Mind Readings: Are You Serving Your Loyal Customers?

What about me? This is a question I ask often. You probably ask this question often too. When it comes to priorities from companies of acquisition versus retention, very often acquisition gets most of the budget. And that has an unfortunate side effect.

We see companies bending over backwards to entice new customers. Well, existing company customers kind of get screwed, right? Outright mistreated. Every time you get an email or an ad or promotion one that says, hey, there's this new great thing, get three months off, whatever. And then there's that asterisk at the bottom, says new customers only, and you're like, what about me?

Why don't I get that deal when I've been a loyal customer? And the company's like, new customers only. And you wonder why customers churn. In fact, I know plenty of people who just make a habit of flipping back and forth between companies as new deals occur. You know, this company has an offer for first three months free, and then at the end of three months, yep, they cancel and they've they switch to the competitor, they go back and forth.

Boy, does that cost companies a lot of money? Point is that really diminish customer satisfaction when people are essentially just shopping around for the best deal because you're not rewarding long-term customers. So if you'd like a secret, secret, um, for long-term business success, if your acquisition budget is greater than your retention budget, flip that around. That's that's it. That's the secret.

Flip around the budget so that you're doing more for the people who are already loyal to you than you are for the people who are just first in the door. What if you had discounts, right? At that increased the longer a customer was a customer. So maybe in year one, they get a 1% discount after the first year of being a customer. After year two, a 2% discount.

After year five, they get a 10% discount to thank them for being a customer that long. And that comes out of your retention budget, which now should be larger than the acquisition budget. And it doesn't necessarily have to be money, although that certainly helps. But there are ways that you can reward people for their loyalty by making stuff just for them. I'll give you a real simple low cost example.

Marketers spend a lot of time creating content, acquisition level content. We you know it's the hero hub help model making all this great content to try and capture search attention, capture social media attention, bring new customers into the funnel. What would it look like if you spent that amount of time creating loyalty content, creating retention content? What does retention content look like? Well, an easy example is anything that any kind of thing that you sell, if it comes with a manual, then it probably needs some recipes.

If you sell, if you sell a blender, the blender comes with recipes. That's retention content because you're telling people here's the thing that you already own. Let me show you how to make it more useful. Here's a phone. Uh, here's you know, here's some new apps that you should try out.

Here's a game you own, here's some new things to explore in the game. And it doesn't, it's not just B2C, it's B2B too. I'll I'll give you a real simple example. Um, I run a Slack group for Trust Insights called Analytics for Marketers. We use it to stay in touch with our loyal community.

There's over 3,000 members there, and it's a place we want people to come and hang out, but there's got to be a reason. There has to be a reward for that loyalty. It can't just be, hey, you know, join the Slack group so I can pitch your stuff. Nobody wants that. So from time to time, we'll publish stuff that you can't get anywhere else as a gift to the people who are in that community who stick with us.

Yesterday I shared a strategic uh marketing plan for podcasting. So if you got a podcast, this gigantic chart uh shows you all the different marketing options that you could do to build a podcast to make it really grow. You're not going to find that online. It's nowhere else except in our Slack group. A couple weeks ago, Google had that big SEO leak.

You know, all these documents that came out about uh the way Google's content warehouse works. I did a bunch of analysis in generative AI and I published the results only in the Slack group, nowhere else online. You won't find it anywhere else. We give that to our community first. Well, actually, that's technically not true.

We give it to our paying clients first. Paying clients get uh first dibs on anything, then our community, then maybe or maybe not the general public. But that's kind of the point. Right? Um, I did a version of my unofficial LinkedIn um marketing guide based on the algorithm.

There was a version that went to clients that was like the best quality version. The same for the Google SEO stuff. There's a version that went to clients that was the best um possible version because it's a hell of a lot easier to keep a client happy than it is to try and acquire a new one. And if you do that, if you keep providing value to that client, then when it comes time for them to renew or to become a customer again or to buy something else from you. It's not a it's not a hard proposition, especially if it's you're in a situation where you have things like renewals and and recurring purchases and things.

If someone's subscribed to your streaming service, what rewards do you give them to stay a subscriber? Is it just new content? Is it is there something that only longtime subscribers can get? Treat your loyalists better than you treat your outsiders. And in the long run, your marketing's gonna flourish, your business is going to flourish.

What things can you make that are so exclusive that people would tell their friends, oh yeah, you got to be a member of this club, but you got to stay a member because you don't get it for you know however long. If you get pushback from your company, that loyalist marketing, retention marketing isn't isn't hitting your acquisition KPIs, then it's time to revamp those KPIs because again, it's a hell of a lot more expensive to acquire a customer than it is to retain one. So whatever you can do with your community. We are in a situation now where audience and attention is the most valuable uh resource other than money that you can have as a marketer in business. There is so much AI intermediation, taking our relationship away from the customer.

We've had this be the situation for the last decade in social media where our reach keeps getting smaller and smaller. We've had it to some degree in search uh as Google consumes more and more clicks, and now with things like AI answers, we're not even getting traffic. We're not even getting awareness because Google is is summarizing a bunch of results into a generic answer that doesn't even surface our brand. So the only way that we get attention from people now is through collaborations with others, partnerships, buying ads, which that's a whole other can of worms, or doing such a good job with retention marketing that loyal customers can't help but spread the word about what a good deal it is to be a customer. Right?

What a good deal it is to be a member of the club. So what are you doing to help people be a member of the club and see so much value that they can't help but tell people, yeah, you've got to join this club. This is the place to be. Give that some thought. Your retention marketing budget should be greater than your acquisition marketing budget because in the long run, that's how you're going to defeat AI doing an end run around you.

That's gonna do it for today's show. Thanks for tuning in. Talk to you next time. If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button, subscribe to my channel if you haven't already, and if you want to know when new videos are available, hit the bell button to be notified as soon as new content is live!