While prominent studies show that the key focus area for businesses should be building brand loyalties and focusing on customer retention, most businesses are still running around in circles- trying to peak the interests of potential buyers and acquire new customers.

According to McKinsey, 55% of marketing budgets are focused on acquiring new customers, while only 12% go for customer retention.

While 'The Chase' continues to be the central theme, businesses need to cut the chase and focus on what really matters - retaining existing customers. 80% of your future profits will come from just 20% of your existing customers, states Gartner. At this point, we need no mathematicians to churn numbers and infer that customer engagement & loyalty drives way more profits for brands than new customer acquisition. Not saying that customer acquisition is not important.

In the race of acquiring more and more customers, most digital-first businesses underestimate the power of customer communications for retaining existing customers. A robust digital communications strategy not only ensures a seamless customer onboarding, but also improves customer experience, thereby, increasing customer retention.

A successful digital communications strategy is driven by 3 core principles:

1) Sending relevant contextual communications in accordance with the buyer’s journey
2) Interacting with the customers at the right time
3) Delivering personalized omni-channel customer experience

In this blog, we will delve deep to understand how an effective CCM strategy can maximize your customer retention rate.

1) Improves Customer Experience

As per a Forrester research, 'the customers of today are far less loyal than ever before. They're more inclined to shift spend, based on a single poor experience or to experiment with a new service.'

The brilliance of your product or service does not guarantee customer loyalty, the magic potion for driving greater customer retention is delivering exceptional customer experiences throughout their journey. An effective CCM strategy can help your brand drive personalized communication across all customer touchpoints, for delivering an immersive customer experience.

A CCM platform provides the brand marketers a 360-degree view of the customer communications and empowers them to efficiently manage and customize them in accordance with the needs of the customer. Leading CCM platforms make it easy to modify documents, offer interactivity and provide customer-centric data for developing a targeted communication strategy.

2) Enhances Customer Engagement

Most brand leaders are under the impression that if their customer service teams are aligned, customer experience would be well taken care of-which is not the case. Leading brands focus on developing a comprehensive customer communication model which encompasses the entire consumer journey right from the customer’s interest in the product to purchase and after sales service.

According to a research by Gartner, 'The best service organizations capitalize on interactions that impact loyalty through value enhancement. They not only resolve customer issues, but they also make sure customers leave an interaction more confident in their purchase decision and better able to maximize the value of their product or service.'

A digital communications platform empowers the brand marketers with a holistic view of all the outgoing communications to avoid any duplication of content/communication-which often leads to a poor customer experience. Delivering customer communications that reflect the brand beliefs and ethos, across all outbound communications and channels.

3) Helps drive Contextual Communications

Most leading brands have different departments that look after different aspects of outbound customer communications - while some departments look after digital channels, the others focus on email, app or offline marketing. As history bears witness, most departments work in silos and focus on their area of functionality, which leads to the delivery of a wide range of communications across channels.

A CCM platform helps brands centralize their communications and efficiently manage the different data, content and documents, allowing the different departments to co-exist harmoniously and work collaboratively. By aligning communications, allocating distribution channels and time, brands can leverage CCM platforms to drive contextual, connected, and timely outbound communications.

Thoughts to Ponder Upon

With the pandemic-led remote working and constricted mobility across the world - delivering relevant customer communications at the right time across all touchpoints has become a pre-requisite for business success. Gone are the days when the digital communications strategy was product-focused, with modern digital platforms, brands can easily leverage state-of-the-art technology to drive personalized communications for every unique customer.

Espire’s digital communications services are helping brands deploy the latest interactive and cloud-based services to reimagine their communication strategy & foster higher engagements with long-term customer relationships.

Explore our digital customer communications offerings > HERE!

Reach out to us at marketing@espire.com for your queries.