It’s not enough to create buyer personas and leave them getting dusty on the shelf. Find out how to apply customer personas to inform each stage of your marketing strategy
What are marketing personas?
Customer or buyer personas are fictional people who represent target customer segments. Personas are used by marketing teams to segment and target key demographic, psychographic, and behavioural traits of their target audiences.
The term ‘user personas’ is also commonly applied when analyzing particular online users’ behaviours, such as website experience (CX, UX) or in response to marketing automation (e.g. email or mobile campaigns).
Why create customer personas?
By researching and creating customer personas, we as marketers, managers, and business owners can gain valuable insights into our buyers’ preferences, motivations, pain points, and online behaviours.
Persona-based marketing techniques enable businesses to tailor their digital marketing campaigns and always-on…
Create a co-ordinated 'always-on' digital marketing strategy for the whole customer lifecycle to boost conversions and retention
It's no secret that engaging your customers is crucial to achieving continued sales, and it's also well known that it is usually far easier and costs less to get repeat business from existing customers than it is to acquire new ones from scratch.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is well established as a process to try to achieve this, but this customer lifecycle 'relationship' begins with the first contact with the customer (when they are still a contact or prospect).
We believe that the best way for a company or brand to build relationships is through a planned always-on marketing approach integrated across each 4 stages of your customers' lifecycles:
Reach
Act
Convert
Engage
This renewed focus by marketers on prospect and customer engagement, conversion, and retention has led to the appearance of a new…
Discover the latest trends and innovations in customer relationship management to truly integrate your financial services CRM marketing
From account opening, saving money, investing, to foreign currency exchange, financial services marketing leaders are looking to create a user-centric digital environment to respond to users’ expectations. Financial services CRM today means providing customers with more innovative and complete financial services with partners from different industries, including telecom companies, FinTech start-ups, and insurance companies.
Financial services companies have often perceived the strength of digital purely as an acquisition channel. As customer relationships have become more complex, the growth of new distribution channels has increased combined with the exponential growth of new technology means financial services CRM marketing is more important than ever, for both customer acquisition and retention and lifetime value.
Larger financial brands also understand as their historic dominance is continually being squeezed by startups such as FinTechs focusing on retention can drive up…
First my wallet, now my phone, are stacked with customer loyalty cards, emails, and apps. But what do customers want in loyalty schemes?
The customer loyalty market is in a state of flux. While physical cards decline amidst low-contact social distancing, notifications and emails from my favourite brands are more targeted (and appealing!) than ever.
With marketing budgets tightening, customer engagement is a wise area to defend. Recent studies show it can cost up to 5x more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one.
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Loyalty schemes are expensive to implement, promote and very costly to manage, both online and offline. But are they making a difference? Do they increase customer engagement, and what can we learn from the best examples?
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Managing customer loyalty schemes
Whether it's an in-house managed scheme or being part of an external…
The latest results from the CMO Survey, a special COVID-19 edition, give a fascinating insight into our fellow marketers' business strategy and planning to drive growth this year.
Digital Marketing Strategy during COVID-19
84% of marketers confirm they have ‘improvised to generate new marketing strategies during the pandemic’ according to the CMO Special Covid-19 report in June 2020. So what did they do? And what can we learn about managing business growth right now?
“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change”
- Albert Einstein
So, by Einstein’s prognosis, 2020 has been a very intelligent year for marketers. While for some of us, the changes have been less grand, others have witnessed a complete transformation in less than half a year. Naturally, there are fluctuations by industry, so for more detailed data about your industry, check out this special …
Only 34% of marketers report being comfortable with the idea of customer lifetime value, and even those who get it struggle to market across generations
"Know your audience" is Marketing 101, so why do so many marketing leaders miss the mark when appealing to their bases? Even when a brand is successful, it often struggles to maintain that appeal in the long run. Your brand’s customer lifetime value strategy is crucial, no matter what industry you’re in.
Unfortunately, only 34% of marketers report being comfortable with the idea of customer lifetime value, and even those who get it struggle to market across generations. They get lost in the myriad details of the marketing process without realizing it’s an audience’s culture — not one of the countless formulaic solutions that work only on paper — that maintains its loyalty.
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When customers feel an emotional connection to a brand, the lifetime value of that customer can increase by 300%
There is so much more to success in business than a profitable bottom line. Unfortunately, many marketing teams and sales departments get so wrapped up in hitting goals and increasing conversion rates that they forget about the most important part of creating a great brand: the customer-business relationship.
Often, the reason that a customer comes back to buy from your business is the perception they have about your brand. If their experience was positive and they enjoyed your product, there is very little convincing needed to get them to convert once again.
This is why cultivating meaningful relationships with customers is so important. In fact, when customers feel an emotional connection to a brand, the lifetime value of that customer can increase by 300% and they are far more likely…
Why local customer service ecosystem matter?
The concept of customer experience is built around delivering value. One of the integral elements of the value proposition of any business is customer service.
A well-oiled customer service machine is the multi-faceted beast. It is capable of working all-round insight miracles for multiple aspects of the business operation. The customer service ecosystem is a swiss army knife for information gathering.
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Here’s why:
It is designed to keep feedback with the user audience, maintain their basic needs and demands.
It is also a valuable source of information regarding user habits and the tendencies of product/service use.
The interaction with the customer points identifies where there is…
With myriad options available to today’s consumer, customer retention is vital for e-commerce brands. Gamification, push notifications and loyal programs help in contently re-engaging with the existing customers
Research by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company found an increase of 5% in customer retention can improve the revenues by 25-95%. In e-commerce, repeat customers are godsends. They’ve proven their interest in buying your product and are willing to spend money.
In fact, according to a report by RJ Metrics, an online store typically generates 43% of its revenue from existing users. This figure can increase up to 75% if the store spends time and effort cultivating a deeper relationship with its existing customers.
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The question that…
Learn how to transform uncertain prospects into brand advocates one step at a time
Marketers often see the customer journey as a linear progression of four stages:
Awareness
Interest
Consideration
Purchase
But there’s one important thing most of us tend to forget - the customer journey is no longer linear. Gone are the days when you could easily walk alongside your customers, guiding them all the way to the checkout page.
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Today, your prospects can unexpectedly jump in or out at any point. Now, this doesn’t mean that the framework of the customer journey is no longer relevant. You should still think about these stages, but the way you approach them needs to change.
Your ultimate goal today should be to provide a…
