Attracting new prospects to your enterprise is obviously key to a successful business, but that is just the beginning of the process. To be successful over the long term, you need to be driving relevant customer experiences so that all your clients embark on the Yellow Brick Road (YBR) to the highest customer lifetime value.
Keeping customers on the golden pathway means developing a series of explicit steps that will deliver the maximum benefits and satisfaction to them.
The focus here should not merely be on how great your return might be, but on how you can customize your product or service to cater to your clients’ specific needs.
This means that your YBR should be flexible enough to adjust itself to your customers’ situation, desires and goals.
The Flexible Yellow Brick Road
For example, if you offer a software service that allows users to detect loopholes in their databases or their own software, giving them the ability to patch up these errors before hackers take advantage of them, how would you apply your YBR to this situation?
Bearing in mind that your aim is to gain maximum monthly usage and revenue of your service, as well as prolonged and indefinite customer retention, you could take these steps:
Identify the prospect’s precise needs. How exactly is the client going to use your software or service, how often, and for whom?
Assess the most valuable and profitable fit for your product or service. Is there a specific version of your software that is most suitable for a particular client?
Determine the size of the enterprise you are dealing with and analyze how this will affect your need for communications; if you are dealing with a small e-commerce enterprise, the way to communicate will be much different that with a national corporation.
Tailor your communications as a step-by-step process that will help each individual customer not only take the first step on the YBR but also stay en route. You can facilitate this by segmenting your list of prospects’ emails so that you can implement data-driven customization.
Optimizing Follow-Up Communications
Too often, after prospects opt in or subscribe to your company and become customers, the automated communications that follow up with them often are not optimized, which means you’re missing out on an opportunity to keep your customers on the YBR.
In order to avoid this, you need to collect and collate information from the get-go, including: age, demographics, geographic location, occupation, industry, size of the company, and purchase interest (I’ve talked about segmentation in greater depth on this interview at GrowthHacker.tv).
You can do this by simply adding a drop-down to your website which enables prospects to specify when they opt in. Then use this tested information to hypertarget those prospective clients. You will immediately increase your open rates, your click rates and the initial draws from those front-end leads will also go up.
Regimented, Segment Outreach
You don’t have to bombard your clients with information, but be consistent. Create a relevant and timely schedule to send out your customized communications.
On a weekly basis, you could pick a specific segment from your customer database and run a two-email sequence for that niche for clients that have more than 500 employees, for example.
On a monthly basis, present an educational webinar about your product or service that caters to all your prospective clients.
On a quarterly basis, send out communications specific to each of your prospect segments, offering limited-time incentives and bonuses.
Remember, in order to keep your clients on the YBR, as well as creating an automated front-end for accruing prospects, you have to implement customized communications over time in order to create customer lifetime value. This means you will be able to recruit new prospects and retain regular clients for years to come.
Happy marketing.
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