Using Data to align your business’ customer acquisition and retention teams

Using Data to align your business’ customer acquisition and retention teams:

With our traditional marketing based on SEO, PPC and occasional forays into online media, digital industries focus has been on traffic sources. Who can blame the acquisition manager when all they see of the hard earned customers they acquire is their backs as they fly past and into the hands of a customer support or CRM team, earning us another conversion click? From there on the acquisition managers wait with bated breath for that click to turn into an action or deposit or wagering depending on the metric their efforts are measured by.

The acquisition team’ focus is spent on evaluating effective earnings per click, analysing traffic sources, the conversion numbers they generate, and the prominence we give to each operator on our sites. Sometimes they go so far as to look at the design and branding on our site and the overall customer experience but most times it’s the numbers that keep them busy and focused.

This is sound business practice, but is this enough for an industry that’s now been doing the same thing for over a decade? In that decade, social media and smart-phones have threatened the dominance of www. Our target audiences however are still searching and looking for our competitor’s products across all the devices they use. Meanwhile, we continue to battle it out amongst ourselves to grab a share of search and capture the click. In our industry the focus is all about the metrics and the results they produce.

A decade later we find ourselves still unable to predict beyond six months of certainty. We confidently assert that this uncertainty is the nature of the Internet. After all, who knows what tomorrow brings in a Web 2.0 world? Our obsession with the platform of delivery, the metrics we use to measure our activity on the platform and our business model keeps us blind to the key ingredient in the mix: the customer.

It’s partly a fault of our business model. We assume we have nothing of value to trade with the customer. We view the customer as a click; a number, a percentage that affects the metric that obsesses us. We lose sight of the motivation that drives the customer to search for and then click on our link or Call to Action. We view the ad text and organic ranking position as the prime customer motivators and our battles centre around the race to the top. Unfortunately for us it’s not a free race. Time and money are the key elements required to fuel the engines in the race. Working in small teams or even as individuals these commodities are in scarce supply so we focus all our time and or money on this small area to stay in the race.

So how do we evolve our business and have a plan for the future?

The first step is an old marketing maxim:

• Know thy customer

You have a very limited window to start trading with your customer once they hit your site. The fear of disrupting the customer journey to the key objective: clicking to an operator, obsesses us. have you considered the following basics:

How do you track their behaviour online?

What metrics do you use to determine their online behaviour?

How does their transactional behaviour affect you?

How an you sift through the realms of transactional data you have and make it usable such that you can help influence what the customer does on your site?

Our recommendation would be to look at a way to identify the key drivers in your business and note these drivers are not often what you think they are. Next you have to understand how you will monitor these key influencers and set targets. What do you want your business to achieve. Then comes the hard bit. Finding an effective way to monitor what is going on in your business in an effective not tactical manner. Then finding a way to take the reams of transactional data in your business and come up with short action based lists of customers whom you can promote to in order to help you uplift your business results.

Doing it yourself if you do not have the tooling background or skill set may result in a fruitless exercise and distract you from your prime expertise in traffic management. Datasprint is a Business Intelligence Software tool that has decades of experience invested in it. It shows you actionable trends within the business sand the driver behind those trends so you can go straight to the root and work a customer level to improve your business results.

Small teams of people who have too few hours in the day can’t this overnight. Neither can a business work effectively if it has silo-ed Acquisition and Retention teams with no common shared vision or tooling. At Datasprint we recognise this and are cost effectively helping businesses to adopt a joined up approach to acquiring and retaining customers. We also help senior level executives be aligned and on the same page as junior level coal face executors by providing shared common tooling in the form of Datasprints’ software. Using Datasprint has helped our clients stay focused on their game and up their game several notches. The success of our software drives our clients and us as we put meaningful distance between them and their competition.

Michael Braga is a Director of DATASPRINT a Software As A Service Business Intelligence tool offering transactional businesses the opportunity of turning their volumes of transactional data into actionable data which can be used to drive their profit growth and can be contacted at Michael@datasprint.uk.