Leveraging to Develop a Power Brand: Building a Stronger Database and Increasing Customer Lifetime Value

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1 Leveraging to Develop a Power Brand: Building a Stronger Database and Increasing Customer Lifetime Value An ewaydirect White Paper Executive Summary Studies are showing that marketing remains the most efficient and productive means of acquiring, engaging, and deriving revenue from customers online, more significant than search marketing or social media combined. It s at the core of developing and maintaining a power brand. can be leveraged in five different ways to create, develop, and maintain a power brand: 1. Building a stronger database 2. Nurturing prospects and customers 3. Marketing through transactional s 4. Reaching prospects and customers through triggered s 5. Measuring and responding to brand perceptions Introduction marketing is at the core of developing a power brand. But what do we mean when we talk about a brand? It s a compilation of impressions, experiences, and concepts that work together to create a position in the mind and sentiment of consumers. Brand perception will differ from individual to individual, and is based more on experience and performance than it is on advertising. In that sense, we can think of a brand as a concept, one that elicits an emotional response. It can be a cultural icon (think Ford Mustang), a status symbol (think Porsche Boxter), and a group identifier (think pickup trucks).

2 Power brands are created through a number of initiatives: planned media, press coverage, key-influencer usage and endorsements, word-of-mouth, reputation, and consistent delivery on the brand promise. #1: Build a Stronger Database Building a stronger database is at the heart of customer-acquisition strategy and initiatives. Your customer-acquisition solution must bring in quality leads on a consistent basis to both safeguard your brand reputation (thus maintaining your power position) and deliver the ROI you expect. The only way to ensure that both of those requirements are met is to qualify every lead. Marketers know the equation: the more qualified a prospect, the more likely the prospect is to become a customer, and the higher the revenue from that customer will be. But marketers are often either obtaining lists through co-registration that don t perform or obtaining lists that hurt their reputations, with consumers and with ISPs alike, affecting both deliverability and brand perception. Building a stronger database means: triple-qualifying every lead and thus maximizing conversion rates looking at which sources are the most effective and nurturing the successful ones while turning off those that are non-performing. Inefficient testing and ing the wrong people with irrelevant information hurts inbox deliverability and ISP reputations. So it s essential to work with a customer-acquisition solution that does the testing for you, that helps you learn as you go and fine-tunes your target market to maximize efficiency and revenue. It s also essential to use data technology that learns, and adapts to constantly makes alterations in order to understand which sources are the best for each

3 individual client so that it can always be presenting the very best leads. New potential target sources can be found by examining additional data pools so that marketers can obtain additional sources appropriate to their verticals. #2: Customer Lifetime Value: Nurturing Cascades It s been said that retention is the new acquisition, and engaging customers who will not only continue to buy from your brand but who will serve as ambassadors, promoting your brand and bringing in new customers themselves, is every marketer s goal. As new prospects and customers are acquired, they are placed into a strategically designed transition program typically lasting two to four weeks, with technology enabling the program to be easily implemented and executed and tracking ROI results to the source. This program begins with specially designed mailings that introduce customers to the company, give them a sense of who the company is and how it does business, makes sure that customers know how to access more information, etc. Prospects and customers are also offered special benefits: a new-members-only sale, for example, or a series of coupons or special discounts for new members. The emphasis is on making these prospects and customers feel special and appreciated so that they value the company and are ready to be taken to the next level. Using an solution that moves a new customer smoothly through transition marketing, from welcome s to engagement s, is a solution that will build good CRM and lifetime value. In fact, marketers using new-subscriber smart cascades see response rates of: six to 10 times that of their standard campaigns.

4 conversions of prospects to customers that increase as much as 25% when these prospects are sent new-subscriber cascades. In addition, simple tools such as shares, likes, and F2F, when put in the hands of your brand s most enthusiastic customers, can drive dramatic growth and at low or no cost. Building brand loyalty takes time, but ensuring that every customer leaves every encounter with your brand or company with a positive story to tell will harness the power of social media as they share their experiences with friends, family, and essentially the world. #3: Customer Lifetime Value: Transactional s Transactional is that is, essentially, housekeeping: it s that confirms or informs. It may be a response to an action that someone took directly (an online purchase, for example, will generate a receipt), or it may be a response to an action that the recipient is the target of (comments made in response to a social media post generate s to alert the poster of the response). Sometimes it s even triggered by inactivity: when a customer hasn t visited a website for a proscribed period of time, they may be sent an encouraging them to return. For many people, transactional s are essential to conducting business and personal transactions on the web. They restore lost passwords, confirm reservations, and help remind us of deadlines. But the reality is that beyond reading the subject line, people tend to skim the content of transactional s. They glance through the quickly to see whether or not it interests them and whether they want to examine it more closely.

5 So there are some immediate conclusions you can draw. The subject line needs to be both clear and engaging. And the content of transactional s both in terms of design and copy needs to be every bit as creatively crafted as are your other s to customers. Only include essential elements that communicate your brand, and avoid superfluous elements that might pull a reader s attention away from your central message. Why? Because you re going to use them for more than just transactions. Transactional s can be marketing s as well, as long as the marketing message is subtle and noninvasive. They can be used to build relationships, encourage future sales, and provide a connection between your brand and your customers. For example, the ticketing company Eventbrite includes a link to its mobile app in its ticket delivery s, and has found that four out of 13 customers download the app for storing their tickets. That s four more subscribers at no extra effort for the company. The reality is that you re going to be sending these s anyway. They re a necessary part of doing business. And marketing messages as a part of transactional s are welcomed by customers as long as the marketing content doesn t take over the the messages need to be in synch with each other. The marketing needs to flow from the transaction and not make it seem as through two separate s have been cobbled together. Coupons, links to download an app, tips about using your company s services or products, notices about upcoming sales, and ideas along the lines of Amazon s other customers who bought this product also bought are all great marketing opportunities within transactional s.

6 #4: Customer Lifetime Value: Triggered s Triggered s are s that are sent in direct response to a customer s actions; they can be either transactional or marketing in nature. The good news is that they perform better than standard s (by ten times or more). Because triggered s allow you to take action in real time, you are instantly interacting with customers immediately after they connect with your brand. s can be triggered by an almost infinite set of prospect or customer actions, some of which may include: a. Website page-level triggered s perform times better than standard s and are critical to driving revenue, because only about 5% of your subscribers go to your shopping cart when visiting your website. These s note what page(s) the customer visited, what items were viewed, and encourages the customer to return. b. Shopping cart-triggered s optimize the performance of the 5% of customer who do get to the shopping cart pages and deliver times the CPM of standard s. They encourage customers to complete the purchase initiated. c. Social interaction-triggered s drive times the revenue of standard s and they extend customers lifetime engagement by 50% and more. These are the s that respond to something the customer has posted in social media sites online and that are relevant to the relationship between your brand and the consumer.

7 d. -activity triggers are the best way to drive relevant content to active subscribers in real time, responding to actions they take (either in a single campaign or as part of an cascade), and letting that activity drive the content they receive going forward. Monitoring #5: Customer Lifetime Value: Reputation and Chatter Every marketer knows the importance of brand recognition and positive sentiment around that brand. Influencing that sentiment is easier than most marketers think once a program is put in place to monitor and respond to brand mentions online. What is at issue is the persistency of brand reputation: Events that impact brand reputation in a positive way maintain positive persistence for four to six weeks without outside influence Events that impact brand reputation in a negative way maintain negative persistence six to 10 weeks without outside influence One such solution alerts companies to market disruptions, points in time when a company s brand reputation scores change significantly in either a positive or negative direction. Monitoring these disruptions allows a company to respond quickly and effectively to market changes that can seriously impact the company s business in either a positive or negative direction. This monitoring can improve ROI by: monitoring the effectiveness of marketing budgets and specific campaigns having transparency into results driven by service providers seeing how acquisition strategies impact brand reputation

8 taking advantage of times when the competition falters Conclusions marketing can help marketers develop and maintain a power brand through reaching more prospects and retaining more customers. An Epsilon report (linkto: hmarks_final_7_2_2013.pdf?2941&2701) notes that the start of 2013 saw non-bounce rates remaining strong at 96.4%, open rates increasing quarter over quarter (+13.5%) and year over year (+18.6%), resulting in an overall open rate of 31.1%. Click rates increased both quarter over quarter and year over year, reaching 5.1%. With over 3.3 billion accounts worldwide, and more than a hundred trillion messages sent every year, marketing continues to be the most effective marketing tool available. continues to grow as a marketing channel; its unique ability to foster seamless customer experiences can connect various customer touchpoints and devices while driving customer acquisition, conversion, and engagement. As smartphone and mobile proliferation continues, will continue to thrive as a proven marketing channel.