It takes greater than coupon clippings and reward factors to win over in the present day’s shoppers — they’re searching for worth that goes past financial incentive. Companies that know find out how to have interaction their prospects and supply unconditional worth would be the ones that foster a long-term relationship with their group.
This makes the pairing of content material advertising and buyer retention a strong match that may’t be ignored.
The expansion group I lead at Outbrain, the world’s largest content material discovery platform, gives a real-life case research for content material and retention coming collectively to supply outcomes.
I’d wish to share 5 particular content-based buyer retention ways we’re using to develop our buyer base and income at Outbrain – ways you possibly can steal in your personal buyer retention technique.
1. Get new prospects skilled up quick with academic emails
The earlier you educate prospects about utilizing your product, the sooner they will derive worth from you and turn into sticky.
Based on a survey conducted by SaaS metrics company Preact, 23% of shoppers churn as a consequence of poor onboarding. Particularly when you’ve got a reasonably advanced service, frontloading the supply of academic content material and studying from how new signups work together with this content material is important.
We’ve definitely seen a direct correlation between lowering our churn and enhancing our onboarding course of. To assist our prospects get acquainted with our platform and perceive how our system works, we created a bootcamp coaching collection.
As quickly as a buyer’s first marketing campaign is launched, an automated e-mail marketing campaign (which we name our Brainiac Bootcamp) is triggered for them. It sends 4 day by day emails that stroll the shopper by means of marketing campaign optimization ideas, our dashboard and different assets. Right here’s a screenshot of the primary of 4 emails:
The primary of 4 emails in our automated e-mail coaching collection.
After we first launched our Bootcamp collection, we did a take a look at and management experiment by sending 90% of first-time prospects the e-mail program and preserving a ten% management group. For patrons who acquired the bootcamp emails, we noticed a direct correlation between content material and retention.
Professional tip: In the event you’re launching a brand new e-mail marketing campaign, exclude 10% of recipients as a management group so you possibly can say with confidence that the shopper’s actions have been a results of the marketing campaign, they usually wouldn’t have taken the identical actions even when they hadn’t acquired the emails.
We dug even deeper by being strategic about which options required extra training than others.
For instance, we knew from analyzing the general habits of our prospects that the extra headlines they’re testing per particular person piece of content material, the higher probability they’ve of receiving a better click-through fee (CTR) when their content material is advisable in our writer community.
This graph reveals the drastic improve in CTR when a marketing campaign has higher than 5, 10 and 15 headlines on rotation.
Understanding this, we made positive our bootcamp content material helped prospects perceive the significance of testing extra headlines. Consequently, these prospects acquired larger click-through charges – and stayed lively 1.5x longer than individuals who didn’t obtain the bootcamp emails.
Takeaway in your campaigns:
Make certain your onboarding course of is laser-focused on educating customers on the significance of sure product behaviors you recognize will outcome of their success.
By means of testing, decide which options result in a better retention fee – after which be sure you frontload that training. If prospects do effectively, they’re extra prone to stick round longer. It’s mutually useful.
2. Use dwell webinars to step up buyer coaching
Webinars are sometimes mentioned as an acquisition tactic, however they’re additionally a good way of partaking extra personally with prospects at scale. Nothing beats actual face-time when explaining a posh product.
We run bi-monthly webinars carried out by our Account Strategists. The content material has advanced over time, and it’s at all times pushed by suggestions from our prospects, in addition to questions fielded by our Buyer Help group.
A touchdown web page for one among our bi-weekly dwell webinars.
We put a number of time into adapting the content material we current in these webinars, but in addition carefully measure the webinars’ impression on our backside line.
Our Enterprise Intelligence group constructed a report to check prospects’ marketing campaign efficiency every week earlier than and every week after they attend the webinar. We additionally take a look at their metrics two weeks and a month later to see in the event that they’re persevering with to optimize their efficiency primarily based on webinar learnings.
On common, we’ve seen a 50% improve in common spend and 38% improve in cost-per-click (CPC) on account of these webinars.
Chances are you’ll be considering that improve in spend and CPC doesn’t essentially equal success for our prospects, who’re optimizing for leads and pages per go to. However because of the aggressive nature of our content material market, a marketing campaign that begins with a better CPC has a a lot better probability of receiving any site visitors in any respect.
It’s one other win-win situation – if we are able to successfully clarify this to prospects on a webinar, they’re extra prone to see outcomes from their campaigns they usually’re extra prone to stick round.
3. All the time be including content material to your assist middle
Not almost sufficient content material entrepreneurs are targeted on making their assist middle and FAQs as helpful as doable – however assist facilities needs to be a significant a part of the shopper journey.
At Outbrain, we’ve structured our Help Center to replicate our prospects’ wants from the pre-signup stage to first-time marketing campaign creation to extra superior optimizations and reporting.
Identical to webinars and bootcamp emails, assist facilities needs to be works in progress that you just’re continuously striving to enhance. You should use a mix of sources to assist decide what content material must be developed, refined or up to date. These might embody:
- New product developments that require extra coaching and FAQs: Product releases are thrilling, however the platform and its options are solely pretty much as good as your capability to speak them to your prospects. It’s vital to coach prospects on find out how to get essentially the most out of recent options — create new coaching content material and FAQs to information them!
- Generally requested questions despatched to your Buyer Help group: In case your buyer assist group notices a development in a specific matter of enquiry, that’s nice fodder for brand spanking new Assist Middle content material.
- Google Analytics experiences for the highest Assist Middle search phrases, search refinements made by prospects and mostly visited FAQs: For instance, take a look on the chart under which reveals our mostly searched phrases from 2014 and the proportion of search refinements customers have been making when looking for related content material.
Clients trying to find FAQs on cancelling accounts or languages have been having to additional refine their phrases to seek out the content material they have been after, whereas prospects searching for FAQs on UTMs, cellular, monitoring or including content material have been discovering what they wanted instantly.
We used this report back to create extra related and apparent FAQs to handle these trickier searches and noticed an enchancment in search refinements and a discount in questions on these matters despatched to Buyer Help.
All of those measures assist prospects really feel supported the complete means by means of their journey, and permit them to raised perceive your product and derive extra worth. And that retains prospects coming again for extra.
4. Talk product enhancements and new options with nice content material
Collaboration between content material and product advertising is crucial to bringing new options to prospects in essentially the most environment friendly means. The extra academic content material created round every launch, the extra prospects will proceed to interact with and supply suggestions on the brand new characteristic.
For us, e-mail and our weblog are our two best channels for sharing product updates with our prospects. Our e-mail updates are designed to alert prospects to the most recent developments, after which we drive them to the weblog to study extra.
After we created the power for patrons to add content material in bulk and take a look at a number of headlines and pictures per URL, we despatched out an e-mail asserting the characteristic:
The objective of including this characteristic was to make it simpler so as to add extra headlines; a course of that had been handbook and really time consuming.
By monitoring the characteristic as an occasion in Kissmetrics, we have been in a position to see that the common variety of headlines and pictures per content material elevated considerably after our blog post and e-mail explaining the brand new characteristic.
The height on this Kissmetrics graph reveals how utilization elevated after we knowledgeable our viewers of the brand new characteristic.
The idea right here is fairly simple: the extra prospects are conscious of recent instruments and options, the extra seemingly they’re to make use of them.
5. Use lifecycle e-mail advertising to phase prospects
Electronic mail campaigns are nonetheless the bread and butter of many a retention marketer’s efforts. With in the present day’s overloaded inbox, personalization of the content material primarily based on particular person product utilization information is now extra vital than ever.
That is the place lifecycle e-mail advertising is available in: reaching your prospects at every stage of their journey with you and tailoring related content material to their wants and expertise at every stage.
For lifecycle e-mail advertising to our prospects, we use a buyer retention automation platform known as Optimove to measure the impression of each marketing campaign on income and buyer lifetime worth throughout 5 main buyer segments:
- New prospects
- Non-spending prospects
- Engaged prospects
- Churned prospects
- Reactivated prospects
Our seasonal efficiency e-mail marketing campaign is a superb instance of this. Traditionally, we’ve seen that the tip of every quarter is a aggressive time on the Outbrain community; extra consumers and better cost-per-click. It’s particularly vital to talk that to prospects in order that they perceive find out how to optimize their campaigns accordingly.
After we ran an academic e-mail marketing campaign for our most lively buyer phase in regards to the significance of including extra headlines to extend your click-through fee (CTR), we noticed a 10% improve within the common variety of headlines per content material marketing campaign amongst those that acquired the e-mail – together with an elevated CTR in essentially the most lively buyer phase.
Put your content material to work
In the event you plan to prioritize buyer retention as a serious driver of progress and income for your small business, investing in content material will probably be important to your success.
Right here’s a fast recap of the 5 methods content material underpins our total buyer retention technique:
- Get new prospects skilled up quick with academic emails
- Use dwell webinars to step up buyer coaching
- All the time be including content material to your assist middle primarily based on buyer suggestions and person habits
- Talk product enhancements and new options with nice content material
- Use lifecycle e-mail advertising to phase prospects
Over to you — how are you utilizing content material advertising to drive your buyer retention technique?