[Editor’s note: We’re excited to share some valuable insights from one of our Selligent CRM and marketing agency partners, Raare Solutions. Last year, we cohosted a forum with Raare, focused on the core problems that can cause many marketers to waste money on their CRM and marketing campaigns. Here, Esther Poulsen, CEO & Founder of Raare, shares some solutions to overcome these critical issues.]
Marketers spend a lot of time and effort on optimizing every advertising dollar and every customer engagement campaign to acquire new clients and keep them loyal to the brand. We need to! But we also need to recognize two cold, hard realities in today’s marketing landscape:
· 25 cents of every dollar is spent targeting the wrong customer
· 50 percent of CRM campaigns fail
Face it, money is being wasted on CRM and marketing campaigns. Today, the blame is not so much on product and pricing as it is on how you’re talking to your customers. Clients and prospects are a demanding bunch! Consumers and business decision makers alike will ignore your marketing if it’s not personalized, if it presents incorrect, invalid or tone-deaf offers, or if your content doesn’t meet their expectations.
It’s critical for marketers to understand and harmonize every touch during their customers’ journeys and offer immediate gratification across multiple channels. And that’s challenging, especially as brands are faced with fewer resources, more competition, and higher expectations from consumers. But it’s not insurmountable.
Here are five actionable steps you can take to avoid wasting money and drive ROI with your marketing campaigns:
By dividing your market into smaller, more manageable subgroups, you’re better able to assess and respond to customer motivations, then develop targeted marketing messages personalized for every customer. If you’re not segmenting your audience lists, you don’t know who your audience is, what they want, or what they’ve done. This erodes the efficiency of your marketing programs. In fact, research shows that properly segmented campaigns produce higher email open rates, click-through rates, and direct mail response rates, and lower bounce rates and unsubscribes.
One size does not fit all in your customers’ journeys. According to an Accenture study, over 75% of consumers are more likely to purchase from retailers that know their name and buying history and offer on-taste recommendations. If you do not connect your customer data to the messaging your customer receives – that is, if you’re not tailoring experiences based on how they’ve interacted with your brand in the past – you’re wasting money.
You may think you know who a prospect is, but a “hunch” is not enough to build a strong campaign on, regardless of the time you’ve been “in the industry.” Marketers need to use an intelligent, data-centered model to target the right prospect at the right time. Then apply rules to suppress those people who for various reasons shouldn’t be receiving communications.
If a customer senses that your brand doesn’t know or care about them as an individual, you’re wasting money. People expect tailored experiences – and they’ll spend when you deliver personalization. A Business Insider Intelligence report showed that 44% of shoppers become repeat buyers after a personalized shopping experience; and 40% report they’ve spent more money than planned after a personalized shopping experience. Achieving that level of desired personalization requires actionable data insights to every customer, so you can create a relevant and compelling engagement campaign and a premium, enticing, and loyalty-driving customer experience.
Finally, if you can’t state what your campaign objectives are, or you haven’t prioritized those objectives, then guess what? You’re wasting money! You need to understand your underlying intentions for each campaign, and then measure performance throughout the entire process. If you can’t measure it, you can’t repeat it if it’s good – or correct it if it’s bad.
Making simple, but key changes in your strategy and execution can help you overcome common challenges. When you optimize your marketing campaigns using customer insights, you’ll see the results. Conversion rates for optimized email campaigns are 10 to 50 times higher than traditional, non-optimized campaigns.
If you’re concerned about wasting money on your CRM and marketing campaigns, contact us. We’d love to talk with you about these five concerns, help identify where you are losing marketing efficiency, and offer some concrete steps to take that stop the bleeding, fix the problem, and transform customer engagement experiences from so-so to spectacular!
Marigold: where relationships take root.
