marketing, web development, graphic design blog

Written by: Carl Da-Costa-Greaves

It’s clear that the current climate has driven consumers to re-evaluate how they spend their budgets. With discounting top of mind, customers are being even more cautious with their spending patterns and are still expecting the same quality and levels of service they’ve become accustomed to in the past.

This poses a challenge to us marketers who are working harder than ever at customer relationship management (CRM), embracing highly targeted marketing techniques geared specifically towards the needs of the customer. There’s nothing new with this scenario, compared to previous recessions, and how targeted marketing campaigns helped businesses to survive. However, this time around, the new age marketers MUST embrace the digital landscape in order to compete and retain the fickle client ready to jump ship at the drop of a competitor’s promotional newsletter.

There are several online and offline marketing strategies businesses should be engaging or planning to engage such as; measuring online activities, using data to track buying habits and direct marketing to specifically target and re-engage, reminding the cautious customer why they should remain a customer of yours.

Key steps:

1. Ensure customer retention is part of your strategy
2. Maximise your marketing mix
3. Listen to your customers
4. Re-engage lost customers
5. Become more personalised, relevant and precise
6. Measure, test and adjust your programmes for greater returns

Tags: Customer Relationship Management, customer retention, direct marketing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 at 7:58 am and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.