You don’t always need to attract new audiences to grow. Today’s guest post from Demio shares how you can engage your audience to increase their trust and encourage loyal and repeat customers!
Customer acquisition cost, or CAC, is one of the largest costs faced by most businesses, and it’s only getting more expensive. According to HubSpot, SaaS companies pay between $7 and $385 for each new customer. Ideally, a business’ CAC shouldn’t exceed 33% of the total customer lifetime value (CLV), but for many organizations, it does.
To keep your business resilient and make the most of those rising acquisition costs, you need to increase your CLV and engage your audience.
While companies typically spend 81% of marketing budgets on acquisition, the Adobe Digital Economy Index shows 8% of customers making repeat purchases account for 41% of total revenue, and Bain and Company shows that reducing churn (the amount of customers leaving) by just 5% can increase profit by 25% or more.
We see from these metrics that it’s often more cost effective to retain your existing customers – whether through recurring subscriptions, adding new services, or improving engagement for repurchases.
Improving customer retention relies on how well you can build trust, inspire loyalty, and craft an excellent buyer experience. In this article, we’ll go over how to engage your audience through nurture channels like social media, webinars, and email marketing.
Stay in Touch on Social Media
Globally, nearly 44% of the world’s population uses social media. Social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram allow businesses to connect with consumers where they like to spend their time.
That means you can engage your audience and keep in touch with your buyers on the platforms they’re already using, bringing up your brand in a casual environment that avoids being too sales-focused.
1) Identify the Right Channel
Go where your buyers are. Each social media platform has different user demographics, so you need to invest some time to figure out which channels your buyers like to use.
Research which channels your audience is most active in, and look at channel groups and company/employee pages to see where they spend the most time.
Once you find the right platform — and there may be more than one — invest time and resources into building your audience on it. Some of the most popular places to start are Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. You may also be interested in Twitter, TikTok, and Snapchat.
2) Provide an Incentive To Follow You
After you identify which platforms your customer base uses, you need to provide a reason for them to follow you. Here are a few common reasons someone follows a business account on social media:
- To learn about sales
- To get access to discounts or exclusive offers
- To keep up with new products
- To stay in touch and support the brand
- To share feedback
When you understand your audience, it becomes easier to engage your audience and understand how to get them to follow.
3) Prioritize Value for Your Audience
Although social media could act as a sales channel, it performs infinitely better as an engagement channel where you interact with your buyers and build a community. You can share and respond to reviews, post positive customer feedback, answer questions, send tips and advice, share news, hold giveaways, and much more.
Ultimately, your social channels should function as a casual medium centered on delivering value to customers. That means engaging content, direct customer interaction, and you should prioritize helpful information over sales-related content (although you likely do want a social media ad strategy as well).
4) Be Consistent
Engagement has to be consistent to have impact. If you don’t post regularly, with the same level of quality your audience expects, you risk being forgotten — and then what’s the point of having social media channels at all?
To help stay top of mind, businesses can plan out their posts in advance and use a scheduling tool like MeetEdgar, which provides a single dashboard to manage all your social media. These types of tools can help you improve post engagement by increasing the regularity of posting, enhancing reaction times, and standardizing post timing.
Nurture and Reduce Churn With Emails
Email marketing is one of the most important lead nurturing tools. However, it continues to hold value after the sale. Your customers are likely already in your email database, so you can continue to engage with them to keep your SaaS top of mind.
1) Learn Which Topics Interest Your Audience
It’s crucial to focus on topics consumers care about. You should integrate value-added content like whitepapers (and webinars), and only use promotional content when introducing new features or offering upsells.
Answering questions from forums, sharing new webinars, introducing new features, reporting on bugs or glitches, industry knowledge, and how-to information all can add value.
2) Segment Your Email Lists
Once someone makes a purchase or takes up your CTA, it’s important to move them to a different email list. You no longer have to convince them to download or try the product; you have to engage, deliver value, and tell them how to get more from that product.
Setting up new email lists for customers also allows you to offer product updates and new feature updates easily via email. You can personalize your email lists to send updates based on what features someone has shown interest in, which tools they use, if they’re an engaged customer, and other factors.
Segmenting your lists helps ensure you aren’t selling too much to new signups or missing out on upsells to happy customers.
Here are some examples of great email segmentation:
- Emailing a list of customers who purchased X product a discount on a complementary add-on item
- Emailing a list of new offerings to buyers you haven’t heard from for a month
- Emailing your most active and engaged customers a voucher for a free item when they spend $X in purchases on their next visit
Tip: You can reduce churn with emails when used strategically. For example, set up email lists for customers with different blocks. Look at who is waiting for what new feature release, and once it’s available, announce it to that list to encourage users to stay on or sign up again.
3) Stagger Your Emails
Email can be annoying, especially if customers get too much of it. Take a “less is more” approach and deliver consistent, high-quality emails. As a rule of thumb, you should offer value with every email, whether that’s new information or a discount-of-the-week type of deal.
Tip: You can start everyone off on a weekly newsletter list, but allow them to opt in to a different monthly list, too. This lets them determine their preferred frequency without unsubscribing.
Offer Value With Webinars
Webinars are commonly used for lead acquisition, but they can also deliver considerable value to existing customers. Providing the information your audience wants in a live and engaging format can help you build trust, inspire loyalty, and increase retention. You can also use webinars to introduce new features, improve how users interact with your software, and more.
1) Go In-Depth, Show Success
Webinars are a popular lead acquisition tool, but they’re excellent in your customer retention strategy as well. Webinars are great for building value with in-depth, relevant, and relatable content. They function as an opportunity to dive into a specific topic, bring on industry experts, and showcase your successful case studies.
For example, you can offer a webinar on a topic your audience is interested in, then bring on a customer to share their story and how they achieved success using your product. This strategy provides a case study in an interactive way, and enables current and potential customers to ask questions.
The goal should be to help customers get the most out of your SaaS while delivering new value to them. Leveraging guest speakers, interviewing successful users, and offering solutions to commonly asked problems are easy ways to meet these needs.
2) Tie Webinars Into Other Campaigns
Webinars can add value to your social media and email campaigns by allowing you to offer an interesting event and an additional opportunity for your audience to learn.
For example, you can acquire new leads on social media, get them to sign up for your newsletter, then share a new product release webinar on your email newsletter and convert that lead through the webinar. This is just one example of how these three channels can work together to convert, upsell, and retain.
Integrating a webinar into email newsletters and social media marketing also allows you to gauge your audience on those channels, because it shows how many people receiving your newsletter are fully interested in (and have the time for) more in-depth content.
Wrapping It Up
Engaging with existing customers is a lot easier than engaging with prospects. Doing so also allows you to build on existing relationships. Strengthening and expanding upon them means your customer stays longer, which reduces churn and increases profit.
About the Author
Rachel Andrea Go is a content strategist and inbound marketer on the Demio content team. Demio is a no-download webinar platform that provides a seamless experience and full marketing suite to generate more leads and engagement from your events. With easy branding features and browser-based technology, Demio provides everything you need to grow your business with webinars.
