Customer Marketing Archives - Act-On

Increase Customer Retention: Why Multichannel Marketing Is an Underrated Tool

Act-On — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 20:34:58 +0000

Winning new customers is an exciting accomplishment. But most marketers also know the real work begins after that.

The cost of acquiring a new customer is estimated to be five to seven times more than retaining an existing one. Retention issues translate to lost dollars and more work for marketing teams who strive to battle the vicious cycle of churn.

Multichannel marketing is frequently used for new customer acquisition but is often overlooked as a strategy to increase customer retention. So, if you’re looking to boost retention efforts, cross-sells, and upsells, we’ve shared our favorite multichannel marketing customer retention strategies to jump-start your efforts.

Why Use Multichannel Marketing with Your Existing Customers?

Imagine that your customer makes a purchase. They’re excited, and they love your product, but the novelty wears off over time. They get bored, and all those shiny new features lose their appeal.

In the meantime, your team has launched brand-new product features. But the customer has no idea, and eventually, they go shopping, find a competitor’s product, and make a switch.

Bummer, right?

Using customer retention tactics, such as multichannel marketing, helps keep your existing customers engaged. That engagement affirms your product’s value and provides opportunities to cross-sell and upsell.

^{Strategies for increasing customer retention are what separates the best marketers from the rest.}

How to Increase Customer Retention: 4 Strategies

As with any marketing effort, your starting point should always be the customer. Talk with your sales and marketing teams and gather intel.

Where do your customers struggle?

What questions do they have?

What are their most pressing goals and reasons for purchasing your product?

To increase customer retention, you’ll want to understand these needs and map relevant content and resources to touchpoints along their journey. Here are four areas to try.

1. Email nurturing

During 2023, we had an interesting challenge. Our nurture sequence emails were doing reasonably well, but we knew they could do better. Our internal guru, Kelsey Yen, took up the challenge.

She inventoried the current programs and worked to match them more closely with people’s intents and journeys. Open rates jumped from 25% to 48%, and click-through rates increased from 1% to nearly 18%.You can read the step-by-step guide here.

While Kelsey was working to improve new prospect nurture sequences, you could easily apply a similar strategy with your existing customers. Here’s what that might look like:

Send a welcome email to new customers.
Ask about their most pressing interests and goals, and then segment them in your marketing automation program.
Funnel customers into a nurture sequence, delivering specific content and resources based on their interests to reinforce the value and increase customer retention.

Measure your open rates, click-through rates, and engagement to continue testing and refining new content and focusing on areas with positive metrics. For example, if you learn new customers interested in email marketing are also interested in deliverability, you can continue adding more training and resources to that nurture sequence.

Remember when you talked with sales and customer service and mapped out customer interests and needs? You’ll want to continue using that information.

Imagine that you sell marketing automation. You learn that your new customers struggle with deliverability issues after the new Yahoo and Google changes, so you decide to create content to help and reinforce your value.

You might create a webinar on the topic featuring your internal experts (more on webinars shortly). Then, you can cut that content into mini lessons and share it on social media.

By the way, you are asking customers to join you on social media, right? Identify one or two channels where they hang out, and then make the ask during your welcome email. And don’t just ask; give them a sample of some awesome content you’ve produced on the channel recently so they can see the benefit of joining you.

^{There’s nothing better than increasing customer retention, even winning a new customer.}

3. Training and tutorials on landing pages

In 2022, we relaunched our Power-Up webinars, a series created specifically for our existing customers. The goals are to help them solve their challenges and understand how to get the most from their marketing automation, and grow the relationship.

In the first year of the relaunch, we delivered value to 286 accounts. The following year, that number grew to 400 accounts, representing a 140% increase. What’s more, those who attended experienced a 24% increase in retention rate.

Here’s what we do:

Find topics our customers need help with. We look at webinars that have done well in the past, as well as feedback we’re getting on an ongoing basis.
Create and deliver the webinar. We also have “office hours” to give our customers more guidance in a smaller group setting.
Post the webinar on a landing page, with related content to help our customers deepen their knowledge.

Our focus is on helping our customers be as successful as possible in accomplishing their goals, which naturally increases customer retention.

4. Website content with customer stories

Most marketers create customer success stories to help new prospects understand how an existing customer solves their problem using the product. However, many don’t create stories for their existing customers.

Talk with your sales team to learn which customers have experienced impressive success by using additional products, such as cross-sells or upsells. Then, record a video or written case study, repurpose that content into the relevant lead-nurturing series, share clips on social media, and post it to your website.

How to Improve Customer Retention by Starting Small

Take one action. Revamp your welcome series, plan a webinar, or publish an upsell customer success story. Then, test another, and another, until you have a reservoir of data to draw from. Find out where you’re getting the most success, and then double down to scale your results.

And of course, an important tool in scaling is marketing automation. It’s also useful for gaining insights into customer interests and needs. Check out our Using Marketing Automation to Boost Customer Retention guide and we’ll give you the playbook on harnessing that data.

How to Reduce Customer Attrition and Keep Your Best Customers

Act-On — Thu, 30 May 2024 22:52:49 +0000

Budget cuts, doing more with less, and consolidation of business tools are all on the rise in 2024. Jeff Coleman, chief customer officer at Act-On, explained during an interview that, as the economy contracts, customers are deciding to use fewer products and consolidate the ones they already have. And that leaves many battling to protect at-risk business.

Research shows that only two-fifths of companies focus equally on customer acquisition and retention, despite customer churn costing U.S. providers $168 million annually. The challenge is that even if you’re focusing on retention, cross-sells, and upsells, doing these tasks well isn’t always easy, and the job begins the moment the customer transitions from prospect to customer.

Jeff explained that the hunting and farming analogy is a common way to illustrate the difference between acquiring new customers (hunting) and retaining existing ones (farming). However, he thinks of it more like fishing at a friend’s lake.

“If I show up at your dock and you let me fish in your lake, you’re being nice, right?” asks Jeff. “But if I leave my litter, overfish, and behave badly, you won’t let me fish there anymore.”

In other words, this bad situation happens when customers aren’t getting what they need after the initial sale (when we visit their ‘lake’). As we cultivate stronger relationships with our customers, we can deploy strategies from the onset that help build a foundation for reduced customer attrition and improve future growth.

^{The risk of customer attrition makes customer marketing and customer success crucial for today’s teams.}

Two Types of Growth

Not all growth opportunities are created equally, with some being significantly easier to land. Jeff breaks opportunities into a couple of categories, which are:

Adoption-Led Growth

With adoption-led growth, you’re capturing opportunities that exist due to a natural evolution of business. “If your company uses Slack and hires five more people, you probably need five more licenses,” says Jeff. “Or if you have 1,000 employees using software and only have 700 licenses, it’s time to sell the additional licenses. These are the easiest opportunities to land.”

Capturing the “low-hanging fruit” is important, but you also want to master the more challenging opportunities, which require more complex strategies and time to execute.

Sales Expansion Growth

Sales expansion growth, which includes your cross-sells and upsells, is trickier than adoption-led growth. The challenge is that a “post-sale” isn’t like a traditional sale, yet you can’t approach it with a service-only mindset either. Expansion requires strategic planning to protect your existing business.

“Salesforce is an interesting example of this, where the salesperson is responsible for a loss up to a certain point,” says Jeff. “You can’t sell something new if it causes churn on the other side. You don’t get to count the increase unless you count the decrease.”

Before expanding, the key is to get the customer to use fully what they’ve already purchased. According to Jeff, most expansion is built on successfully deploying what the customer purchased the first time. In other words, it’s hard for a customer to justify buying more when they haven’t fully realized the value of what they already have.

Jennifer Blanco, director of customer marketing at Act-On, explains that when marketing to existing customers, an inverted pyramid is used.

^{Once your customer makes a purchase, customer attrition becomes enemy number one!}

“The first hurdle the new customer needs to get over is onboarding, and the second is adopting your solution,” says Jennifer. “A great onboarding and adoption are the overall key to success, but not nearly enough companies put enough emphasis on these areas.”

When considering customer growth and retention, an important distinction is customer satisfaction versus customer loyalty.

In a recent McKinsey & Company study, customer care was cited among the top three priorities for participants. And despite companies working really hard at customer care and service, Jeff suggests that you can’t differentiate yourself on service alone. He explains that you need to get people to use your product successfully. It needs to be embedded in the infrastructure of what they do.

“I read this book about net promoter scores, and it talked about loyalty,” says Jeff. “It said, ‘How many times have you heard someone say, Yeah, I like that steakhouse, but if there’s a new one in town, I’m totally going to try it?’ There is a difference between satisfaction and loyalty.”

Building loyalty is one of the reasons why investing in a strong onboarding process is critical when it comes to getting embedded into customer workflows and helping them experience the full product value faster.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

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Customer Attrition and Building a Stronger Foundation

Building a stronger foundation and reducing customer attrition start with your welcome series, according to Jennifer. She shares that, at Act-On, we break this into a couple of initial nurturing sequences:

The new welcome nurture sequence. We give our customers the lay of the land and tell them what to expect during the onboarding process.
The brand-new user welcome series. This nurture campaign is designed for users who have never used Act-On before. It has a few touchpoints focused on what to expect and beginner resources.

“I’ve found it’s amazing how many customers aren’t doing the basic things to get off to a great start,” says Jennifer. “We know that onboarding tasks are critical to our customers’ success, so it’s also critical to our success, right? The purpose of the nurtures is to make sure customers have the basics checked off their lists.”

Marketing automation is helpful for setting up these experiences with customers, but Jennifer highlights the importance of combining automation with a human touch.

“I’m constantly asking our customer-facing teams, ‘Hey, what have you heard from our clients lately?’” says Jennifer. “I want to find out which of our customers have recently had successes so we can celebrate with them and send them a gift or something special.”

This cross-functional balance is an important part of success. It improves the experience and builds stronger relationships to prevent churn and build loyalty.

^{Listen to your customers and help them solve problems: step one to stemming customer attrition.}

Churn Reduction and Rethinking Measurement

Customer marketing isn’t always straightforward to measure, mostly because there isn’t a single variable to track and calculate. When Jennifer measures success, she often looks at the overall impact:

How many customers participated in the program?

How many have upgraded to this specific feature?

What was the revenue impact of all of that?

For example, we recently relaunched a customer success program that involved transforming a basic customer webinar series into landing pages, office hours, and hands-on workshops.

During the first year, 286 accounts attended, and that attendance grew to 400 the following year – a 140% increase. Participants who attended had a 24% increase in retention.

So, remember: it’s a long game.

“If you can retain and grow your customer base, you’re going to continue to see your revenue go up,” says Jennifer. “But if you can’t keep and grow your existing customers, you’ll always be playing catch-up.”

Looking at existing strategies for churn management and customer relationship expansion can help prepare for stronger growth, because you won’t be fighting an uphill battle created by lost business.

Do you need help developing a stronger strategy to reduce customer attrition, reduce churn, and improve cross-sells and upsells? We created a step-by-step eBook to help guide you:

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

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What Is Customer Marketing?

Act-On — Wed, 29 May 2024 23:20:44 +0000

Lead generation is on the to-do list of most marketers. And sure, you might have some successful strategies in place, but wouldn’t it be nice to capture some easier wins?

One of the best ways to land these wins is through customer marketing.

Why?

Companies have a 60% to 70% chance of selling to an existing customer, compared to a brand-new one (the latter is only 5% to 20%). Research also shows existing customers spend 67% more than new customers.

The bottom line is that existing customers are easier to sell to, and they buy more.

So, if you want to capture more of that revenue, a great place to start is customer marketing.

What is customer marketing?

Customer marketing is the strategy of continuing to actively market to your customers after you’ve made the initial sale by building relationships and improving your brand experience. Customer marketing helps promote retention, and foster upsells and cross-sells. The customers who know, love, and use your products are much more likely to purchase additional products and services in the future.

And if they don’t love your products (yet), you want to provide value and help continuously, so when it comes time for renewal (or shopping the competitors), staying with your product will be the clear choice.

Why is customer-centric marketing important?

The cost of acquiring a new customer is roughly four to five times the cost of retaining an existing one. And yes, customer acquisition is important for growth, but if you don’t balance that with marketing to your existing customers, you can end up in a vicious cycle of churn and burn.

Here’s what that looks like:

You onboard customer X.
You lose customer X.
You spend 4-5x more to replace customer X.
And the cycle grows longer and more expensive…

Customer relationship marketing helps you to correct this imbalance to retain more customers, upsell, and cross-sell to achieve a higher customer lifetime value.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

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What customer marketing strategies should I use?

As you create your customer-led marketing strategy, most organizations have a couple of primary goals.

Create happy customers. Why would they want to switch to a competitor? They love you!
Grow lifetime customer value. They love you so much that they’re presold when you recommend other products and services.

Here are a few strategies for reaching these goals:

Personalize onboarding

Onboarding email: “We’re really great. Our product is really great. Us, us, us… {continues with corporate speak and canned messaging}.”

The customer’s response: Delete.

Oops, that didn’t go so well.

Let’s try again.

When your customer buys your product or service, you want to send them a personalized welcome email and onboarding series. The content should be specific to the product they purchased and give them resources, guides, and training that help them successfully use the product.

And remember, once you create this email, don’t set it and forget it.

Continue to talk to your customer service and salespeople. Ask about the problems that customers have during the onboarding process and then use that intelligence to create progressively better content.

Map your customer success journey

Map out the specific journey your customers take after purchase. The first step, which we mentioned above, is that welcome email. Now, you’ll want to target a few more touch points. Here are several to consider adding to your list:

Adoption and training. Your customer is brand new when it comes to using your product; what do they need to know? Again, chat with your sales and customer service teams and ask questions about where new customers get stuck. Use the answers to these questions to create training and resources to solve common problems and support your new customers.

Help customers understand the overall value. Continue showing customers the great ways to use your product, and reinforce its value. For example,

“Hey, customer, did you know you can do this cool thing? Customer X just recently grew revenue by Y% using this exact feature. Give it a try! Let us know how it works for you.”

And here’s a pro tip: You can use marketing automation to set up these experiences.

Expand the relationship, cross-sell, and upsell. Once your customer has some wins with your products, consider telling them about complementary products and upsells. Explain how these solutions can help them continue to grow their success.
Ask for feedback. Don’t wait until you’re close to renewal to ask for feedback. Ask early and ask often. Then, take that feedback to your team, look for ways to improve the product or service, and let the customer know how you’re using their feedback.

These are just a few potential options, but the point is to start thinking about the customer journey and then set up touch points along that journey to create stronger relationships.

^{Delighting your customers with marketing content is a great way to keep them engaged with your brand.}

Segment users with similar characteristics

We can’t answer the question “What is consumer marketing?” without mentioning segmentation.

That’s because it’s the framework that allows you to personalize at scale.

Remember that welcome email we mentioned earlier? You can use it to segment your customers even further and help them reach their goals. For example, if you sell marketing automation, you might ask the new customer about their goals during that first welcome email.

Let’s say you learn their primary goal is to grow revenue through email marketing. You can use that data to segment new customers by interest and then provide personalized training, tools, and resources targeted to email marketing. Or you might discover a top interest is improving email deliverability. As a result, you send a comprehensive guide written by your internal gurus on the topic (by the way, we actually wrote that guide! You can check it out here).

When your customers reach their goals faster, your retention strategies will be more effective, and they’ll naturally want to grow their relationship with you.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

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Measuring your results

As with any marketing strategy, you’ll want to show results, right? And while customer marketing metrics are tricky to track since programs happen over a long period, you can still track them. A couple of metrics to consider include:

Lifetime customer value (LCV). LCV is the total revenue generated from a single customer throughout your entire relationship with them. For example, if a customer spends $100 per purchase, makes five purchases per year, and has been with your company for three years, their LCV would be $100 x 5 x 3 = $1,500.

ROI. With ROI, you measure the profitability of your customer marketing efforts as related to their cost. For example, if a customer marketing campaign costs $10,000 and generates $50,000 in revenue, your ROI would be ($50,000 – $10,000 / $10,000) * 100 = 400%.

New customer acquisition will undoubtedly be part of your marketing strategy in the future. But when you balance that strategy with powerful customer marketing efforts, you can make faster strides toward growth because you won’t be battling churn.

Do you want to know more tricks for keeping customers? We’ve shared our favorite strategies for using marketing automation to boost retention with your existing customers.

Welcome Email to New Client: Best Practices & Example

Tue, 21 May 2024 21:06:40 +0000

Post-purchase evaluation, the process a customer goes through after making a purchase, is real. Research says that 90% of consumers report their post-purchase experience is just as important as the quality of the products. And that process starts with a welcome email to your new client.

Did I make the right decision?

Should I have purchased XYZ products instead?

Maybe I acted too soon….

We recently spoke with our internal customer marketing expert, Jennifer Blanco. She explained that while you don’t need to overthink it, you do want to seize the opportunity to get your new relationship off to a great start.

“The welcome email doesn’t need to be overly produced or analyzed, but if you don’t have one, you’re missing out,” says Jennifer. “It offers an opportunity to connect with your new customers and reassure them that they made the right choice.”

Not sure where to start? We’ve got you covered with some of our favorite tips and welcome email best practices.

What is a welcome email?

A welcome email is the first communication you send to a new customer, and it’s one of your best opportunities to build a strong relationship between the customer and your brand.

The email might thank customers for their business, provide details for getting started, and explain what to expect in the future.

Why does your brand need a welcome email?

After making a purchase, customers want to hear from you. They’re excited about their new product or service, ready to get started, and very likely to open an email you send them. A welcome email lets you capture that opportunity.

Of course, the first step is to decide that you need a welcome email to new clients, and the second is to decide what it will say.

Welcome email open rates

Want to know the average open rate for a welcome email? It’s about 80%. That’s impressive!

How does that compare with the average open rate for a regular email? Stats vary, but across all industries, it’s roughly 36%.

^{There’s nothing quite like the feeling of satisfaction when you make a purchase. Welcome emails can help that feeling last longer.}

Welcome email best practices

Jennifer explains that your welcome email can be as simple as a short welcome message for customers from the CEO, thanking them for their business and communicating your excitement. Or it can be a welcome email series, starting with the same email and following up with several more that include helpful tips or outline the onboarding process.

Here are a few helpful suggestions as you craft your email or series of emails.

1. Send the welcome message immediately

We’ve found that customers are much more likely to open a welcome email sent within the first hour of purchase. So, you’ll want to send that email immediately after the purchase. The best way to do that is by using a marketing automation tool that allows you to create triggered emails.

2. Say thank you

This might feel like a no-brainer, but you’ll want to thank your new customer for making the purchase. Better yet, include the thank-you in the subject line to clarify the email’s purchase. For example, “Thank you for signing up with Act-On” or “Welcome to Act-On!”

3. Introduce your account team

As customers start using your product, you’ll want them to know who’s there to support them. That’s why Jennifer recommends introducing your account team in the new clients’ welcome email. If you can customize the email to include the specific rep assigned to their region or industry, that’s even better.

4. Provide helpful resources

Consider providing links to your most helpful resources, such as your knowledge base, support site, community, or login portal (here’s an example of webinar resources we might include). Also, consider including your support offerings and hours.

5. Set expectations

Let your customers and subscribers know how often you’ll send emails, the types of emails you’ll send, and how to unsubscribe or adjust their subscription settings. Providing these details is important to deliverability and ensuring future emails arrive in their inbox.

6. Include a simple call to action

The intent of welcome emails is to thank customers and embrace them as the newest members of your community. So, while you want to keep it simple, you can also include additional links that introduce relevant products, services, and content.

7. Send more than one welcome email

You don’t want to stuff your welcome email to new client (or any email, for that matter!) with too much content. Doing so could overwhelm your customers, leading to lower click-through rates in the future. If you have a lot of content and resources to include, consider dividing them into several emails to create a welcome series.

You’ll also want to distinguish between an onboarding series and a welcome series. An onboarding series focuses on guiding new users or customers through the first step of successfully using your product, while a welcome series is more high-level.

“The goal with a welcome series is to give the customer the nod for making the right choice and setting the tone for what’s to come,” says Jennifer.

^{Welcome emails aren’t just something to check off your list. Make them better with our tips!}

Optimize your growth

Mastering your welcome email is an important part of starting a positive relationship with your customer, but it’s also part of something much bigger: customer marketing.

Customer marketing is focused on outreach to existing customers, promoting retention and growing revenue through strategic upsells and cross-sells. Research shows that repeat customers spend 67% more than new customers and convert at higher rates, so it’s a huge opportunity.

So, yes, master the welcome email, but also consider how it fits into your larger customer marketing strategy and how it will grow the customer’s lifetime value.

Do you want to know the tricks for keeping your customers coming back for more? We’ve given you our favorites in our on-demand webinar.

New client welcome email example

Want a starting point? Here’s a new client welcome email example from our internal swipe file. Use the welcome email template as inspiration so you don’t have to start from scratch.

WELCOME TO ACT-ON, JENNIFER!

First things first, congrats on joining the Act-On family. You’ve made a big decision to elevate your marketing automation strategy and we’re glad you’ve put your trust in Act-On. We’ll be here to make sure you’re successful at every step of your new journey as you begin to level up and grow your business.Members of our team are currently meeting to make sure there is a knowledge transfer and you are set up for success. They’ll be reaching out in the next day or two to schedule an onboarding call.We look forward to partnering with you and celebrating your future success. Thank you for choosing Act-On, we’re so glad you’re here!

Cheering you on,
Jeff Coleman, Chief Customer Officer

Retention Marketing: How We Reached 400 Customer Accounts with a Refreshed Program

Jennifer Blanco — Tue, 07 May 2024 21:17:49 +0000

Is retention marketing on your list of priorities? It’s certainly on ours! Keeping your existing customers happy not only helps secure more referrals but also paves the way for more cross-sells and upsells.

In 2022, we decided to relaunch our Power-Up Series, which is a customer success program we paused during the pandemic. The relaunch transformed what was previously a basic webinar series into custom landing pages, office hours, and hands-on workshops.

During the first year, 286 different accounts attended, and that attendance number jumped to 400 in 2023, which is a 140% increase. Customers who participated were more likely to stay with us – their retention rate went up by 25%.

So, if you’re looking for creative ways to improve your retention marketing, we’ve shared our framework for reaching more customers and keeping them happy.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

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Customer-Driven Marketing Strategy: The Three Parts

Have you ever attended an event that provided high-level information only to find that once you got into actually doing the work, you were a little lost? Our refreshed Power-Up Series decided to tackle this challenge through a three-part framework:

The high-level webinar. The webinar is our “main event” and focuses on a topic we think our audience will love (more on that shortly). For example, if the topic is email deliverability, our experts provide a high-level overview.

The workshop. The workshop takes that high-level information and helps our customers apply it to their exact situation. Think about it like college: You attend the lecture and then attend labs to actually do the work.

Office hours. Speaking of college, we designed regular office hours to meet the customers where they’re at on any issue they need help with (not necessarily related to the current topic). Customers can bring their questions to our experts and work one-on-one to solve them.

We also created dedicated landing pages for each topic with additional resources, such as articles or guides. These pages receive a significant amount of traffic. In 2022, we had 1,985 views on the landing pages. In 2023, views jumped to 4,311, marking a 217% increase.

^{Providing additional resources for customers is a great way to practice retention marketing.}

How We Find Topics Our Customers Love

How do you know what topics your customers will love? Of course, we started by partnering with Support about frequently asked questions. We use data and anecdotal feedback to guide our decisions, and we also look at:

Industry trends. What trends are happening in your industry right now? This is often a great starting point. For example, Google and Yahoo launched new requirements to help improve email security and user experience earlier this year. Our internal data showed deliverability is a popular topic with our customers, so we decided to do a Power-Up on the topic. Attendance broke our records for a single event, with 430 registrants.

Traffic data. One of the great benefits of building a landing page for each Power-Up is that we can track traffic data to gauge customer interest. We use this data to determine what topics our audience needs help with and to guide future content creation.

Webinar participant surveys. Asking your attendees to fill out a survey is a great way to understand how to improve on an existing topic and develop future retention marketing content. First party data is an underused intelligence source for marketers. Before relaunching the series, we sent an email survey post-webinar to gather feedback, but the response rate was low. With the relaunch, we took a new approach: survey attendees directly on the Zoom platform. The response rate increased to 25%.

Here are some of the questions we asked:

Did you find this session beneficial?
What percentage of today’s webinar was new information to you?
Would you like more information about {X} topic?
Are there any other topics that would be helpful to you?

With this data, we could follow up with customers who want to learn more about a specific topic and use their feedback to guide future customer marketing efforts.

^{Our internal webinar program captivated customers, the sign of a great retention marketing play.}

Tracking Attendance Rates and Planning

When sending promotional emails for customer retention marketing webinars, the last thing you want is a poor response. That’s why we look at historical data to plan future events.

Here’s what our internal data says:

Avoid July and August. Many of our customers are out for summer vacations.
Skip March. It’s often a time for spring break travel.
Pause during December. Everyone has checked out for the holidays, so we may as well wait until Q1.

Also, our internal webinar expert Kelsey Yen, has another tip for sending promotional emails.

“I send my webinar promotional emails the same day of the week and time of day I plan to hold the event,” says Kelsey. “If engagement is high, it’s an early indicator that the time might work well for the audience.”

When thinking about webinar marketing, you can also look at past email open rates to determine the day and time that typically works best for your customers.

^{Retention marketing is a frequently overlooked strategy to score big wins.}

Customer Retention Marketing and Adding Value

From the moment customers decide to purchase our product, there’s a value exchange. We always want to be on the right side of that value exchange because once customers feel like they’re not getting enough, we’re at risk for retention problems.

To that point, I’ll share something we learned early in the Power-Up Series: Don’t sell. Whatever you create should be focused on helping your customers get the most from their existing products without any sales pitches. That idea alone could help improve any customer retention program.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

Learn More

And if you need help generating higher customer lifetime value and improving retention marketing, we have a webinar for you! Check out our favorite tips from our resident experts in the on-demand resource The Spice of Lifecycle Marketing: How to Add More Flavor to the Customer Journey.

The Rebel Instinct Podcast, Episode 9: Marc Liu

Galen Ettlin — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 16:14:00 +0000

^{What does it mean to be a rebel? To Marc Liu, it means challenging the status quo, but also knowing when to let someone else take the reins. As chief revenue officer of the startup E-bike company, Civilized Cycle, he has fought through COVID-19 production issues to launch a green product people ACTUALLY want. It’s not a TESLA, but the bike creates an experience riders haven’t felt before}

On every episode of the Rebel Instinct, our team sits down with rebels from across the marketing landscape to share stories about bold moves they’ve taken as marketers. Subscribe for more.

Galen Ettlin:
You are listening to the Rebel Instinct Podcast by Acton Software for all the marketing innovators living outside the box. Let’s shake it up everybody. I’m gay Atland with Act-On Software. My co-host today is Bob Garcia, head of product marketing here at Act-On. Good to have you here, Bob. I know you’ve got 30 years of experience in the software, so your experience will definitely lend to this conversation.

Bob Garcia:
Hey all, it’s great to be here. Looking forward to talking with Marc and Galen today.

Galen Ettlin:
Excellent. And of course, as he just mentioned, our guest today is Marc Liu, Chief Revenue Officer for Civilized Cycles, a sleek e-bike company. Marc also has extensive agency experience spanning the globe, having helped market from major brands like Pizza Hut, Bud Light, Southeast Asia Tourism, and many, many, many, many more. So we’re going to have a lot to talk about, and maybe put your rebel instinct stamp on your passport. Marc, thanks so much for joining us.

Marc Liu:
Thanks for having me. That’s quite the intro.

Bob Garcia:
So Marc, you co-founded an agency Elemental that sold just recently and now you’ve pivoted into working for a really exciting up and coming e-cycle brand. How are you managing that transition from working with multiple brands across multiple verticals to now just being committed to one vertical with one really cool product in an emerging market?

Marc Liu:
Yeah, yeah, it is quite the change for me. I founded Elemental and ran it for 13 years, and so that’s a long time to be doing anything. And in the agency world, bouncing back and forth between different brands is a very different experience to being committed and focused on one brand. I will say first and foremost, it’s quite refreshing to be able to put all of my energies into one brand and really kind of dig deep into the details versus kind of bouncing back and forth. So I’m very grateful for that opportunity, a welcome change to the pace of work. And now obviously I am responsible for a lot more things, so I have to live up to the words that I put out there. I think what’s helped me a lot in that transition has been the fact that I’m first and foremost an entrepreneur at heart. And so my area of expertise is sales and marketing, and I’ve done that on the agency side for a very long time. But what I really love to do is solve problems and tell stories. And whether you’re doing that for lots of brands or one brand, fundamentally the approach is the same. You just get to do a little bit more of it when you are inside of the brand. So I’m pretty happy where I am and it’s a nice new challenge for me.

Bob Garcia:
In terms of the category, it seems like it’s so dynamic. There’s so many different types of products coming in to the market and you’re seeing, you’re really leading with creating a very elegant, high-end vibe and you’re being rebellious in how you approach that. Can you talk a little bit about how you’re starting to differentiate in such a crowded, nascent market?

Marc Liu:
Yeah, and thanks for the kind words about the bike and what we do. We are trying to do something very different for the e-bike market, which is a very exciting market to be in, especially right now in the US. I think everybody has seen during the pandemic, people started buying bikes, and e-bikes were certainly a huge part of that. And although bike sales have kind of plateaued, E-bike sales continue to remain strong because people have realized what a profound change it can make in their lives. The difference in approach that we bring is there are lots of other great bike brands out there, but by and large the way we approach it is making the best bicycle possible and then putting a motor and adding all of this electrified capability to that basic bicycle platform, which is a tried and tested model.

We are trying to do things a little bit in reverse where we’re trying to figure out what is it that people want to get out of a two-wheel experience that currently they’re only really getting from a car, and how we build that into the two wheel experience into what we can still call an e-bike, but providing car-like features, like amazing ride quality, the ability to transport people, adult passengers and large amounts of cargo. And through solving those problems, getting people who are interested in riding bikes but haven’t pulled the trigger on it yet because there hasn’t been anything in the market for them to come over to this side and really get to experience everything that an e-bike can offer. So we are trying to lead also by design and elegance because at our heart we have a sustainability mission. We want to get people out of cars and onto bikes, but we also want people to look good and feel good when they’re doing it as well. That’s a huge part of it. We saw that that was kind of the model that Tesla had established leading with their Model S and the sports car, making that kind of lifestyle desirable first and then bringing additional kind of mass market products to the consumer.

Galen Ettlin:
For you, you’re the revenue and money guy, how are you balancing that creativity with the KPI you’re measuring?

Marc Liu:
Sure, yeah. I mean revenue and let’s call it creativity or the creative aspects of the business are inseparable, especially since we’re a startup. And so every startup, our big challenge is lack of resources relative newcomer to the market. So we have to go out there and tell our story in a way that immediately makes an impact and differentiates us from the pack. And so we start with the hard KPIs that we know we have to hit in order to survive and thrive and also attract investors. And that kind of gives us the shell or the box within, we have to then deliver. And that’s really where the creativity comes from, is from those constraints knowing that we only have X amount of dollars or X amount of personnel and we have to tell this story to as many people as possible, that drives the creativity. So I think they go hand in hand and one really helps the other.

Galen Ettlin:
That’s an interesting point too. We recently had Jascha Kaykas-Wolff from Linux here, and he said a very similar thing along the lines of – the constraints are what lead to the best creativity. If you’ve got some structure, it really leads to better outcomes when it comes to that creative process. So that’s interesting that you also touched on that.

Bob Garcia:
One of the things I’m wondering about, Marc, is just how COVID has possibly evolved or impacted your approach to going to market with the new brand and such a dynamic market?

Marc Liu:
COVID has obviously impacted our business tremendously, both positively and negatively. So on the positive side, as I previously mentioned, it really spurred the demand for two wheelers as people were staying at home and now working from home more often, that kind of lifestyle becomes much more accessible and attractive. But there were also the negative repercussions of huge supply chain issues. We were actually ready to go to market in January, 2020, and we had pre-orders of the bikes that we were only able to fulfill a few months ago because we physically could not get the product out of Taiwan where we manufacture into the US. That forced us to really take the time and lay the groundwork for when we would be able to go to market. So things like making sure that we had all of our sourcing buttoned up, all of the components, so that when the demand hit we would be able to fulfill rapidly. It forced us to take the time to build the strategic partnerships and alliances that would allow us to quickly go to market, and that has borne a lot of fruit. So we’re an omnichannel brand, we sell direct to consumer, but we also sell through select retailers around the country, and we were able to access all of those retailers through the relationships that we built in our kind of furloughed period during COVID. So that’s how we made the most of the time and it’s helped us hit the ground running.

Galen Ettlin:
All right. So Marc, we’ve got some questions we like to ask all of our guests on the Rebel Instinct Podcast. What’s the most rebellious or out-of-the-box thing you’ve done and how would you say it performed?

Marc Liu:
Oh, that is a very good question. One of the things that has been a blessing in my career is that I’ve entered into markets at the beginning of their growth. And so for example, when we started Elemental, the agency, this was back in 2009, and social media and digital marketing as a whole were really just starting to take off as the primary channels of marketing for brands. We had the same learning curve as the established agencies. They didn’t know more than us and we just had to learn a little bit faster in order to compete with them for clients. And so literally when we started the agency, our initial clients were restaurants. I used to live in New York for about seven years and we acquired those clients by walking up and down Broadway, knocking on doors at restaurants, finding the ones that had the most empty seats and going in saying, looks like you need some customers.

We think that we can help you with website design, social media, maybe some Google ads, some Facebook ads. How about we do this for you for free, and if you make money, hire us and make us your agency. And the next question was usually, what’s an agency? And they’re like, okay, we will help you make money and fill these seats for you. And we did that for the first year just knocking on doors. And in a similar period in the throes of the financial crisis, people were having a really tough time financially, but they were also more open to trying new things because obviously what they were doing up until then was not working. And so I don’t know if you would characterize that as being rebellious, but certainly it was a novel approach to group building an agency, and fortunately for us it worked.

Galen Ettlin:
I’d say that’s rebellious with the door knock. That’s scary. It’s a risk. You never know if someone’s going to yell in your face or say, thank you so much for showing up here.

Marc Liu:
Oh definitely had people yell at us and tell us to leave. That happened more than once.

Bob Garcia:
So what advice would you give to marketers to be more rebellious or creative in their work coming out of that creativity that you use to drive business?

Marc Liu:
Creativity is such an interesting thing because we all know people who seem kind of naturally predisposed to out of the box thinking. And so there’s certainly a part of it that seems like it’s innate that’s born with us, but… I don’t believe that it’s a thing that can’t be taught or at least can’t be nurtured. I firmly believe that all endeavors in life require a certain amount of creativity, especially if you want to get ahead of the competition and there are muscles you can train and work on. My wife is a neuroscientist and she does research on children with autism. So in our household we talk a lot about neuroplasticity and concepts like that, concepts that really kind of fly over my head, but she knows a lot about. But because of that, I get to learn about a lot of these different concepts, including divergent and convergent thinking.

Things that have been very helpful for me. But I would say in terms of a simple approach to rebellious and more creative thinking for marketers is to take a look at what is being done in industries that are not yours or those of your client. And so for example, one of the things that we would often do as kind of a creativity hack for our restaurant clients will be to see, what are people in doing in consumer and fashion and spirits and that sort of thing. There seems to be certain repeated patterns or ways that people market those products and can we take those ideas and apply them to our industry? Can we take them wholesale or can we modify them slightly? And we all get kind of trapped in our familiar patterns and that makes us stale and is the enemy of creativity. So taking that step out and seeing what are people doing in completely different fields and asking yourself, can I make this work in my industry? That’s been a pretty good shortcut to generating some creative ideas for us, and I think it’s something that pretty much anyone can pick up and run with.

Bob Garcia:
That’s super helpful. I mean, it’s inspiring because as we work as a company to differentiate our market, it’s super important for us to not get stuck in our box and really look for inspiration externally and pull those kind of thoughts in to challenge our conventions.

Marc Liu:
That is really the trap of expertise. The better you get at something, the more you have repeated practices or patterns that work, the more tempting it is to just fall back on those because they’ve been successful in the past and that really kind of dulls the blade in terms of creativity. So building in mechanisms within your daily practices or your company’s kind of regular practices to force yourself out of that kind of familiar knowledge, I think is essential.

Bob Garcia:
I couldn’t agree with you more.

Galen Ettlin:
We’ve gotten a lot of interesting answers on this one when we’ve asked other guests this, so Marc, how are you a rebel in your non-work life?

Marc Liu:
That’s so funny because I think of myself as being a very kind of ordinary, bland, vanilla type person. I have a daughter who’s a year and a half old. Most of my time outside of work is spent with her, and we also have a dog I cook at home. It’s a very domesticated life. I do make sure that I have time for exercise. I’m a lifelong martial artist and I practice jujitsu. I have a black belt and I also practice other martial arts. I also think of myself as being very ambitious, not just kind of financially or professionally, but I think striving to have happiness in all these different aspects of my life, professionally, personally, health, spiritually. For me that’s very ambitious because I find it very difficult. I find it difficult to try to find that balance between all the different areas. Balance is one of the tricky words. There really never is perfect balance, and so you’re constantly juggling these things and negotiating between different parts of your life that are competing for your attention. And so for me, that for me is the height of ambition to really have it all in a way where I can feel satisfied that I’m not missing out on these things that are truly important to me.

Galen Ettlin:
I always love that question because people will often say like, ‘oh, I’m not that rebellious,’ and then be like, ‘oh, I’m actually a black belt’ and I think it’s a great answer. Thank you for indulging.

Bob Garcia:
That is a really great answer, and balance is so important in life because it’s so easy to get sucked into any one direction and pulled out a whack. In terms of culture and rebel rebell in our culture, what characteristics, what type of persona or attributes do we need more of to rebel from the current constraints of our culture?

Marc Liu:
The idea of a rebel is quite an interesting one for me because I didn’t grow up in America, and it definitely has different connotations here than in many other countries because of the history, because of the culture that’s been built on the backs of that history. Rebel is an important characteristics to have because the world is very fluid. None of us know all the answers to everything. Having a healthy questioning of the status quo or what we’re being told and that sort of thing is the way that we collectively solve those problems or at least start to ask the right questions to get to a place where we can solve those problems. The tricky part becomes how do you know when to question things, when to push knowing that you don’t have all the answers? And I think for me it is the confidence to question things really comes down to critical thinking.

Having the ability to honestly break down issues or problems that I’m seeing and know the limitations of my knowledge and then seek out counsel and ask people who I know have been there before, done it before, and whether it’s in business or politics or anything else, just engaging with people who might have a different perspective and a little bit more knowledge than me. By being very frank about that and not being satisfied with my own kind of initial idea of things, I think that’s where I then get the confidence to then question. Okay, what I’m seeing in front of me doesn’t seem quite right. Everybody says that this is the way that things should be done, but things don’t seem to add up, and so maybe we should look a little bit deeper.

Bob Garcia:
So humility and curiosity and the willingness to lean in and challenge convention sounds like great advice for all of us to think more about as we engage with our day.

Marc Liu:
Yeah, I mean you really need both sides of it. You need the humility to understand what you don’t know and to seek out counsel, but you need the confidence to push when you need to push. And again, trying to find that balance is that’s the name of the game.

Galen Ettlin:
Along those lines, Marc, I’m curious for you, is there a rebellious figure either here in this culture or elsewhere that you look up to or that you think is someone worth celebrating?

Marc Liu:
I’ve become a big fan of Andrew Yang and ever since I discovered him during his presidential candidacy, and regardless of whether you agree with his approach or not his politics, you cannot deny that he is promoting a different perspective on what this country needs to be doing to advance and move forward and improve things for the people. He ran as a democratic candidate initially and did not get a ton of support from the party and now has launched his own party, the forward party. So again, there are policies that I think have a lot of merit. There are other approaches that I would need to dig into a little bit further, but by and large, if you’re looking for a rebel within the state of American politics, you don’t have to look very far – pretty rebellious.

Galen Ettlin:
Makes sense. Outside the box, against the grain, however you want to put it, but not the conventional.

Marc Liu:
Exactly.

Galen Ettlin:
Okay. Well Marc, finally here it is. Time for our ‘honey, I don’t think so’ segment talking about what’s annoying you lately that needs to stop in the marketing or martex space. You have 60 seconds to make your case.

Marc Liu:
My pet peeve, and I’ve had this for a little bit of time, is the tendency for marketing people, whether it’s marketing agencies or marketing tech companies, to promote this idea that we can track and measure everything and we’ve kind of shot ourselves in the foot because technology improved and we have so access to so much data and analytics. And so we’ve gone out there and told brands clients that everything has a straight line between what you do and the ROI and it’s just not true. There are still huge gaps in the data, but even more than that, fundamentally there are things that we do as marketing and salespeople, not because they have a 10x or 20x return, but just because they’re the right thing to do. And I use the example of restaurants. If you don’t know what the ROI of sweeping the floor is, but you do it anyway because it’s the right thing to do. And so especially when it comes down to branding and storytelling, we need to make sure that brands know that those are things that you may not be able to measure but are very important

Galen Ettlin:
Right on time. Maybe one second over, but I’ll give it to you.

Marc Liu:
Okay, thank you. I appreciate that.

Bob Garcia:
I love the wisdom I’ve picked up this morning. Thank you so much for sharing, Marc.

Marc Liu:
Yeah, thanks for having me. This has been a really fun shot.

Galen Ettlin:
All right, Marc, thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate it. We’re going to link to all of your socials in our description here of the podcast episode. So thanks again.

Marc Liu:
Appreciate it.

Galen Ettlin:
Thanks everyone for listening to the Rebel Instinct Podcast. Be sure to follow Act-On Software for updates and upcoming episodes and remember to always act on your rebel instinct. Until next time.

How to Use Marketing Automation to Cross-sell Insurance

Act-On — Tue, 02 Aug 2022 13:00:00 +0000

Most insurance marketers know that if you want to grow your business fast, existing clients are the low-hanging fruit. The average cost to win a new customer across all industries is estimated five times higher than selling to an existing customer. However, this number is even higher for the insurance industry, estimated at seven or even nine times more. On a dollar per customer level, that’s paying between $487 to $900 for each brand new customer.

You already have customers who are happy with your products and services, and if you offer them the right offer at the right time, you can help guide them into more and better policies and options. And, we get it. Figuring out the timing isn’t always easy. That’s where marketing automation comes in.

Insurance policy cross-selling with marketing automation allows you to capture more of your existing customers’ business and do so at scale. With this tool, you can identify new segments within your customer base, deliver relevant content, and convert more business from the people who already know and love your insurance products.

Cross-sell the Right Policies at the Right Time to the Right Customers

You want to retain and expand existing relationships, but if you want to do this successfully, you need to work even harder than in the past. That’s because your customers want hyper-personalized experiences. If you reach out with a product or service that doesn’t feel relevant, you instantly lose customer trust, which is critical in all industries, but especially for insurance. And the next marketing email that you send? Chances are, they’ll click right past it.

So, what is the answer?

The solution is greater personalization, especially considering that almost all customers (71%) say they’re frustrated with shopping experiences that feel impersonal.

Each of your insurance customers is at a different life stage, and the products and services they need change quickly, sometimes in a matter of months. A single adult who gets married or has their first child, for example, may now need products that weren’t relevant a few short months ago.
Marketing automation allows you to tap into your existing database of customers, segment those customers, and figure out what offerings are most relevant. Every time you do this well, the customer will feel like you get them – and you will win their trust.

5 Marketing Challenges Facing Insurance Brokerages (and how to solve them)

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For example, Physicians Insurance needed a way to nurture diverse buyers with highly relevant content, to build trust and convert more leads. They used marketing automation to create more personalized content campaigns and improve conversion rates. A couple of results included:

Increased email engagement. More customers stopped clicking past marketing emails and the company experienced a 31% increase in email engagement.
Higher customer retention rates. Not only could the company now more effectively cross-sell, but retention rates increased. A 95% retention rate was achieved due to more customized content and advanced segmentation.

The company relies on relationships to grow business, and most revenue is tied to the core book of business. Marketing automation helped them to make existing relationships stronger and get positioned for stronger growth.

Lead Management Helps Shorten the Conversion Cycle

Sales and marketing both play an important role in nurturing relationships and building trust. On their own, they are important, but when working together, the results are powerful – and sales cycles are potentially shortened.

Over three-fourths of sales and marketing leaders report that collaboration between the two areas is critical to business growth. If almost all of your competitors are getting this wrong, imagine what happens when you get it right. You instantly earn a competitive advantage.

The most tightly aligned sales and marketing teams achieve on average 24% faster three-year revenue growth and 27% faster three-year profit growth. Additionally, companies that aren’t aligning well are estimated to lose up to 10% of revenue annually. A few more considerations include:

The majority of business goes to those who respond fastest. Up to 50% of sales go to the businesses that respond first. If sales and marketing are aligned, it empowers sales to prioritize the most relevant leads and follow up more quickly.
Improved lead management helps to close deals faster. Sales and marketing alignment helps companies to become 67% better at closing deals.
Customers buy more from companies that deliver content at every stage of their buyers journey. Ninety-five percent of buyers say they purchased from a company that gave them relevant content at every stage in their journey.

For example, Insurance Agency Marketing Services is a company that supports the servicing of tens of thousands of insurance policies nationwide. The company was using a marketing webinar and newsletter program that delivered poor results. Sluggish response rates and low webinar attendance stalled their lead generation and nurturing efforts.

They needed better marketing intelligence for lead tracking, to support sales and marketing to deliver more personalized and relevant content. Through marketing automation, they achieved:

A large increase in webinar registrants. One of the company’s main marketing strategies was webinars, but they had a hard time getting sign-ups. With marketing automation, they experienced a 470% increase in webinar registrations.

Increased web traffic. The company wanted to nurture existing relationships, but it also wanted to plant seeds for new ones. Marketing automation supported a 300% increase in web traffic and click-through rates tripled from 2% – to 6%, well above industry averages of 2.2%.

Since people are more likely to purchase from companies that deliver content at every turn in their journey, marketing automation supports the ability to accelerate funnel building by providing the right content at the right time.

Use Content Marketing to Trigger Automated Campaigns

Your customers receive massive amounts of content, and some of that content is really good. If you hope to compete with the noise, you need to provide excellent content, but equally important, highly relevant content.

Your existing clients are continuously sending you buying signals. The challenge is that many of these signals are going unnoticed. For example, a customer might visit your website and download a product sheet about life insurance. Then he or she might attend a webinar about the topic, and visit the website, again, to gather a few more details. If you want to move this interest from lead to sales, your team needs intelligence to spot the triggers.

Without a consistent framework in place, your marketing to qualified leads might be hit or miss, and your sales team wastes time chasing difficult to convert leads. Tools like lead scoring, used with automated campaigns, help close the gap between marketing and sales efforts and convert more business. A few situations where you can use content marketing to trigger automated campaigns include:

A customer clicks a link in your newsletter. Imagine that you send a newsletter to existing clients. A customer clicks a link within that newsletter to learn more about life insurance, and as a result, you can automatically add that person to a drip campaign. That person will receive more information about the importance of life insurance, and how to pick the best policy.
A customer signals interest during a webinar. You promote a webinar about umbrella policies to an existing customer, and that person signs up. The customer attends the webinar from start to finish, and then, you can segment that customer to receive future follow-up campaigns providing even greater depth on the topic.
A customer visits your website for specific product information. An existing customer visits your website several times to view information about accident insurance. Based on this behavior, you can start sending them targeted information about the benefits of this type of insurance.

Automated campaigns don’t need to be complicated; they can be as simple as a campaign that kicks into action 90 days before a customer’s policy renewal date. Of course, this is the optimal time to review their policy and spot any required changes, but it’s also a chance to learn more about the customer’s situation and if it’s changed.

RSA, for example, needed to deliver personalized campaigns and rise above the noise in a highly competitive market. Using marketing automation, the company was able to increase broker engagement by 300% by delivering personalized and more relevant experiences.

Insurance Policy Cross-Selling: Landing More Business

Selling insurance is all about relationships. You want your customers to feel known, understood, and valued by your insurance company. But doing this effectively in today’s market requires tools that weren’t available in the past, and marketing automation has become a critical part of your toolbox.

With it, you can reach your existing customer more effectively by understanding what they need right now, and then showing them that you understand. As a result, you can create deeper and more meaningful connections with your customers and support growth that helps serve them even better in the future.

5 Marketing Challenges Facing Insurance Brokerages (and how to solve them)

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How to Use Automation to Create a Customer Rewards Program

Act-On — Fri, 17 Dec 2021 07:00:00 +0000

Many B2C companies know that their growth is dependent upon current customers making repeat purchases. And the key to doing that is keeping customers engaged, making them feel good about their purchase, and planting the seed to inspire them to buy more in the future.

But how can companies possibly do all that?

Sending promo codes and email campaigns announcing new product releases is one way to entice people to visit your website or brick and mortar. But many individuals need more incentive to take that extra step in the customer journey, which is where using B2C marketing automation for your customer rewards programs can save the day.

Chances are you’re part of a few customer rewards programs. If so, accruing points probably makes you feel better after your purchase. You probably buy more knowing that you’ll eventually get a reward to use toward a future purchase or free offer. Now, imagine the benefits your organization could experience if you motivate your customer base to adopt that same mindset.

Before we go any further, let’s discuss what a customer reward program is, how it can benefit your bottom line, and how you can leverage B2C marketing automation to implement your own reward campaigns at your company.

What is a Customer Reward Program?

A customer reward program is a marketing tactic designed to reward current customers for their ongoing business in an effort to drive engagement and encourage future purchases. Customer reward program members are granted special perks (such as points, promotional offers, gifts, and more) for being long-term and loyal customers.

An effective customer reward program enables companies to engage customers, demonstrate their value, and motivate their audience to make more frequent purchases. Now that we’ve established what a customer reward program is, let’s chat about a few ways you can leverage B2C marketing automation to implement one at your organization.

Create a Scoring Program to Reward Customers… and Drive Engagement

Most of us probably associate lead scoring as a practice reserved for B2B companies that are trying to gauge where customers are in the sales funnel. But most B2C rewards programs use the same concept. The only difference is that, because these points systems are public, companies don’t subtract points for certain actions (at least as far as customers can see).

These are a few critical customer actions that you can assign positive scores to:

Making a purchase: Most rewards programs assign customers certain points for every dollar they spend. Customers usually have to achieve a certain threshold before they are able to redeem those points for discounts on future purchases. How many points you assign to each dollar and the threshold customers usually need to reach before using those points depends on factors such as the average customer purchase and purchasing frequency.
Browsing and saving items: You don’t have to wait until customers make a purchase to reward them for their loyalty. After all, window shopping or browsing through your website is one of the first steps in the customer journey, so giving customers an incentive to complete their purchase might help them reach the end of the sales funnel sooner rather than later.
Purchase history: Many of your customers are probably creatures of habit, and you can use that to your advantage by assigning additional points when customers make repeat purchases or, if applicable, buy in bulk. You can also track these repeat purchases to gain a sense of which offers to send to your customers in the future.

Urban Outfitters, for example, rewards customers with points as they save items to their wish list on their app. Customers can search and save items right on the app, but they can also scan the barcode of an item while in-store. In addition to encouraging engagement, this practice allows Urban Outfitters to track user preferences and even encourage customers to act fast by notifying them when an item is almost out of stock.

Keep Customers Engaged With Marketing Automation

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If a customer is not accruing points over time, this is your cue to enter them into an automated email nurture campaign. You can focus these campaigns around your customer’s specific product interests and remind them to use their points before they expire at the end of the year.

Implement Event-Triggered Emails to Celebrate Special Events

A good reward program doesn’t just reward customers for making a purchase; it keeps them engaged by making them feel special and valued by your company. That’s why, in addition to offering a points system, you should provide your customers with gifts and promos to help them celebrate special days such as birthdays, the anniversary of them signing up for your program, and even holidays.

You might think that keeping track of all these dates can be a handful, but managing this part of your B2C marketing automation program is simple and intuitive with event-triggered emails. You can easily create eye-catching emails with enticing offers, and then identify criteria that signal to your platform to automatically send them out when a special day or event comes around.

A/B Test Offers and Measure Engagement to Optimize Your Program

In addition to helping you build customer loyalty, an effective customer reward program should empower you to learn more about how to create an enjoyable customer experience. You should set up your B2C marketing automation program to track your customers’ purchase patterns and identify which promotional tactics are motivating them to make more and bigger purchases.

A/B testing is the best way to understand what is resonating with your audience. So, if a customer doesn’t engage with your initial email, you can send it to them again with a different subject line to see if that piques their interest.

Once you have a good formula for subject lines, you can test your email designs, copy, and CTAs to learn which marketing efforts and offers are working best with your customers.

If your outreach efforts are completely falling flat, you’ll need to make significant changes and improvements. If, for example, you notice a low click-through rate on your CTAs, you should restructure your reward program to feature more appealing offers that match the product or service interests of your consumers.

Deliver an Enjoyable Customer Journey With B2C Marketing Automation

A good customer reward program can do wonders when it comes to improving repeat purchases and brand reputation. And marketing automation makes it easy to implement and manage one for your organization.

Not only that, but marketing automation can help you do a lot more to build a robust customer marketing program. Act-On B2C marketing automation, for example, equips B2C marketers with a variety of tools that enable you to promote loyalty, match customers with awesome products and services, and help your organization grow.

If you’re interested in seeing our platform in action and learning more about what makes it unique from other marketing automation options, please schedule a demo with one of our marketing automation experts.

Keep Customers Engaged With Marketing Automation

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How Insurers Can Use Marketing Automation to Retain Existing Policyholders

Act-On — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 20:00:00 +0000

Marketing your insurance plans to existing policyholders is crucial to sustainable success over the long-term. These individuals and families are your primary revenue stream and also your best opportunity to grow and diversify your portfolio. Unfortunately, many insurance agents fail to build and strengthen these relationships, putting them at constant risk of losing their clients to their competition — even where their offerings aren’t as affordable or attractive.

So, in today’s blog, we’re going to examine a few best practices for improving insurance marketing to existing policyholders. But, before we do, let’s take a closer look at why existing policyholders are so important to your success.

Why Are Existing Policyholders So Important?

Regardless of which policy lines you sell, retaining existing policyholders is critical to profitability and low marketing costs. This is due to two factors:

New policyholders are extremely expensive to acquire. In fact, it costs between $500-800 for every new policyholder.
Existing policyholders are familiar with the people behind your brand and services, making them prime targets for potential upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

What’s at risk if you fail to strengthen these relationships? Well, in the auto insurance industry alone, only 2-3% of new customers enter the market annually, while 22% of policyholders churn every year (1). Thankfully, by delivering personalized service and relevant policy options to your current customers, you can achieve your retention goals and drive additional revenue from your existing streams.

Proven Marketing Tactics for Insurance Policyholder Retention

To achieve and exceed your retention goals, you must do everything in your power to anticipate each policyholder’s unique needs and provide them with the knowledge they need to find the perfect fit for themselves and their families. Here are three proven marketing tactics for insurance policyholder retention.

Automate personalized renewals campaigns

There’s a general sense that the insurance industry is cold and numbers-oriented. Many policyholders often feel like they’re treated as though they have the exact same needs, the exact same budgets, and the exact same family makeup, hobbies, and preferences as everyone else. That is, they feel like they’re being treated as a means to a money-making end.

Obviously, this perceived indifference and lack of personalization can be a major turnoff to consumers, as well as a significant deterrent to your ability to retain and upsell your existing customers. But with marketing automation, you can automate personalized renewal campaigns that speak to each policyholder on a 1:1 level.

The first step is to segment your customers into specific buckets that match their current policy types. You can likely transfer these contacts into your renewal campaigns from any welcome programs you’ve built. From there, you can further segment based on income, age, health status, and known life events.

Once you’ve placed each contact into their respective segment(s), create a series of emails that will trigger within 90, 30, 15, and 3 days of their policy renewal date. Be sure to educate them about their current policy, the benefits of their plan, and any changes to the offering that might affect them in the coming year. Depending on their engagement level (or lack thereof) you can either cease the campaign or reach out directly to ensure the renewal.

You can set these programs to repeat annually — saving time, money, and energy while improving renewal rates and maintaining revenue.

5 Marketing Challenges Facing Insurance Brokerages

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Most of us purchase insurance and never give our plans much thought until it’s time to renew — as long as our rates don’t change, that is. That’s because most of us don’t realize how important our insurance plans really are and how we could be getting more out of our policies if we were just a little more informed. So, instead of only communicating with your policyholders when it’s time to renew, why not try engaging them throughout the year with relevant messaging and educational content in the form of a monthly newsletter?

Most insurers hear the word “newsletter” and automatically assume there’s a ton of work involved, but with marketing automation that’s just not the case. Using Act-On’s pre-built email templates, simply add relevant content (blogs, datasheets, case studies) that likely already exist on your website and create a simple cadence for a monthly send.

If you want to diversify the content within your newsletter based on your recipients’ policy types, simply segment your audiences based on policy type and demographics and then populate your email templates with the perfect content for each policyholder. Include content like instructions for policy payouts, policy-specific benefits, and promotions for discounted rates.

These communications strengthen existing relationships and keep you top of mind with your customers all year long!

Understand and support your policyholders’ evolving life events

For better or worse, things happen in life. You buy your daughter a car for her 16th birthday. You get laid off from work and lose your benefits. You buy a new home or lose your house in a fire.

Regardless of what life throws at us, though, the one thing we can count on is change. Sometimes this change is expected; other times it comes as a complete surprise. As an insurance agent, your job is to act as the steadying hand during both the best and worst moments in life. Therefore, understanding how your policyholders’ lives are changing empowers you to deliver personalized digital experiences that help them meet those challenges and secure their future.

The best glimpse into your existing customers’ lives is through the data. Combining your agency management system (AMS) with marketing automation helps you gather this data and then make it actionable. First and foremost, per the section above, knowing policy dates, family size, and income helps you know when to launch your renewal campaigns. Just as important, though, getting a clearer picture of your customers gives you the insights you need to sell additional policies or supplement existing ones.

A policyholder buys a new jet ski, so she might be looking to buy a bigger vehicle. Think she might need insurance for that?
A local businessman decides to expand his staff past the 50 FTE threshold. I wonder if he’ll need to apply for large group coverage?
A loyal customer recently lost her job and is worried about paying for her son’s medical treatments. Chances are she needs an affordable and effective private health insurance plan.

When you know what’s happening in your policyholders’ lives, you can use marketing automation to deliver multi-channel marketing communications that speak directly to their needs. Consider adding forms to your emails to gather the information you need to give them the care they deserve. Place a tracking beacon on your website to visualize which webpages your customers are visiting. Create pay-per-click landing pages that offer helpful content in exchange for additional information.

Develop tactics to collect as much data as possible, and then launch campaigns to maximize your opportunities.

Establish trust through localized community involvement

Insurance is all about establishing trust, and what better way to do that than by making a positive difference within your community! Sponsor a local blood drive. Establish health and wellness programs with local hospitals, assisted living facilities, and children’s organizations. Hold fundraising events for a good cause like children’s literacy, food and clothing for families living below the poverty line, and community initiatives such as a skate park or live music series.

More than just participating in these activities, though, promote your involvement across your digital channels using marketing automation. Leverage Act-On’s Advanced Social Media Module to share your organization’s community involvement. Dedicate a portion of your monthly newsletter to previous and upcoming community events or causes. Create a page on your website dedicated to community service and encourage visitors to pledge to a fundraiser or join you at an upcoming event. For this last one, you can place a tracking beacon on this page of your site to understand which policyholders are viewing your community involvement content and then send them personalized communications that highlight your activities and invite them to participate as well.

Setting the example and sharing your experiences will humanize your organization and generate the kind of goodwill and trust most people are looking for in the companies they do business with.

Act-On Is the Top-Performing Marketing Automation Platform for Insurers

Hundreds of insurers throughout North America and the United Kingdom trust Act-On’s best-in-class marketing automation platform to develop and deploy phenomenal customer experiences to new and existing policyholders. Our software is the perfect tool for you and your brokers to execute multi-channel insurance marketing tactics and orchestrate holistic automated journeys throughout the customer lifecycle.

To learn more about how your insurance brokerage can leverage Act-On to exceed your marketing and business goals, please contact one of our experienced marketing automation professionals to schedule a no-risk, 20-minute demo.

Or, you can click here to take our interactive tour, where you can choose your own adventure while learning more about our new and improved platform.

Lastly… looking for a good read? Click the link below to learn how marketing automation can help you overcome your biggest insurance marketing obstacles!

5 Marketing Challenges Facing Insurance Brokerages

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RLH Corporation: Using Act-On to Build Customer Experiences That Matter

Act-On — Fri, 10 Jul 2020 00:41:27 +0000

A modern marketing blueprint for sustained success:

Deliver great brand experiences at every stage of the customer lifecycle
Drive engagement and excitement around your offerings
Grow and expand your business through retention and loyalty

While most marketers would agree that the three steps above comprise a proven roadmap for business growth, real success lies in the planning and execution of these lifecycle marketing strategies — no small feat for even the most seasoned and well-staffed marketing departments. But just because something is difficult doesn’t mean it’s not worth pursuing; in fact, the opposite is usually true, especially in marketing.

We recently hosted a Customer Spotlight Webinar highlighting Red Lion Hotels Corporation’s (RLH) use of Act-On to achieve consistent and growing customer marketing success using the approaches above. Specifically, we wanted to share how RLH is leveraging marketing automation to strategically plan and execute exceptional guest experiences.

Our guest representative from RLH Corporation was Whitney Swales. Whitney is the VP of Guest Recognition/Loyalty, Marketing Promotions with RLH Corporation and oversees their customer loyalty programs — building the customer journeys, content, and messaging that fuel those efforts.

Keep reading to learn how RLH is driving great engagement and repeat guest stays from their customer marketing strategies, especially their Hello Rewards loyalty program.

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Incentivizing the End User

RLH is unique in that they utilize B2C marketing strategies on behalf of their more than 1,000 hotel franchisees across 8 distinct brands. The goal is to support these franchise owners through marketing programs geared toward securing guest reservations at their hotels. These efforts include loyalty campaigns through their Hello Rewards program (with more than 2.5 million members), as well as seasonal promotions for new and past guests across multiple digital channels — including their website, social media platforms, email automation, and third-party online travel agencies (such as Expedia and Kayak).

The secret to their success is incentivization. They engage their past and potential guests through numerous acquisition tactics — such as digital sweepstakes, on-site property-level incentives, promotions through their website and other digital properties, and limited-time offers and discounts for reservations during select time periods. Once they’ve acquired these guests, they continue to market to them through Act-On via the following loyalty campaigns:

Promotional email campaigns
Automated campaigns
Reward expiration reminder emails
Surprise reward emails to celebrate milestones (birthdays, number of stays, etc.)

Here’s how they pull it off.

Building Effective Loyalty Programs: An Act-On Use Case

Whitney and her team recognize the need to go beyond lead generation to focus on customer engagement at every stage of the lifecycle. They know that given the right experiences, existing customers are most likely to turn into loyal advocates who embrace the RLH brand and share those experiences with their friends. Plus, guest data makes marketing to this audience easier and more effective by fueling more customized and targeted campaigns.

Wanting to utilize this data as much as possible (while also continuing to collect new information), RLH created several campaigns in support of their Hello Rewards customer loyalty program, which allows RLH to support its franchisees with direct bookings to their respective properties through incentivization.

Let’s break down each marketing element behind RLH’s guest engagement programs.

Rapid Transactional Emails

Consumers today expect real-time communications. For RLH, Act-On’s transactional email feature delivers on this demand. More than just a digital receipt, RLH creates entire email programs to deliver better real-time transactional experiences.

Through their bi-directional sync with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, RLH is able to automatically export and import all of their reservation data and then filter that information based on each hotel brand to create distinct branding and consistent messaging. From there, they send up to five separate emails that populate with personalized dynamic content.

Confirmation: Sent immediately following a guest booking
Modification: Sent immediately following any change in the upcoming stay
Cancellation: Sent immediately following a canceled stay
Pre-Stay Reminders: Sent 3 days prior to arrival with inviting messaging and a local promotion (e.g., discount on a car rental)
Post-Stay Appreciation: Sent 1 day after checkout with appreciative messaging and a survey about their stay

Said Whitney, “The best part about our transactional emails is that, by using conditional logic and dynamic content to set up our programs, we can set them up once and then rely on the automation to take care of the rest with occasional spot-checking.”

Promotional Engagements

RLH also uses Act-On to build and deliver their promotional messages, which vary more than their other campaigns based on new offers and discounts. These programs are designed to secure more bookings while also increasing Hello Rewards members — and are delivered, tracked, and optimized using Act-On.

RLH frequently targets promotions at the property-level. That is, they market on behalf of individual properties based on seasonality, regions , and local attractions. For example, in the past, they’ve targeted Anaheim, California and Orlando, Florida due to their proximity to Disneyland and Disney World, respectively. When those amusement parks have special events or festivals, RLH will create special offers to support their regional franchisees’ efforts to maximize bookings and deploy these campaigns on their behalf using Act-On’s advanced segmentation and automated email capabilities.

In addition, RLH offers quarterly brand promotions to keep guests invested in each of its brands and incentivized to continue visiting. They also offer top-prize sweepstakes in partnerships with other vendors to sweeten the pot and keep things fun for their franchisees’ loyal guests. These programs are built and executed using Act-On email and form templates, which, according to Whitney, are both “dynamic and easy to use.”

Lastly, RLH makes sure to celebrate their customers by sending out promotional emails on birthdays, anniversaries, and after a certain amount of stays at its family of hotels. This data is collected via Act-On and all emails trigger based on logic within the platform, making it a simple and seamless process free of intensive manual labor.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

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Intuitive Automated Campaigns

RLH Corporation’s automated email campaigns are based on behavior, engagement, demographics (all of which are captured in Act-On and Microsoft Dynamics), as well as upcoming promotions. And since they’re optimally leveraging Act-On, these programs usually involve all of the aforementioned elements as part of a more targeted segmentation, messaging, and delivery mix.

They kickstart these campaigns with a welcome series of emails for new sign-ups to the Hello Rewards loyalty program.

Email 1 (Immediately): Initial welcome email outlining the benefits of Hello Rewards

Email 2 (3 days later): Reminder to activate the account and login

Email 3 (7 days later): Another reminder to activate the account with more detailed information about the benefits of the program

Following the initial welcome series, RLH further engages and incentivizes their Hello Rewards members through their Hello Bucks and Hello Perks series — both of which are designed to strengthen brand connections and ensure repeat stays.

Hello Bucks

Hello Bucks is the point-based currency that RLH provides their guests following stays and other purchases. So, for example, when a guest checks out, they’re sent an email letting them know they’ve earned Hello Bucks based on their recent activity. The email also tells the recipient their current Hello Bucks balance and includes suggestions for how they can spend them through RLH and their affiliate hotels. If they don’t open or engage with the email, they are sent a reminder within three business days. Also, since Hello Bucks are temporary, RLH sends an email one month prior to expiration, which encourages guests to use them to book additional upcoming stays.

Hello Perks

The Hello Perks program is designed to surprise and delight Hello Rewards members with additional membership benefits based on certain milestones. So, when a guest reaches a certain milestone (for example, 5 stays), they will receive a “perk” in the form of a gift card — usually to a local business such as a restaurant or car rental agency.

All of these programs rest squarely on the shoulders of the seamless integration between Act-On and Microsoft Dynamics. This connection allows RLH to import members from Dynamics into Act-On through an automated sync and then drill down to each segment to better understand where they stand based on behavior and engagement. The best part is that all segmentation automatically updates when Hello Rewards members enter and exit the loyalty program. This means that Whitney and her team can build these programs once and then let them run with just occasional spot-checks and automated reporting.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

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Said Whitney, “The goal is to make the overall guest experience as seamless as possible, and Act-On enables us to deliver that experience with minimal effort and fantastic results!”

Check Out These Results!

From a business level, Act-On helps RLH streamline workflows and processes while conserving valuable time and money through reliable and intuitive automation. But what about the direct impact on engagement and performance? Take a look for yourself!

Bounce Rate

Within just six months of working with Act-On’s email deliverability team, RLH had decreased their total (soft and hard) bounce rate from 18% to less than 2%.

Email Engagement Across Campaign Type

RLH is seeing tremendous engagement (delivery, unique opens, and unique click-to-open rates) across all of their outbound automated campaigns.

The Best Is Yet to Come!

Up next for RLH, Whitney and her team want to begin utilizing Act-On lead attribution and funnel reporting to get a better sense of how each step of the customer journey impacts their bottom line, as well as how and where they can improve. Said Whitney, “I’m so excited to unlock every feature the technology has to offer to maximize our branding, messaging, and return on investment!”

To learn even more about how RLH is utilizing Act-On, please click here to read their official case study. Or, if you’d like to read more about customer marketing strategies you can execute through marketing automation platforms, please download our eBook, “Drive Engagement Around Your Offerings.”

Customer Marketing Archives - Act-On

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1. Email nurturing

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Customer Attrition and Building a Stronger Foundation

Churn Reduction and Rethinking Measurement

What Is Customer Marketing?

What is customer marketing?

Why is customer-centric marketing important?

What customer marketing strategies should I use?

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Why does your brand need a welcome email?

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Welcome email best practices

1. Send the welcome message immediately

2. Say thank you

3. Introduce your account team

4. Provide helpful resources

5. Set expectations

6. Include a simple call to action

7. Send more than one welcome email

Optimize your growth

New client welcome email example

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The Rebel Instinct Podcast, Episode 9: Marc Liu

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What is a Customer Reward Program?

Create a Scoring Program to Reward Customers… and Drive Engagement

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Implement Event-Triggered Emails to Celebrate Special Events

A/B Test Offers and Measure Engagement to Optimize Your Program

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How Insurers Can Use Marketing Automation to Retain Existing Policyholders

Why Are Existing Policyholders So Important?

Proven Marketing Tactics for Insurance Policyholder Retention

Automate personalized renewals campaigns

5 Marketing Challenges Facing Insurance Brokerages

Deliver a monthly educational newsletter segmented by policy type(s)

Understand and support your policyholders’ evolving life events

Establish trust through localized community involvement

Act-On Is the Top-Performing Marketing Automation Platform for Insurers

5 Marketing Challenges Facing Insurance Brokerages

RLH Corporation: Using Act-On to Build Customer Experiences That Matter

Incentivizing the End User

Building Effective Loyalty Programs: An Act-On Use Case

Rapid Transactional Emails

Promotional Engagements

Intuitive Automated Campaigns

Hello Bucks

Hello Perks

Check Out These Results!

Bounce Rate

Email Engagement Across Campaign Type

The Best Is Yet to Come!