When a buyer moves through your sales funnel and becomes a customer, your marketing automation work is hardly over. The next step is to make sure that those customers remain customers through automated churn management campaigns.
Keys to Successful Churn Management:
- Connect Marketing Automation Software with CRM & Support Systems: Connecting business systems is essential for timely communication with new customers, customers who need to reorder based on their original order date or customers who are likely to churn based on their interaction with support. If a connection is not possible, a simple process for importing customers into your marketing automation system is all you need.
- Determine Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) Prior to Campaign Launch: If you retain a customer who could have churned, how much is that worth to your company? Knowing the CLV helps you determine the ROI on your campaigns.
- Develop Churn Timelines: Customers generally churn on a regular timeline. Having that information helps you determine the staging of marketing automation programs based on common timing for customer churn.
- Create a Preemptive Customer Communication Plan: Knowing customer behaviors will help you create a plan for what to say and when to say it. This way you can communicate with likely churn candidates through a combination of marketing automation and sales engagement based on their online activity.
- Investigate Customers’ Online Communication: Where are your customers talking about your brand online? Find and actively engage with, or, at the very least, monitor, those communication channels online, as well as conversations with brand advocates offline. These sources can help you understand what is being said about your brand.
Churn Management Campaign Ideas
Churn prevention does require a significant amount of data about customer behavior. However, all the data you need may not be available if certain business systems are not integrated. Whatever integration challenges your company faces, you can strategically build pages and automation workflows to gather data and retain customers, including:
- Customer Care Pages: These pages, not exclusively for support, can be used to gain valuable information about customer experience. They can include product maintenance information and other problem-solving content. Page visits can be tracked within the marketing automation software, and customer behaviors on the pages can trigger an email to sales to alert them to a problem or an email to the customer to maintain the relationship.
- Timed Reminders: If a product lifespan is pre-determined, you can send email reminders to upgrade or update the product based on the date of purchase. If there is a flexible timeframe, you can do regular uploads of new customers to the marketing automation software, labeling the contact as a customer and automatically adding them to a pre-developed workflow for email reminders. (This is also useful for upsell opportunities.)
- Customer Satisfaction Surveys: Create a landing page that is used to gather intelligence about customer lifecycles with a short survey. If you have a specific question you need to ask or if you would like general feedback, you can use this survey technique to learn new churn triggers or determine if a customer is going to churn based on historical data.
Are you doing anything else to prevent churn? Let us know in the comments below.
photo credit: Donna62