Did you know that, for a business, acquiring a customer can be five times as expensive as retaining an existing customer? Or that increasing customer retention by just 5 percent can boost profits up to 95 percent?

With the power of customer retention to grow the bottom line—and with the cost of the alternative, as US companies lose more than $130 billion per year due to avoidable churn—savvy marketers in every industry are focusing their efforts on outreach strategies that build customer loyalty for the long term.

It’s a tall order, especially for rapidly growing companies and brands with sales outlets, distributors, and reps scattered across the country. But fortunately, the right marketing tech can seriously simplify customer retention strategies. Let’s take a look at how.

Personalized Brand Experience

In our automated, online world, a little personalization goes a long way in building relationships with customers. In fact, research shows 80 percent of consumers are more likely to buy when a brand offers a personalized experience. So, what does that look like? There are a few possibilities:

• Adding customers’ names to communications.
  This is one of the easiest ways to increase email open rates and a great way to increase response rates to physical mailers by up to 44 percent.
• Tailoring messages to recipients’ regions.
  This includes national brands tailoring postcards to reflect regional languages and lingo, retail locations, and time zones. For local businesses, it could mean including directions to shops or offices tailored to recipients in different parts of the city.
• Remembering customers’ history and preferences. From sending emails and mailers with offers based on purchase history to using retargeting to spotlighting specific products on social media, highlighting a customer’s history is a great way to encourage a follow-up purchase.

Our teams are highly experienced in building and then executing highly complex variable data mailings helping make personalized marketing is a breeze.

Automated Multichannel Communication

Today’s customers expect to be able to communicate with their favorite brands any time, via virtually any platform. Research has shown multichannel marketing can deliver revenue uplift in the range of 15 to 35 percent and that marketers who integrate multiple channels are more than twice as likely to report higher marketing effectiveness vs. using those using fewer channels with less integration. This includes email marketing, posting and interactions on a range of social media channels, and discoverability on search engines, just for starters.

But again, keeping the communication lines open across every virtual platform can be a full-time job and more—unless you can use marketing tech to automate the legwork. Email (with pre-made brand templates and personalization capabilities), Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram content and imagery (again, customizable via modular templates), and paid search capabilities – all at the local level – make all of this possible, however—and even better if they’re all enabled by a single-source marketing execution partner like OneTouchPoint.

The best part? Because these are pre-approved and templated, little to no marketing knowledge is required. The corporate marketing teams set the content, the templates, images – and more – then you just provide access to your approved user to run their own local marketing campaigns. Everything is on brand (you can even add automated workflows to review) and your team is no longer bogged down with the day-to-day. Need additional support, we do offer services those that need 1:1 help.

In-Depth Audience Insights

One key way to maximize the return on marketing investments (ROMI) is to identify which strategies are working and lean in on those, no longer investing in the outreach that’s falling short. This takes a couple of forms:

• Tracking users’ interactions with your brand
  and communicating with them accordingly in order to move them down the marketing funnel toward a purchase. If a customer has spent a lot of time exploring one of your offerings, it might be time to send them more information about it, or even to send them an incentive for making a purchase. If they’ve interacted with all of your social media posts, but haven’t been to your website in a while, it’s time to send them an invitation to pop back in.
• Invest in strategies with the highest engagement. If one particular type of marketing email—or paid advertisement or social media post—is seeing high clickthrough rates over another, then you know what your audience likes. Investing in more of the former and less of the latter will inevitably lead to more engaged customers and higher sales.

So, how do you track all this user behavior? Automated reporting on social media engagement, website interactions, set up specific campaign landing pages and email engagement, for starters, can show you which of your content customers are gravitating toward and which is less compelling, arming you with the strategy you need to maximize your communication success.

For print, there are a bunch of options. Do your customers call to schedule appointments? Leverage campaign specific phone numbers. Coupon and promotion codes can easily be tied back to a campaign if the data is collected at the point of sale.

Compliant Messaging Every Time

Finally, to maintain customer loyalty, messaging consistency is key. And in heavily regulated industries like healthcare, finance, and alcohol and beverage, compliance consistency is even more critical. So, how do you ensure every single marketing communication—from physical catalogs and fliers to Facebook ads to sales emails—is consistent and compliant, even when there are multiple team members or brand reps producing content?

The answer is modular content: content that’s been divided into the smallest possible reusable “blocks.” Think text like disclaimers, value statements, or product descriptions, and visuals like product shots, videos, or infographics. These components can then be remixed into any number of assets for any number of channels.

These modules—created and approved by corporate, with legal oversight for compliance as necessary—can be distributed via your team’s content and resource hub so anybody involved in collateral creation has easy access whenever they need it. This ensures the kind of national brand consistency and airtight compliance that’s so critical to maintaining customer trust, while giving users the flexibility to create personalized promotional assets relevant to local markets.

Effective customer retention strategies are critical to a business’s bottom line, and marketing plays a significant role in turning one-time buyers into loyal evangelists. But without the right systems in place, these strategies—from personalized outreach to trust-building consistency on every platform—can be impossible to manage.

OneTouchPoint understands what’s at stake, and we’re obsessed with helping our customers leverage our end-to-end suite of marketing execution services to not only retain current customers but identify and attract new audiences every day.

We encourage you to browse our website to learn more about our marketing execution services—including print and digital marketing. Then, when you’re ready, contact us or request a quote on your next project. Our experts will provide insight and ideas to deliver phenomenal results at a great price.