Submitted by: denise cox on Mon, 27/07/2009 - 09:13

I’ve nicked this post’s header from an excellent recent article by David Baker.

“Retention Is The New Acquisition Strategy”

It is an essential manifesto for B2B marketers: RETENTION.

As marketers know, it is less expensive to retain a customer than to find a new one. An existing customer is easier to up-sell and cross-sell to. But retaining a customer in this day and age is more challenging. Partly due to the economy, but also because of the internet. For years now anything can be found online cheaper and faster. Often the only reason customers stay with a business is the customer service – and the care and the value they get from being your customer. Email can play a strong role in your rentention strategy.

Eight strategies for retaining customers using email

1. Every single email sent matters – In the stampede to send to “lists”, let’s not forget that each and every email sent from a company to a customer is an exercise in customer retention. Have in place a structure to answer one-to-one emails in a timely manner. A reply should occur within minutes, even if it is an acknowledgement of receipt of the email. A human reply within hours – but never more than one business day. And check to ensure the content of replies by employees to your customers are friendly, helpful and the results satisfy the customer.
2. Acknowledge the relationship – Your communications to customers, versus prospects, should acknowledge that you know the person you are sending the email to. (Example that acknowledges the relationship)
3. Send Great Content (Also check out content B2B customers want)
4. Use metrics to improve your emails – Make the most of your clicks. Plus, test to improve. Here are some ideas of elements to test.
5. Create a frequency strategy – Knowing the life cycle of your products and services will help you set the frequency that best matches where your recipients are in the life cycle. This includes the cycle through the lifetime value of your customer and cycles such as repeat purchases. (I’ve written about this here.)
6. Use your data to inform your content – MarketingSherpa has found that any segmentation can increase clicks by up to 70%.  If you’re just getting started, review what data you do have within your company, such as sales history, geographical location - anything that gives you a jump-start on your profiling and segmentation. It can be as simple as separating customers from prospects, segmentation by geographic region, type of business, size of business, or who it is from (e.g. Account Manager). It can be as sophisticated as dynamic content within a set newsletter template that reflects each reader’s interests, previous clicks and purchases.
7. Build a personalisation strategy - How are you going to increase the personalisation within your email as you gain insight and metrics into your subscribers?
   
8. Decide what to do with ‘inactives’ – First measure what they aren’t doing – then read Mark Brownlow’s ideas.