Breaking Down the 5 Sections of a Successful Digital Marketing Funnel. Part 4 of 5 – Loyalty
Understanding the client journey through the five sections of a successful marketing funnel can provide great insight in creating relevant content tailored for step of their decision making process. In part four, we will discuss the Loyalty section. Tune in.
Breaking Down the 5 Sections of the Digital Marketing Funnel (part 4 of 5)
Hello. Good afternoon, Michael Winn, Chief Digital Officer of Digital Opps a division of RB Oppenheim Associates. Thank you guys for joining me again on today’s virtual lunch-and-learn where we talk about digital tips and strategies to grow your business. So today is part four in a series of five, where we talked about breaking down the five sections of a digital marketing funnel. So the thing that we want to talk about here is loyalty. If you do a Google search for marketing funnel, many of the funnels that you’re going to see that we talked about at the end of part three which we talked about yesterday, which was conversion. So obviously in a marketing funnel, you want people to take that conversion step and become a client but I think a lot of marketing funnels fall short and do not include the last two. The first one that we’re going to talk about today is the loyalty section and then the last one being advocacy so we’ll talk about that tomorrow.
But today we’re going to talk about loyalty and why it’s so important. To make sure that you really understand the value of this segment of the funnel because the statistics and the data is out there. It suggests that it costs much less to retain and attract existing clients to decide to purchase again than it does to acquire new customers or to acquire new clients who’ve never been a client of yours or have never heard of your company. So the loyalty section of the digital marketing funnel is really important. So let’s dive in and talk about loyalty.
Relationship Standpoint
I think we can break these sort of contents and strategies into two segments and we’ll talk about it first from a relationship standpoint and then secondly from a retention standpoint. So we talk about relationship building with existing clients who’ve gone through the phases of awareness, consideration, conversion, and now they’re into loyalty. What type of action do we feel they will find the most value from and really think of themselves as a loyal customer?
One: Have a FAQ Section
So I think right off the bat, providing a strong FAQ section on your website is incredibly valuable. I think that a lot of companies under utilize the frequently asked questions section or FAQ. Especially in light of what’s going to happen with voice search, having that type of content available on your website is going to be really valuable because as we continue to use voice search on our mobile devices right as we speak into, Siri, Google or Amazon, or whatever that voice device is many of our queries will be in a question format. So having a FAQ section really provides great information for your customers to find the kind of information that they’re looking for is a great tool.
Two: Have a Support Forum
Number two would be to have your own forum or support. Now many of these sort of ideas are things that you can do, especially if your website is built on WordPress. There are many plugins in and sort of add-on free tools that can expand the functionality of your website. So having your own forum that’s behind or inside of the wall of your digital business is a great tool for you to be able to provide exclusive access to content it’s only available to your customers. Providing a forum on, whether you do it in a in a community to community, in other words let clients answer questions of clients, and really cultivate the community of folks that leverage and use your products or services great. You could also have a forum section that’s more support related. So just as you would have support staff answering the phones, you could have support staff answering questions inside of that forum. Within the forum mechanism, you can sort of gamify that particular segment or functionality of your website and again, you can go to buddypress, there’s lots of different memberships, and there’s several different community building components for WordPress that are extremely popular well tested and can provide great value to your clients.
Three: Use Email Marketing
Number three would be to obviously utilize your email marketing platform. But in this effort you want to segment out the group that are already consumers and provide success stories. People who said “hey, this is how I found the greatest benefit of using this product or service” and really have that segmented out to the different outcomes that are available when people properly use your product or service that you’re offering. So don’t forget email marketing. Again, we talked about the relationship side of loyalty.
Retention Standpoint
Let’s talk about the retention side of loyalty. So keeping a customer for life is really hard competition is extremely competitive every company is looking to do it better, faster, and stronger.
Loyalty Offers
A couple of things I want to talk about are obviously loyalty offers for retention, in other words provide that discount or provide that special offering that’s only available to existing consumers or customers that have already purchased from you.
Customer Appreciation Day
So having those loyalty offers and the other thing is to now while this is not necessarily a digital tactic but having a customer appreciation day or month or week. Where again you kind of segment out part of what you’re doing in terms of relationship and marketing strategy in creating this environment or this event, that is a customer appreciation opportunity. Again, it could be through an offer, it could be through providing them with unlimited services, or really just think about ways to again provide them value.
VIP Service
Number three would be to develop a specific VIP service. Give them direct access to the top people in your organization during a limited window if you do it quarterly or maybe you do it monthly but really give them a VIP status. You can create a VIP criteria to say okay you’ve been a customer for three years, five years or seven years and create the different components of what that VIP service looks like.
So those are really the two segments, if we were to break down into incremental steps. How do we really create an environment of loyalty so that as the consumer passes through that customer journey through the digital marketing funnel they experience what it means to build relationships with your brand through an enhanced FAQ or through a members-only customer only forum. Specifically email content that is success stories of other customers that you’ve had. Then in the retention stage, we talked about creating loyalty offers customer appreciation days and VIP services.
When we really look at this funnel, it’s almost a funnel that’s become full circle because ultimately, what we want to do is we want that feeling of loyalty to really transcend or organically grow into a sense of feeling like they are a brand to advocate. That’s the fifth and final part of the series that we’ll talk about tomorrow and how we can really create brand advocates as the ultimate return on investment for a successful digital marketing funnel. Guys, thank you so much for your time today. My name is Michael Winn, I am the Chief Digital Officer of Digital Opps, a division of RB Oppenheim Associates. Thanks for joining today, we’ll catch you guys tomorrow!