At the forefront of every marketing strategy is acquisition. The motivation behind each marketing campaign is to drive brand awareness in the hopes to generate new business. Of course, part of branding is establishing loyalty between customers and the company. When you can build trust with your customers, they’re more likely to stay and continue buying from your brand. Ultimately, it’s how you avoid churn.
You’ve likely heard of customer churn, which simply means that a business’s users have decided to stop using the product or service. While it’s something that many businesses aim to avoid, it’s inevitable. And a big part of measuring success means that you also have to acknowledge failures. This is true for marketers, too.
In marketing, in order to celebrate the wins you need to be able to learn from the losses. Insert: marketing churn.
What is churn in marketing?
Churn in marketing refers to the rate at which customers stop interacting with a company after a given period of time. This can be in the direct form of paid users canceling, or a more indirect loss of people unsubscribing from a marketing campaign or channel (like email or social media). Either way, there’s a simple way to calculate the marketing churn rate: divide the number of customers you lost during that time period— that month, for example— by the number of customers you had at the start of the month. If you started the month of March with 500 subscribers and ended with 450, you would divide 450 by 500 and your churn would be 10% because you lost 10% of customers in that time period. This is a good way to measure the effectiveness of your email database, social media followers, or even webinar registrations.
Why does it matter for your team?
Marketing churn is important because it directly affects the amount of customers interacting with any given campaign. For example, churn in marketing might mean you’re losing email subscribers or social media followers. While that doesn’t seem detrimental to the overarching health of the business, less people interacting with your brand on a marketing level equates to less customer engagement with the product or service (which means less money). Having those eyeballs on your marketing campaigns, and avoiding churn, can help drive more traffic to your website resulting in more conversions. As such, reducing churn in marketing should be considered when planning all campaigns and future strategies.
How can teams decrease marketing churn rate?
You can’t force people to buy your product, but there are things you can do to help nurture your existing customers through your team’s marketing efforts. Keep these five things in mind to help reduce your marketing churn rate.
Keep your users engaged
The best way to keep your customers active is to keep them engaged. You can do this through your marketing efforts by putting out valuable content that offer solutions to pain points in their workflows, daily tasks, etc. To keep your audience hooked you’ll want strong branding across all marketing collateral. They should be able to recognize your brand regardless of what platform you’re on. This establishes trust, which in turn creates loyalty. If your brand feels trustworthy and provides value to the customer, retention becomes easier to maintain. Make sure all of your marketing content is thoughtful and avoid fluff.
Nail your go to market strategy
Your go to market strategy is how your team plans to market your product or service to new and existing customers. It includes things like voice and tone, brand positioning, market share, and pricing. If you can nail your go to market strategy, and ensure you’re reaching the right people, you’re likely to have less marketing churn. Make sure you know your audience, what problems they’re facing in your industry, and how exactly you want to speak to them. This will set you up in a position for success.
Have a marketing campaign plan
Different from your go to market strategy is your actual marketing campaign plan. This is how you will tell people about your offering. It can include cross-promotion on platforms like email, Google advertisements, social media, blog articles, or public relations. Things like branding, visual impact, content, and cadence can all impact the engagement on your marketing campaigns. You might even include win-back campaigns for dormant users to help reduce your marketing churn.
Using a marketing campaign plan presentation can help get your marketing team aligned on deliverables and expectations, while updating other departments and stakeholders.
Host monthly or quarterly project updates
With any plan, it’s important to host project updates and reviews to assess what worked well and what’s missing the mark. This will help teams determine future opportunities for new strategies, how to address win-back campaigns, or where messaging can be tweaked. Similarly, a project update can also prove to upper-management what is working and what might require more budget to make a real impact. Use these meetings to brainstorm new ideas and celebrate wins.
Connect with your audience
Any marketer will tell you that your campaign needs to be relatable in order to connect with your audience on a deeper level. And while that’s true, it takes more for customers to feel connected to your brand than a simple social media post. It’s important for marketing teams to engage with their audiences through comments, messages, and acknowledging feedback from users on various platforms. In fact, they should consider themselves a secondary customer service team. The simple communication will build trust and loyalty between customers and a brand, ensuring a more long-term relationship.
