May 20, 2010
Reactivating and Retaining Customers Through Social Channels
By: Lauren Vargas
Massing large amounts of fans or followers is pointless if you cannot service your current community or entice them to remain interested and have ongoing engagement with your organization. Your company must be just as smart and strategic about your online participation as it is about traditional customer service and offline engagement channels. While online behavior is not indicative of your entire customer base, any insights your organization can add to its existing customer database, will enrich analysis of trends and purchase behaviors that will help your organization better connect with existing customers.
Begin reactivating and retaining customers through social media channels with these three steps:
1. Relevance: Maintaining customers and propelling them to have repeat interactions with your company is more science than art. Those catchy phrases and colors on marketing materials may intrigue a customer, but do not always incite action. Great marketing must partner with an organization’s personal touch. Begin by looking for seasonal trends in the activity of existing customers on the social web. Where is the buzz focused? What are the triggers? Identify behavior patterns and integrate these insights into your reactivation planning to get the right balance of customer segmentation and presentation.
2. Participation: Ask for feedback. Who doesn’t want to be asked their opinion? Inquire about the activity of your customers on social media channels while determining the strength of their brand affiliation. If you have a traditional customer database, match up your survey results with existing customer profiles and develop communication and marketing strategies based on a deeper dive into those customer buying behaviors.
3. Rinse and Repeat: So often, organizations build metrics to measure data at an overall level for use in driving larger business decisions while deeper analytics are not being used to maintain current customers or define and bring back dormant customers. One contact is not enough. Test different combinations of insights gleaned from observed social media channel trends and survey results to find out what motivates your customers. The right solution arises when you interact with the right customers at the right time.
What is your company doing to maintain or reactivate customers on the social web? Is your company tracking this engagement using CRM processes and tools? Please share your experiences with each other.
Great post! I agree that Social Channels are ideally suited to re-awaken sleeper customers and retain repeat customers.
I am a big advocate of brand representatives showing their human faces–literally. Customers relate and engage more easily & openly with individuals. Team members can simultaneously post to identical, official secondary accounts with their name and profile photo. Instantly the corporate entity has become transparent, and relatable. Surprise! Instead of a faceless, corporate collective, it is represented by real people.
Splitting each representative out into individual accounts provided a goldmine of preferences to mine for data.
In the engagement paradigm, creating relationships is the secret formula.
The Social Media Alchemist's ultimate goal is to magically convert customers from passive observers or casual enthusiasts into active, even passionate brand advocates and influencers who in turn, engage and activate others.
Great post! I agree that Social Channels are ideally suited to re-awaken sleeper customers and retain repeat customers.
I am a big advocate of brand representatives showing their human faces–literally. Customers relate and engage more easily & openly with individuals. Team members can simultaneously post to identical, official secondary accounts with their name and profile photo. Instantly the corporate entity has become transparent, and relatable. Surprise! Instead of a faceless, corporate collective, it is represented by real people.
Splitting each representative out into individual accounts provided a goldmine of preferences to mine for data.
In the engagement paradigm, creating relationships is the secret formula.
The Social Media Alchemist's ultimate goal is to magically convert customers from passive observers or casual enthusiasts into active, even passionate brand advocates and influencers who in turn, engage and activate others.
Kirsten,
You are spot on! Authentic engagement from the enterprise is the secret sauce. Instead of tapping into wallets through engagement, you are unlocking egos and embracing personalities.
L
Kirsten,
You are spot on! Authentic engagement from the enterprise is the secret sauce. Instead of tapping into wallets through engagement, you are unlocking egos and embracing personalities.
L
This is often an overlooked area – not just in social but in other areas (such as email) of online marketing. It's very important to have a strategy–not just for how to engage people but also to reengage them. This strategy should be different for prospects, buyers, frequent buyers, inactives, etc.
Great thoughts here!
[...] down the spines of certain firms. As it probably well should.Blogger Lauren from Radian6, identifies another critical function of social CRM – revitalizing your customers.Read more here….Banned [...]
A very interesting post.
Relevance and participation are very essential for social media but social media should not be concidered only as a promotional tool, it should be viewed as a relationship building platform. It also maximizes the cross and within media integration and it helps research consumer behaviour before developing ideas as a part of the marketing strategy.
I have recently read a post at http://www.innovatrs.com/blog/social-media-policy… on tools for social media strategy.