What’s Working: 9 Tactics for Acquisition and Retention

June 24, 2009 By Hallie Mummert, Editor-in-chief, Target Marketing

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#7. In today’s customer-centric climate, onboarding programs (i.e., welcome programs covering the first 90 days after purchase) are working well to embrace new customers and establish stronger ties to your brand, states Grange. These efforts don’t have to center around discounting, she explains, but can involve premium positioning and enhanced service instead to retain customers.

#8. Don’t wait until customers grow dissatisfied to the point of attrition before you reach out to see what can be fixed. Gauging their satisfaction levels at various points in their life cycles does not open the door to thoughts about leaving that never would have occurred to them otherwise, says Grange. Instead, it allows you to identify problems with your product, customer service or marketing that can be improved to reduce churn. Quigley takes this idea one step further: Incorporating a more solicitous approach in marketing communications (such as asking for feedback on what the audience finds helpful) to prospects and customers typically corresponds with a spike in sales for Songbird.

#9. Before you spend another dollar on acquisition efforts, take a step back and look at your customer and prospecting databases. It was so easy to acquire new names during the past decade that Bosley lost focus on its database of roughly 2 million customers. How many of those inquiries were still valuable leads, and could they be converted at a greater profit than new names acquired today were the questions Fettig and his team set out to answer. For Bosley, data mining and the right lead nurturing programs proved to be a successful venture. The same is true for Allstate Roadside Services, which has been successful with optimized reactivation and renewal efforts, says Karen Burns, the motor club’s director of marketing.

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