Rubi Cohen, Head of Marketing for Vindicia, says organisations should be taking greater steps to look at their customer retention plans.

The funnel is the most important piece of “infrastructure” in your marketing plan, but it’s got a problem. It ends at the point when the connection with the customer is more important than ever, and it puts your revenue potential at risk.

The funnel is broken

The customer journey begins at the top of the funnel, at the awareness stage, and marketers devote much time, energy and resources nurturing those leads to the consideration stage and to the ultimate win, acquisition. All the marketing dollars spent on optimizing the journey and ensuring good acquisition rates are definitely well spent. But they could be spent better if the funnel didn’t suddenly come to an end just when the customer finally decides to sign on.

“It’s time for marketers to ask themselves whether retention is part of your marketing plan, and if not, why not?”

Beyond acquisition is the entire world of retention – making sure that customers are satisfied and engaged, providing them with delightful experiences and building long-lasting connections based on trust. It’s time for marketers to ask themselves whether retention is part of your marketing plan, and if not, why not?

Retention – A smarter approach

By now, you understand that acquisition is not the end game, and “cost per lead” doesn’t really reflect the entire retention journey, the customer’s true value or the efficacy of the marketing activities you did to acquire them. So, if you’re going to start considering LTV as a key metric, then suddenly, retention becomes a smarter and stronger approach.

Churn is a marketing problem

Once a customer is acquired, the job of retaining them tends to fall through the cracks. There are two ways that customers churn:

• Voluntary churn, when they actively decide to leave (a marketing problem that probably already has your attention)
• Passive churn, or put another way, “technical churn” (a problem that, in marketing terms, is overlooked and ignored)

“It is not just the job of the IT department to prevent passive churn. It’s also a marketer’s job.”

Passive churn is when the e-commerce payment fails or an error occurs and the customer is lost. There are a million reasons why this can happen, but it’s always a shame, because the customer churned inadvertently, for no good reason. After all, think about the money and effort you invested in developing the customer’s relationship with your brand, making sure they prefer your product or service over the competitors. And after all that, the customer simply “drops off,” without asking for it!.

The question then becomes: how are you addressing passive churn, or perhaps more specifically, who is addressing it?

It’s important to adjust perspective here and to realize that this is not actually a technical problem, but a problem of retention. And it is not just the job of the IT department to prevent passive churn. It’s also a marketer’s job.

The churn tools are ready for you

You don’t need to be a sophisticated data scientist to understand that lost customers are lost revenue, and not just that, they are also lost brand ambassadors – which means loss of untold revenue potential. There is no reason not to include retention in your marketing plan, and every reason (and more) to include it.

“If your marketing strategy is only working at the top and middle funnel to get conversions, then it’s only doing half the job.”

Fortunately, the tools you need to fix the problem are available, accessible, and easy to implement with your existing funnel and systems. Vindicia Retain is working all the time in the background to retain customers with accurate churn identification and prevention solutions. What’s more, it requires no heavy integration to get amazing results. In fact, check out the Forrester report about the impact of Vindicia Retain and how it saved $24 million for our customers over three years.

Go to the land beyond conversions

If your marketing strategy is only working at the top and middle funnel to get conversions, then it’s only doing half the job. When customers want to stay connected, but can’t, then it’s time to step in and go beyond conversion to retention. Today’s marketers are fueled by data, not just figures and numbers, but a holistic approach that supports the customer’s expectations for their entire lifecycle. Make retention part of your marketing plan with the holistic, data-driven Vindicia Retain and stop missing out on the incredible potential revenue of satisfied, connected customers.

About Author – Rubi Cohen