A Call to Action: Planning Your Customer-Centric Sales & Marketing Strategy, Part II

By Ed Pierce, Fleet Industry Marketer

Last month, we left off mid-stream in describing the planning of a customer-centric sales AND marketing strategy.  Let’s finish up:

Know Thy Customer

With advances in customer relationship management tools that now incorporate every milestone in the buying cycle all the way back to a prospect’s first website visit along with instant, segmented digital surveying capability, companies can obtain more information about buyers and buying habits than ever before.  Combined with the availability of a broad range of more timely sales reports, the “opportunities” picture has never been clearer.

With the ability to collect and store data on individual customers over time, a customer-centric marketing approach means moving past aggregate metrics on a product, channel, or event, and instead focusing on customer-level data – especially customer behavior over time.

Questions to ask:  How valuable are the new customers we’re acquiring?  How effectively are we maximizing the value of every customer relationship?

Long-term trends in customer acquisition and retention can be identified through behavioral analytics that takes the data from, say, an eCommerce platform and breaks them into related groups for analysis (cohort analysis).

Use KPIs for Evaluation

Additionally, a customer-centric program integrates key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate strategy and tactical effectiveness.  For example, look at customer lifetime value (CLV) and Customer Equity, as well as retention-specific metrics like the Early Repeat Rate.

While performance indicators can help a company better understand the impact of its actions on customer behavior, the key to understanding opportunities is to uncover insights about the customer segments.

When considering upselling trends, for example, when’s the ideal time to reach out with a follow-up message to drive deeper brand engagement?  For those customers who expand services, what are the categories that they gravitate toward?

We will finish building the customer-centric plan in our next column.  Meanwhile, if you have any questions, comments, experiences, or opinions about fleet industry-related marketing that you’d like to share, write to me at edpierce@ITAcommunications.com.

 

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