11
If you are in a growing marketplace, you will need to focus
on both acquisition and retention.
Finally, don’t forget to reactivate your dormant customers,
who often fall by the wayside because of lack of attention.
On the value scale, these are the folks you should focus on
second, just after your current customers. You need to find
out why they aren’t buying from you today; and, if they do
represent a profitable opportunity to you, get them back.
n
Ruth P. Stevens’s expertise in customer acquisition and
retention derives from a decade and a half of hands-on
marketing for both large enterprises and start-up companies.
Just prior to beginning her consulting practice, she served as
chief marketing officer at an Internet company in New York
City. Before that, she had broad responsibilities for direct
marketing at three corporate giants – IBM, Ziff-Davis and
Time Warner. She is past chair of the Business-to-Business
Council of the Direct Marketing Association.
•
Triggered after-marketing programs.
Create an
after-market relationship management program that is
customized to what is going on in the account and tries
to be optimally relevant to the buyer.
•
Loyalty programs.
Taking a page from the consumer
loyalty business, a number of businesses have successfully
fenced off their best accounts and put in place a special
program to recognize and reward them.
Investment Trade-off: Acquire or Retain
The way you talk to a current customer is different — or
it ought to be different — from talking to prospects. The
more basic question is: How much of your budget do you
concentrate on retention vs. new customer acquisition?
We all know that customers cost a lot more to acquire
than to keep. The best way to allocate the marketing
mix is to analyze where you are in the product life cycle
and the size of your universe of potential customers.
You might set up a plan to contact your best customers 25 times a year: 12 by email, six by phone,
six by mail and one face-to-face sales call. Inquirers, on the other hand, merit a different set of contacts
designed to move them along to become first-time customers. Your lapsed, or dormant, customers
would be treated differently with a series of contacts intended to win them back. Social media activities
would span customer type and be ongoing.
Sample Customer Contact Matrix: An Ongoing Communication Model
Email Direct
mail
Phone Sales visit
Total
contacts
Expense
per
customer
Revenue
per
customer
Expense:
Revenue
Customer
segment
Customer
quantity
$0.25 $1.50 $15 $250
Inquirers 350
6
1
1
0
8
$18
$50
36%
One-time
buyers
400
12 3
6
0
21
$97.50 $500
19.5%
Multi-
buyers
200
12 6
6
1
25
$352
$2,000 17.6%
Dormant
customers
150
3
1
1
0
5
$17.25 $75
23%
Total
1,100
