Gone are the days when customers were happy to be addressed as part of a mass audience.

Today, customers are increasingly channel-agnostic. That means they are happy to engage with your business in different ways, from in-store purchases to purchases on your website e-commerce facility or even directly from a social media platform. This cross-channel approach to customer acquisition might seem daunting, but it’s also an increasingly important factor in business success.

Customer Acquisition & Retention Strategy Summary

1. Look at the data
2. Create personal connections
3. Build a community

The data you collect within your business can help. There are huge amounts of data about our customers and prospects, including their:

• Past purchases
• Purchase frequency
• Purchase behaviours
• Demographic data
• Abandoned cart data
• Name
• Address
• Social media profiles

This data is central to your digital marketing strategies. It will inform you about trends in your customers’ behaviours, which in turn shapes your strategic marketing plans including how you develop customer retention, customer acquisition and sales strategies for your business.

Get serious about your data

Successfully attracting and retaining new business is impossible without a solid grasp of customer data. Every organisation operates at different data-maturity levels. But regardless of how far along a company is, virtually every organisation has valuable customer data assets that could be put to better and more active use.

Nowadays, it’s more than simply collecting information about your customers’ preferences, buying habits and demographics – you must transform that data into tactics for marketing. Effective use of current data can dramatically decrease your customer acquisition cost and can be a foundation for your strategies for customer retention.

The key to optimising your targeting strategies in marketing is to enrich your data to incorporate digital profiles, life events, community information, transaction-based insights, customer preferences, sentiment scoring and so on to build a multi-dimensional view of the customer.

Often data within a business exists in silos so that it is difficult to understand everything the company knows fully. Integrating pertinent customer data can be difficult, but making it accessible across the business can cut down on duplicate information gathering and manual data entry and lead to greater customer convenience, improved communications and an enhanced customer experience.

Learn more about how you can start using customer data to benefit your business today.

Even for small businesses, it makes sense to appoint someone responsible for the ongoing management of data quality and integration – your bottom line will thank you for it.

Take a personalised approach

Customer relationships begin and end with your ability to connect personally. However, the strategies you use to achieve this will depend on the nature of your business. If you run an online business, consider implementing product recommendations or live chat – these tools can promote awareness of your offer and generate interest from potential customers. Have a ‘feedback’ channel; you will get to know the positives and negatives of your business from your customers’ point of view, then use that to improve your customer experience.

When you talk to them, use their name and make sure they know yours. Your customers expect to be valued by your business. So, before you send out a mass mailing or an edm to all your customers, consider whether the content speaks to each customer personally. It might be better to break those lists into subsets that talk more personally to the circumstances of that subset.

Increasingly your competitors are finding better ways to build a personal connection with their customers. Personal relationships can create long term customer value. One of the most effective ways to consider the merits of investing in long term relationship building services or products within your business is to know the long term value of a customer. Do not solely focus your brand marketing strategies on single transaction sales. Suppose you have an improved understanding of your customers’ lifecycle value. In that case, you will better understand the need for effective retention strategies and how much you might invest in acquiring a new customer.

Build your community

Creating a relevant and meaningful dialogue with your customers is the next step for customer acquisition best practice. Implement a company blog that speaks to the interests of your target customer, share relevant updates and links on social media. Post new products or current promotions, and make an effort to maintain an authentic voice. If you build a community around your brand, customers are sure to follow. Your community will end up marketing your brand to their community for you.

Selecting the right platforms for your brand is important to fully harness the power of branding on social media. Again, look to your customers and to the data to help you select the right places to build your community.

Understand & engage your target customers using data

If you want to create more effective marketing digital strategies, sometimes all it takes is to stop and listen. If you are keen to improve your customer acquisition effectiveness or boost customer retention, join one of our online marketing workshops. Find out where you can access all the data about your existing customers and how you can make sense of them to formulate a winning strategy for your business.

If your business is still not online, you need to set up a website for your business. Check out our guide on moving your bricks-and-mortar business to an online store to see the seven quick steps you need to do now.