5 Steps to Improve Your Customer Marketing

Customer marketing is all about tapping into the power of your existing customer base to drive repeat business. Depending on your products and business structure, this might involve encouraging your customers to try new products, upgrading them from their existing services, or simply welcoming them back to shop with you time and time again.

There are many strategies and tactics you can use to improve and strengthen your customer marketing efforts. Read on to learn about customer marketing and how to integrate it within your business.

1. Understand your audience

Before you can successfully market towards your customers, you need to understand who your customers are!

Getting to know your customer base, including core demographics, buyer behaviour, and how they interact with your business, will help you to identify successes and challenges so you can build out an effective customer experience that’s geared towards the people who are closest to your brand.

Develop detailed buyer personas

Buyer personas are a representation of your core customer types, based on your data. Identifying and creating detailed buyer personas provides you with a tangible way of understanding your audience, which you can use towards customer marketing efforts and beyond.

Developing buyer personas begins with understanding your core groups of customers. Analyse your data and look for patterns among age, profession, lifestyle, income, and types of products they’re interested in. How you process and structure this data depends on your customers and your business – you might create fictional characters who represent these types of customers or write a detailed summary that clearly captures this sector of your audience.

In the end, you should be able to clearly discern 3-5 personas that represent your main customer types. You can share these with your team and use them to help contextualise everything from marketing activity to customer service.

Analyse customer behaviour

Understanding how your customers interact with your business will give you valuable insight into what you’re doing well and where there’s opportunity to further optimise your experience. Having buyer personas will make it easier for you to study customer behaviour and identify specific takeaways.

Look at the channels you operate in (such as ecommerce, retail, email, and social media) and explore how people within your buyer personas engage with your content. You should start to recognise patterns – perhaps one of your personas is particularly active on social media and responds well to these channels, while another persona converts well from email marketing efforts.

Once you start to understand the ways your customers interact with your business, you can create strategies to maximise success and improve areas where you see opportunity.

2. Personalise Your Marketing

Personalisation is a key aspect of modern marketing that all brands should be considering in some capacity. 90% of businesses believe it contributes to profitability, and when done correctly it can build connections with customers, capture attention, and drive loyalty.

69% of customers say they want a personalised and consistent experience and appreciate it when they receive personalised content. In order to get positive results, it’s important to implement personalisation with a customer-centric approach.

Tailored content marketing

Remember those buyer personas? This is where content marketing for your existing customers can be incredibly powerful. You can use this as a foundation to create marketing campaigns tailored to your core audience types by publishing targeted content on social media, email, paid advertising, and even your website.

What this looks like depends on your product or business – it could be targeted online ads that are geared towards specific demographic, organic social media content that speaks to a specific group of people, or educational videos that are designed to capture interest of a core customer type. Or it could be a combination of all of these ideas!

The beauty of personalisation is that there are many creative ways to implement it across your active channels.

Segment Your Email Marketing

Email marketing is a space that personalisation thrives. Marketers see a 20% lift in sales revenue with personalised emails, and 50% of companies report increased engagement through personalised emails. What’s more, people are looking for personalisation – 74% of customers say they become frustrated when the email experience isn’t personalised.

How personalisation comes to life within your email marketing efforts depends on your business, product, and scope. It could be as simple as including your customers’ names in email subject lines (which can increase open rates by 26%).

You could create a dedicated email campaign strategy with unique content that’s directed at core customer segments, based on your customer personas. Personalisation can also come to life in an email strategy designed to target people at a specific stage of their purchasing journey (such as after abandoning their cart or shortly after making a purchase).

3. Use customer feedback effectively

When thinking about customer marketing, it’s important to pay attention to what your customers are already telling you. Customer feedback is the most valuable resource you have and there are many ways you can use it to inform your business strategy.

Collect Customer Feedback

Start by collating your customer feedback. Look for where it already exists, such as on social media, external review sites, and within your customer service team’s archives. You can also reach out and ask for customer feedback through email services, prompts on your website, or during the in-store experience.

When collecting feedback, be sure to include both positive and negative comments. This will help you to see where you’re succeeding and where you have room to improve.

Use customer feedback to drive change

Once you have a bank of customer feedback, organise it in a way that makes sense for your business – this might be categorising feedback by product reviews, feedback on service, or thoughts on your brand in general.

Look for patterns and trends within the feedback. While it’s important to acknowledge one-off negative experiences, you shouldn’t focus too much on points that aren’t voiced by multiple people.

Identify areas where you do things well, as you can use these points in your marketing to show customers the value that your business offers. Find areas where you need to improve and create strategies to action them.

You should also make an effort to be proactive with the customers who have taken the time to give you this valuable insight – respond to their feedback and create messaging that lets people know that you care about what they say, and that you’re taking action to provide them with an even better experience next time.

4. Implement Loyalty Programs

Loyalty programs are designed to reward your existing customers and incentivise them to continue choosing your business.

There are many different ways to reward customers and encourage them to come back again – they might collect points that can be redeemed towards future purchases, receive bonuses, or be granted exclusive access to products and services. The key is to design a loyalty program structure that adds value and fits the way your customers interact with your business.

Benefits of loyalty programmes

Loyal customers are crucial to business growth and cost up to 5-25x less to market to compared to new customers.

Loyalty programs are a great way to build this relationship and secure loyal customers. Rewards can also directly help to boost revenue and AOV – studies have found that online rewards programs can increase revenue by 5-10%. This is because loyal members tend to spend more (up to 20%, on average) and shop more frequently (up to 20% more often).

Creating effective loyalty programs

For all the reasons we mentioned above, loyalty programs are very popular – 90% of companies offer some sort of loyalty program and 92% of customers are actively seeking out loyalty rewards.

However, that doesn’t mean that all customers use these programs – according to a consumer study, 45% of people don’t like how long it takes for them to earn rewards, 31% find it too difficult, and 27% don’t think the rewards are worth it.

This clearly illustrates why it’s so crucial to ensure your program is delivering real value. Ensure that your rewards are regular, accessible, and worth pursuing. Make it simple and easy to gather and track rewards, so your customers can integrate it easily into their shopping routine.

With Red Letter Days, you can combine the power of loyalty with the power of personalisation by offering rewards that make sense for individual customers by rewarding them with experiences that fit their lifestyle and personality.

5. Measure and optimise results

Your customers’ lives, wants, and expectations are always changing, which means your customer marketing should be treated as an ongoing effort. Make customer marketing a holistic part of your operations by creating a structure that allows you to implement strategies, monitor progress, and update and optimise continually.

Track key metrics

Data is a valuable resource that can give you direction on areas you should focus on, as well as help you to make key decisions about your customer experience. Start by identifying metrics that make sense for your business and your goals, and then create a system to track them.

Some key metrics to pay attention to include:

• Conversion: How many of your customers are returning to buy again? What drove them to make these purchases? Can you trace it back to your marketing efforts, such as email, paid advertising, or social media?
• AOV: How much are your customers spending in an average order? Does it change a lot based on your buyer personas? Is it significantly higher or lower than your expectations?
• Engagement: How many social media followers or email subscribers do you have? How many people click through from your content to land on your website?
• Customer satisfaction: What’s your average score, based on reviews? What patterns of sentiment do you notice?

There are many tools designed to help you access this information and organise it into easy-to-read reports.

Test different approaches

Once you have established a good dashboard of data, you can use this information to iterate on your strategy and test things out. Perhaps you want to compare the success of two different creative campaigns or explore how different types of messaging resonate with your audience. You can also test out different loyalty program rewards and see which options get the most engagement.

Through A/B testing, you can provide group A with one experience and group B with a different experience and measure the results. It’s important to try to keep your tests streamlined so the results are clear – keep most variables the same and decide one thing to change, so you can easily understand what is making the difference.

For example, in an A/B testing email campaign one half of your audience will receive one promotional message and the other half will receive another. Keep the design and copy as similar as possible, so you can clearly see how they respond to the different promotions. Run the test for a few weeks and then analyse the results, which you can then use to make decisions and conduct further testing.

Find out how loyalty programmes can enhance your customer marketing strategy

Customer marketing is a powerful tactic that can make a big difference for your business. There’s so much potential within your existing customer base, and even more potential if you can continue to develop customer marketing strategies that build and drive loyalty.

We can help support your loyalty programs and customer marketing efforts with personalised experiences, which help you to connect with customers and offer something engaging and unique as part of your rewards package. Reach out to our team today to learn more.