McKinsey shows only 16% of data-science teams follow a standard protocol when developing AI tools, limiting the creation of individualised initiatives. Additionally, only 8% of banks can utilise predictive insights from machine learning models, which is pivotal to contextual marketing. To overcome these challenges, banks should consider leveraging a third-party digital product designer and consultant to provide value and unify disjointed teams. Products like Salesforce and Einstein Intelligence are products already built ready to use and partners like Social Beat can help Banks meet up their use-cases increasing their engagement in return leading to happy and loyal customers.


How to Build a Great Martech Team:

  • Aanchal Agrawal
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  • 7 February , 2023
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    • 4 min read

In order to create great digital experiences, you need to first have a great team in place. If you're reading this, you've probably already come to the conclusion that you need a Martech team, whether it's to build a brand new Martech solution or to maintain an existing strategy.

Marketing automation can be proved very useful for companies if used correctly and if the correct decisions are being made. You can achieve outstanding results such as consistent higher ROI and conversions. Marketing automation can help dramatically increase productivity, which in turn will help you to optimize cost.

If you are thinking of implementing marketing automation in your company, there are some factors that you need to consider in order to make it work for you, but you will need qualified candidates. The main point here is that even if everything will be automated, there are some things for which your opinion and a team of well-trained employees will be necessary.

At this time, comes the need to hire the right people to do a specific job. This will be a big investment for you and your company. Therefore, your human resource manager needs to create a clear job description and interviewing process to hire the right team members.

Based on the experience we have outlined steps to build a Martech team with key roles and challenges that will come your way in building the team. Certain steps you need to follow:

Defining the Skills and Roles your team needs:

It’s a very important step where you need to define the skill and roles you need to build for implementing an amazing Marketing Automation solution. Some of the skillset we have identified are:

  • Business Development Manager: This person will be responsible for building the business, getting projects and creating a pipeline.
  • Practice Head: The following person will be the central point who will manage
    • Sales with the Business Development Manager
    • Communication with the Management on the overall status of the Business
    • Work with HR team to onboard team members
    • Work with the Project Management Team to define outline strategy streamline processes
    • Closely work with Account Managers for Client Success
    • Manage conflict and stakeholders
  • Project Manager: Manage the overall project timelines, schedule and cost
  • Solution Consultant: Build the overall solution and also help with presales pitch
  • Campaign Developer: Develop the solution and use-cases on the platforms. Help clients with campaign and reporting.
  • Data Analyst: Work on various data operations as well reporting analytics
  • Quality Assurance: To confirm the solution works as expected and does not have bugs.
  • Account Strategist: Following person brings the Agency side of the business in the Martech solution to blend both the solutions and provide a customer offering or two sides of the solution for the customer.

Not only the roles can change but the frequency of the skills required would depend on the size of the project, engagement value as well as complexity involved.

So this leads to the question: Should you build your team in-house? Or outsource?

Building Process

Hiring the Team In-house

If your organization is large enough, there's a good chance you have the resources to hire an entire team.

First, map out the talent you already have available to you internally, and identify the gaps in skills that need to be filled. Then, before jumping immediately into recruiting for the specific roles outlined above, consider if you might be able to hire someone that is more of a generalist. For the skills that won't be needed often enough to keep someone busy full-time, can you find one person to wear several different hats? If so, can that person be effective enough at those different skills for your Martech solution to be successful?

After exploring your options, it's time to move into the recruiting and hiring process. Good Salesforce talent can be hard to find, but it's out there! A good place to start is on LinkedIn, searching for people with Salesforce capabilities that may be in or connected to your network. Networking in the community can be very helpful if you're looking for local talent: consider meetups, or local events if the timing is right. Getting reference also will be a good source to find talent. Posting knowledge articles and promotions post on LinkedIn are a good way to connect various sources and sourcing resume for profiles.

Hire a Partner that has people with the skills

If your organization is smaller and you don't have the resources to hire an entire team for building and maintaining your Martech, your best bet may be to work with a partner.

If you do not have resources, it might make more sense to align your Martech project with a provider like Airum or Custom Centre rather than building an entire team to implement, monitor and maintain the solution. Even if you do have a knowledgeable IT staff, it may not make sense to use them for this if they are not used to working with the technologies needed to assist with Martech.

By working with the right partner, you can rest assured that your Martech solution is in the hand of experts. When evaluating partners to work with, you’ll want to first make a list of the things that matter most to you. You probably want more than just a great end result; more than likely, you also want to become smarter from the experience and retain knowledge, as well as have confidence that you’ll be able to develop the next solution.

Identifying what you want to get out of the experience besides the one off project will help guide you in choosing the type of company you want to work with. Some companies will focus solely on turning the martech platform around quickly. Others, like Mightas, focus on improving digital capabilities and maturity—while also delivering an excellent experience to your customers. If that entices you, look for partners that provide and create value for customers.

We also encourage you to choose a partner that contributes to Ohana. This will have a great impact on the Salesforce community and, ultimately, improve the overall ecosystem.

Take the long road and learn as you go: Make Mistakes but learn from it

Building a Martech team can seem like a daunting and challenging process, but the good news is that you're never alone. When we started building the team at Social Beat we took time to consider the phases that occur after Martech license is sold, a new solution will need to do more than just automate martech—what integrations are required, what will come next in terms of digital transformation? Thinking about value, maintenance and growing your digital maturity may influence your hiring/staffing goals.


6 Latest Digital Marketing Trends to Watch Out for in 2023

  • Aanchal Agrawal
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  • 4 January , 2023
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    • 9 min read

Quick Links

Rise of Business Messaging/Chatbots | Marketing Automation- Ally to Brands | AI-Tailored Creative Personalisation | The Metaverse and Marketing | CEOs to Become the Face of Brands | Rise of CDPs

“Change” an inevitable part of life that ensures that we evolve and are ready to adapt to newer things is also applicable to the digital marketing world. With the gradual dip in the financial curve in 2022 and the imminent recession that has begun to take its toll on global markets, it is essential that every digital-first brand learns about the latest digital marketing trends and adapts to them as quickly as possible.

Here are some of the most recent trends in digital marketing that every brand looking for a virtual presence must account for.

The Rise of Business Messaging & Chatbots

Marketing chatbots are an AI-tailored technology that ensures spontaneous responses to customer queries and increases customer engagement. With this round-the-clock customer support tool, businesses can drive audiences from the awareness to the consideration funnel by educating them about the product and also build brand image by communicating and resolving consumer queries.

Here’s an example of how an AI-tailored chatbot would work:

Source: Social Beat

Having said that, the digital marketing trends in 2023 might demand that we take it up a notch. While great for resolving minor/easy consumer queries, we need to focus on adding a human touch to our responses (both audio and textual). This will not just help you in driving conversions, but will also help in improving your customer retention rate through personalised engagements.

Tip: Customer personas can contribute to personalising your responses by helping you understand which tonality is best consumed by your customers.

Having talked about marketing chatbots, and automated responses, another crucial digital marketing trend is the improved efficiency of marketing automation platforms.

Marketing Automation Will Become an Ally to Customer-First Brands

As popularly said by Sam Walton- “There is only one boss- The Customer.”

Customer experience has been a crucial digital marketing trend in every form of marketing and that aspect is not going to change anytime soon. However, with the precarious recession times that gradually plague the year 2022, CX will now be a cutthroat competition amongst brands.

While customer experience and personalisation have been in the talks for almost a decade now, only a handful of companies seem to have cracked this code. You might recollect making purchases on Amazon based on suggestions that popped up on your screen. And why won’t you? The offers that they targeted you with were personalized and exactly what you were looking for.

But at the same time, you often tend to ignore or spam-list offers sent by banks or insurance companies. 

This difference is majorly brought by the efficient use of customer data by relying on Martech platforms to automate lead nurturing and targeting the right set of audiences with relevant campaigns.

Did you know that nurtured leads can increase sales opportunities by over 20% compared to non-nurtured leads?

Source: Salesforce

If you have difficulty managing customer data or lack the manpower to do so, you can now easily rely on AI to do the grunt work. Marketing automation platforms like Salesforce can help you automate lead generation, cultivation and also tailor campaigns accordingly. 

Salesforce incorporates Einstein AI that can tailor product recommendations based on customer data interpretation and personalise services for individual customers. It can optimise your marketing performance by driving ROI and increasing spends with synergised AI-driven analytics. 

Moreover, Salesforce Genie, a customer real-time CRM can harmonise all customer data into individual customer graphs and empower industry departments by sharing relevant customer profiles to adapt to the customer’s activities in real time.

Here’s how we leveraged Salesforce to improve Mosiac’s audience engagement by 4.3%:

  • We built consumer journeys to personalise communications based on the audience’s preferences.
  • We reduced the overall manual work by 5% by automating the marketing operations.
  • Created single views for the customer base through Salesforce CRM and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. This further helped us in building omnichannel marketing campaigns and bolstering customer engagement.
  • Increased overall farmer engagement by 4.3%

Hop on to this efficient digital marketing trend with us, we can help you automate your marketing ventures seamlessly!

Creative Personalisation Becomes Easier with Technology

While an engaging customer journey is a crux, ensuring that your campaigns hit the mark visually is equally important. Different audiences have varied preferences for consuming content and catering to these versatile preferences is a must for brands to execute successful campaigns.

For instance, we personalised campaigns for Boat by incorporating creatives that resonate with their versatile range of audience bases on Instagram, Facebook and Google.

These personalised campaigns catered to wide audience bases be it fitness enthusiasts, Gamers, Marvel lovers, etc. and helped us garner up to a 2X ROAS (Return on Ad Spends) amongst the gaming audience and up to a 42% increase in CTR (Click-Through Rates) amongst the sports enthusiasts.

Source: Social Beat

However, catering to such versatile audience bases and working on bulk creatives for tight campaign deadlines requires a great deal of manual work and this is where creative personalisation platforms can play a vital role.

Rocketium, a creative automation platform can help personalise campaign creatives by adapting to different publishing channels, editing bulk creatives and generating highly relevant campaigns. Not just that, you can also create visuals from scratch or auto-generate Copywriter content and ensure omnichannel integration.

Similarly, Dall-E an automated deep learning module can help in generating digital images by combining concept notes seamlessly. It incorporates “Prompts” where you can type in commands and the AI-tailored application will render images accordingly.

BENEFITS:

  • Reduces manual work drastically and saves time.
  • It is cost-effective and can reduce the requirement of a heavy design team.
  • Creatives produced incorporate prompts fed in manually. These are ideal for personalising campaigns through creatives that resonate with a brand’s language.
  • You can produce creatives in bulk and save a lot of time and energy that you can spend towards brainstorming and ideating even better campaigns.

With such automated creative platforms on the rise, creative personalisation of campaigns becomes a lot easier and hence this is another digital marketing trend that brands should definitely consider aligning with.

The Metaverse is Here- But it Will Take Time to Catch Up With Marketers!

Talking about new trends in digital marketing, here is the most anticipated one for the Gen Zs- The Metaverse marketing! But what is the metaverse digital marketing experience?

It is a simulated digital ecosystem structured by components like Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and Blockchain along with an in-depth integration with social media that virtually replicates the physical world. This opens up a whole new world for brands to launch products and even newer methods for marketers to promote these products.

According to Gartner, by the year 2026, about 25% of the population will spend at least an hour every day in the metaverse.

And truly so, major companies like Shopify, Nike, Coca-Cola and Samsung have already set foot into the metaverse with their marketing campaigns. 

While it opens up opportunities to enhance the digital customer experience by exponential values, Metaverse will still require time to catch up with marketers. Why?

  1. Accessibility:Accessing the Metaverse has a minimum requirement of a high-spec computer with really fast internet reception and a VR headset. While some enthusiasts wouldn’t mind investing in these accessories, a major chunk of the audience finds it difficult to purchase such pricey units.
  2. Sceptical Audiences: Many people are still sceptical about the Metaverse and do not visualise it as anything more than a high-stimulus video game. Despite highly intellectual tech professionals explaining the importance and significant growth of the Metaverse, the larger audience is still not persuaded. This in turn hinders the mass production of relevant gadgets to put the Metaverse in full throttle. 
  3. Data Privacy and Security Concerns:Currently, the Metaverse is open to all users and incorporates zero filters as to who can access it. Moreover, there is no regulating authority or guidelines to maintain order. Thus, brands would be apprehensive about promoting products within the Metaverse.According to Vasu Jakkal, Corporate Vice President- Security, Compliance and Identity-Microsoft, the Metaverse will bring about an outburst in infrastructure, devices, apps and data; and with it, an even greater magnitude of attack-surface.
  4. Lack of Metrics Gauges:Traditional methods of gauging performance metrics won’t be applicable to the futuristic Metaverse and thus, there are no provisions to check a campaign’s performance.

However, note that these challenges do not suggest that the Metaverse is not a good digital marketing trend to delve into. Rather, it is just a bit too soon for it to catch up with marketers. Thus, it is crucial that brands hop on to this new digital marketing trend and use this time to learn how the Metaverse works. Brands can understand how the Metaverse improves the digital marketing experience by and executing test campaigns in it. This will give them an edge over their competitors when the Metaverse starts functioning seamlessly. 

There’s a New Face in Town- Founders and CEOs To Be The Face of Brands

While influencers and celebrity ambassadors with their herculean follower count have been the face of most brands for a long time now, we are approaching a gradual concentration of platforms. 

This opens up gates for founders and CEOs to propagate and represent their brands themselves, thereby giving businesses a personalised face value.

Digital marketing trends show an increase in the number of founders coming out and lending their personas to brands. Major C-suite leaders like Elon Musk, Jamshedji Tata, Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs have come forward and represented their brands. Moreover, customer-centric actions like tweet responses to general customers, and the daily life of such CEOs can have a pivotal impact on how audiences perceive their brands.

For example, Elon Musk’s customer redressal and immediate support helped not just humanise the brand but also speak loads about its credibility. 

Source: BigSpeak

Similarly, news about Jamshedji Tata visiting his aged employee and looking after the wellness of his other employees speaks loads about his integrity and adds value to his brand.

Having said that, giving a human face to your brand might also seem precarious as a negative backlash over a hasty tweet or one misconduct by the founder can end up hurting the entire brand as in the case of Ashneer Grover, the Founder of BharatPe.

Thus, while it is advised to adapt to the new trends in digital marketing, be careful and analyse exactly what your brand requires before acting on those lines.

The Rise of CDPs- The Answer to A Cookieless World

While customer data is the key to personalising campaigns, it also poses another challenge for brands- the increase in data silos throughout the consumer journey and the efficient interpretation of this data.

For example, you might reach out to your customer in the form of an advertisement or a newsletter that the user accesses from a different device and a different IP address (either at work or at home) and then visits your website from a completely different device or network. This leads to multiple data entries for the same customer across platform-specific data silos. And this scattered data is what entangles brands and can result in breaches in the updated privacy norms. 

With increasing emphasis on the customer’s data privacy and multiple privacy norms in place, it is essential now more than ever that brands get aligned with Customer Data Platforms (CDP). Wondering why?

  1. Comply with privacy norms laid down in the GDPR:
    Customer Data Platforms are designed to find, collate and synergise all the data available on a user. This helps in complying with the GDPR norm of assembling, sharing, correcting and deleting personal data (on customer request).
  2. Flexible usage of data:
     CDPs are meticulously designed to be flexible and allow different platforms to access and use data silos as directed by their data controller. Thus, CDP marketing ensures the much-needed flexibility of data usage across platforms- a definite requirement for personalised brand campaigns.
  3. Easier consumer data deletion:
    A CDP’s ability to cumulate desperate and scattered data into individual customer profiles also offer another service that ensures privacy compliance- “Deletion of personal data”.When a customer finds a brand irrelevant and wants an out, Customer Data Platforms can help break down data silos and delete customer data while preserving the customer data analytics of the campaign.

Thus, with such herculean loads of duplicate customer data stacked up somewhere in between platform-level data silos, it is very likely that brands will unintentionally breach privacy norms. And with severe actions set in place against such breaches, it is paramount that brands invest in a well-integrated customer data platform to safeguard their marketing ventures. What’s more encouraging is the exponential reduction in efforts to scale up campaign results that these Customer Data Platforms have to offer!!

Let’s Sum It Up

While the world was still licking its wounds dealt by the COVID pandemic, we had another global event, the Russia-Ukraine incident. With major blows to the global economic framework, a recession was never out of the question. With such shifts in the global economy and in the wake of worldwide layoffs customer behaviour changes and so do digital marketing trends. Right from the rise of automated marketing chatbots, to the personalization of brands through marketing automation platforms, we have discussed in detail all the digital marketing updates that brands need to be equipped with to brace 2023.

While a customer-centric approach has been and will always be the crux of every successful marketing strategy, it is essential that we also keep an eye on futuristic happenings. While you currently cater to the millennials and Gen Zs, the little ones (Gen alpha) who will soon become the spending force in the near future must not be left out of your marketing strategies. Thus, brands must also prepare for the futuristic eutopia of the metaverse that will soon become a major marketing platform (probably not in 2023, but definitely in the very near future).

Having aligned with the digital marketing updates for 2023, you might also be interested in:


4 Effective Ways to Improve Customer Retention Rate in 2022

  • Aanchal Agrawal
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  • 10 June , 2022
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    • 4 min read

While acquiring new customers is important, retaining earlier customers is also equally vital for any business. In fact, it’s a more cost-efficient way to scale. Hence, most brands of today are focusing to improve their customer retention rate.

Such customers know the service they receive from your business better than the newer customers. Moreover, their trust and experience with you make them potential advocates of your business. Therefore, your chances of gaining new loyal customers accelerate!

But before moving forward further, let’s define customer retention and how you can improve it. You can also visit our D2C centre of excellence, D2Scale for more info.

What is Customer Retention Rate?

Customer retention rate helps a business understand the percentage of existing customers that a brand was able to retain over a given period of time. A good retention rate is one of the initial aspects that help a business maintain long-term growth!

While there are multiple factors that affect the customer retention rate of a company, Research Gate highlights some of the prime ones: Service quality, satisfaction, trust, and commitment. These are the major aspects to check from the customer’s perspective. Once aced, the chances of improving the retention rate increase by a massive difference!

Why is Customer Retention so Important?

Analysis of the rate at which a company retains its customers is not just limited to determining its ability to consistently provide value to them. In fact, it helps boost the company’s Return on Investment (ROI), improves trust and loyalty and thereby fetches new customers. It mainly prepares the company for long-term growth by maintaining healthy relationships with its buyers.

Let’s have a deeper look at why customer retention rate is so important for a business.

  • More Cost-Effective

The cost of retention is extremely lower than acquiring new buyers. Experts say that finding a new customer is at least 6 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. Generally, the existing customers are deep into the funnel and are already familiar with the brand’s products/services. Hence, you don’t have to reach them through awareness campaigns and the like. So, brands can look into ways to enhance the four factors that affect their customer retention rate.

  • Increase in Return on Investment (ROI)

Generally, return customers tend to transact more with a brand they know over time. And as they buy more, that company’s operating costs to maintain or serve those customers decrease. Hence, as Bain’s Research tells us, a 5% improvement in retention rate generates around a 25% boost in profit!

  • Improves Trust and Loyalty

Return customers generally pay more or upgrade their payment plans over time rather than choose your competitor who they aren’t acquainted with. Once they understand the value of your products/services and your deep commitment to them, they would find it comfortable. This will lead them to come back again to transact even more.

  • Customers turn into Advocates of your brand

If customers are satisfied, they become advocates of your brand naturally. They would refer your services to a friend or family as they highlight to them the major resolutions they found while doing business with you! The new potential customers collect feedback about the services from people they trust to seriously consider. So, with a low cost of retention, you welcome new customers for absolutely free!

Customer Retention Rate Formula

Before jumping straight into any retention strategy, let’s first understand where your current customer retention rate stands. First, take a time period, let’s say quarterly or yearly. And then consider the fundamental customer retention rate formula:

[(No. of Customers at the End of Period - No. of Customers Acquired  During the Period)/ No. of Customers at the Start of the Period] x 100.

So, let’s consider a scenario. At the start of the time period, you had 40 customers, acquired 5 new customers within that time and the 2 customers drop off from doing business with you. Using the customer retention rate formula, the retention rate would stand as:

[(43 - 5) / 40] x 100 = 95% retention

Now that you understand where your customer retention rate stands, you can assess the reasons for the attrition rate. This would help you understand the potential scope of improvement and thereby reduce the attrition rate further.

Also read our guide on : Customer Lifecycle Value vs Cost of Acquisition in Ecommerce

4 Ways on How to Improve your Customer Retention Rate

Using a few strategic customer engagements, you can retain more customers within a given time frame. Here are some ways to improve customer retention for any company. You can try and test out any of the following to see the results.

1. Adjust Prices for Return Customers

You can look into adjusting the charges in a way that’s not hurting your profit but also shows your appreciation towards your customers. For eg, if you have an e-commerce business, you can make adjustments like allowing free delivery or other coupon options. Or, you can provide a cost-effective and smart subscription that helps them cut down costs as they buy more from you.

2. Design a Roadmap for the Future Relationship

It’s a thoughtful practice to show the customers where their relationship with the company is heading. If it’s just the regular transactions and nothing more to it, it will appear as nothing special. This makes customers fall off as they start considering other better options.

Hence, a clear next step in the relationship can provide them with a sense of being a priority or valuable customer. A regular revisiting of the roadmap helps develop new initiatives that serve the goals of both parties mutually. Thus, you can boost your customer retention rate with this future roadmap strategy.

3. Feedback and Action

Asking for feedback doesn’t stop things just there. The answers from both leaving customers and existing customers provide clear scopes of improvement! If you don’t understand the reasons why customers leave, you will never act upon the problems. Once you receive feedback, your team can look into the issues that customers highlight and take proactive measures to bring the problem under control.

If customers see visible differences regarding those issues in a short span of time, they are more likely to continue with you.

4. Create a Customer Loyalty Program

Design a program that rewards your existing customers because of their loyalty. This strategic customer engagement  would work as a consistent incentive program for them to come back to your brand for more. You can consider adding points to their profile as and when they refer your business to their family or friends. Or, you can try sending out an appreciation email with 8-10% off on their next purchase!

Moreover, it’s important to keep things simple in conveying the incentive message and actions. It’s imperative that the customer understands the program’s value easily and at once!

Now that you can define customer retention and have a fundamental understanding of it, you can run an audit and tweak the areas to fine-tune your business and the brand! Better yet, you can Download Our Retention Marketing Playbook for D2C Brands  or visit D2Scale to gain a thorough understanding!


A Complete Guide To IP Warming

  • Lalitha Shukla
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  • 2 March , 2022
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    • 4 min read

A good email marketing strategy can help retain customers and engage with them in a productive way. However, a prerequisite to building an email marketing strategy is building a credible reputation for the IP address that will be used to send the emails out. Have you noticed that a huge chunk of emails that are delivered to you end up in your junk or spam folder while some make it to your inbox? The reason why those emails land up in your spam folder is because of a bad IP reputation. 

In today’s day and age when data privacy is so important, brands across the world are taking measures to ensure that they don’t spam their customers and if you are a brand that is new to email marketing, you need to ensure the same. IP warming is a very important activity that every brand new to email marketing must undertake to increase their email deliverability and customer engagement. Sending large volumes of emails to your subscribers without establishing a good reputation with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will hamper your chances of reaching your customers. 

Do you need it?

Whether you need to warm your IP address depends on two key factors-

The volume of Emails - If you are sending less than 10,000 emails a month, then you may not require an IP warming exercise. ISPs usually target brands that send large volumes of emails every month to their customers. However, it is a good practice to warm up your IP address even if the volumes are low as it helps build credibility for your business. 

Dedicated IP Address - IP warming is required only if a brand is using a dedicated IP address. There are tools in the market that send emails via shared IP addresses and in those cases, brands don’t need to warm the IP address up. It is advisable for brands who send large email volumes to get their own IP address as the reputation depends solely on them. Using shared IPs can prove to be detrimental depending on the previous campaigns and reputation of the IP.

What is IP Warmup?

IP Warmup or IP Warming is the process of establishing credibility for a new IP Address or an IP that hasn’t been used in a while. The process includes sending emails from the new IP Address linked to the email account in small volumes and gradually increasing the number of emails each day or week depending on the schedule. The idea is to build credibility amongst ISPs ( Internet Service Providers) and ensure that the email is getting delivered to the subscribers’ inboxes.

Data shows that most connections from new IP addresses are attempts to deliver unsolicited spam or unwanted email. It’s important to build history when sending from a new IP Address to avoid landing in the SPAM folders of your subscribers. It’s highly recommended to gradually increase your volume of desirable mail to your subscribers to build a good reputation for your IP. Once a solid reputation has been built for your brand, you can start sending large volumes of emails to your subscribers.

How can IP Warmup help brands using email marketing?

Let’s look at how the IP Warmup exercise can help brands indulge in email marketing to engage with their customers. 

  1. Email Deliverability - Every brand’s major concern when it comes to email marketing is whether my email will reach my customer’s inbox or not. IP warming helps do that. Brands can determine the probability of emails reaching your subscribers’ inboxes and adjust the email volumes accordingly. 
  2. Optimise content for campaigns- During IP warming, when a limited volume of emails are sent, it’s easier for brands to understand what kind of content works best and optimise their future email campaigns for the entire database of subscribers.
  3. Campaign Effectiveness - IP warming helps emails get whitelisted and once that happens, brands don’t have to worry about deliverability. They can instead shift their focus to campaign effectiveness - understanding their customers better, creating retention marketing emails and focusing on customer engagement by looking at metrics like Open Rate, Click-through-rate (CTR) instead of the Deliverability rate.

IP warmup - Best Practices 

  • It takes a minimum of 3-4 weeks to establish an identity and build a credible reputation with the Internet Service Providers (ISPs)
  • The main factors that influence this are - Send Cadence, Volume of emails, Complaints, Bounces and Engagement
  • Brands should set specific volume thresholds per domain for each day of each week to follow, which building volume steadily week on week
  • Send cadence should usually be set at a minimum of 3 days a week to establish proper cadence and sending patterns
  • Brands should focus on the most engaged subscribers as it helps in limited bounces and complaints

Email Template Design for IP Warmup - Best practices 

Here are some best practices to follow while designing an email template for an IP warming exercise -

  • Subject line with maximum 60 characters & doesn’t contain SPAM words (eg. offer/buy now etc.)
  • Pre-header content should be maximum of 40-130 characters which give the subscriber snippet of overall communication
  •  Maintain a healthy Text to Image ratio – more than 60% of the overall design should be text.
  •  Single CTA button with “Non-Selling” action – (e.g. Knowmore) and should be on the first fold.
  •  Minimal use of external links in the email body

If you are a brand that is looking to build an email marketing strategy to engage with your subscribers and need support in IP warming, reach out to us. Our team of experts have over 15 years of experience in creating robust email marketing strategies and have handled IP warm-ups for over 300 brands. 

 

 


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