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Welcome back!

We hope everyone had an awesome weekend! Today, we’re exploring the retention stage of the evergreen marketing funnel. You’ve put all that work into capturing potential buyers’ attention, holding onto leads across the customer journey, and triggering a conversion. Now, it’s time to set up your funnel to keep customers coming back for more, which is a whole lot more cost-effective than acquiring new ones.

Let’s dive in! 🏃‍♂️🚀

News

Tools + Productivity

Strategy

At your service

First and foremost, you have to give customers a reason to stay when there are endless other options out there— and top-notch customer service is one of the most important things you can implement to do just that.

Part of excellent customer service means being an active listener— aka soliciting customer feedback and actually implementing it.

Spotahome, an online platform for sourcing rentals in various cities, leveraged customer data from surveys and session replay (capturing interactions like mouse movements, clicks, scrolls, and keyboard inputs) to understand user behavior and preferences.

A compilation of feedback responses was passed along to the engineering and product teams involved to make direct improvements based on this input.

Sentiment analysis tools help you take it one step further by automatically tagging survey text answers as positive, neutral, or negative to clearly identify trends in happiness or frustration levels across different areas so that these pain points can be targeted.

These days, everyone’s using conversational AI platforms to handle customer inquiries efficiently— not just to respond, but also to predict customer queries. Of course, in cases where the user is asking more complicated questions needing human intervention, they should be seamlessly guided to a real customer support manager.

Otherwise, customer support should be available through multiple channels— meet customers where they are whether it’s phone, email, social media, SMS, or messaging apps.

Four Seasons guests can use SMS, WhatsApp, or chat through the mobile app for all their needs, whether it’s room service, restaurant recs, reservations, or even a private jet order:

A long-term relationship

To build a long-term relationship, keep the conversation going with your customers— through newsletters, social media, and more personalizable channels like email.

There are the obvious post-purchase communications like the thank you email, the shipping notifications, and delivery reminders.

But also don’t forget to trigger a bit of FOMO by giving customers a sneak peek of the rewards program they would be missing out on:

Or, use one channel of communication to onboard customers onto another channel, like a newsletter (with a reward to motivate):

Finally, use post-purchase communication to get easy and quick feedback, ideally embedded within some other reward or discount:

Personalization is equally important in the retention phase— content used in the continuous engagement phase still has to be relevant and resonate with individual preferences.

This applies when you’re trying to reel a customer back in after they’ve canceled a purchase, a communication you can enhance by sending personalized messages based on a customer’s specific reasons for cancellation.

Spotify has mastered the art of personalization to keep its users locked in and away from opposition like apple music, amazon music, and others. That’s because they use predictive analytics to recommend new hits you’ll likely love, continuously adapting to users’ evolving listening habits.

Loyalty x3

Speaking of loyalty, loyalty programs are an easy way to automate the back end of your marketing funnel.

57% of customers spend more on brands to which they are loyal, and less than 8% of customers say rewards aren’t at all important to their purchasing decisions.

That’s why an exciting and customer-centric rewards program isn’t just a nice-to-have— it’s a must. You’re probably familiar with rewards programs at your favorite food and drink spots— everyone loves the feeling of getting a FREE chipotle burrito (so much that you forget the $100 spent to get there).

Other brands have similar programs for loyal customers— Sephora’s Beauty Insider rewards program has quite an extensive scheme:

Notice on the bottom Sephora levels things up by offering not just samples and material gifts, but experiences as reward options. Concealer runs out, but experiences stick with you forever.

Along the same lines, make sure you’re making use of a customer referral program to incentivize happy customers to multiply your brand exposure. The reward can be simply and straightforward, like a discount, or you may choose something more exciting that’s tailored to your customer preferences.

Looking Ahead

The core concepts in an evergreen marketing funnel are no different than in any other funnel, but the key difference is eliminating the need for constant re-engagement campaigns to maintain loyalty over a long period. This is achieved with ongoing interaction through consistent value delivery, data-driven personalization, and most of all, using automation tools.

If you’re interested in automating your marketing processes to grow faster, click here to learn more about how Loopgenius can help you.

Stay tuned for next week, when we’ll start a new marketing theme for December!

Evergreen Marketing Funnel

Week 1: Attraction
Week 2: Engagement
Week 3: Conversion
Week 4: Retention (this week!)

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