The 5 Core Attributes of a Killer Customer Marketing Strategy

Customer loyalty doesn't happen by accident. It's an outcome of planning, strategizing, and executing a well-crafted customer marketing strategy that relies on clear goals and KPIs.

The key to any great customer marketing strategy is the ability to stay customer-centric and focused on what your customers want and how they want to get it.

In order to achieve that, there are five core attributes of a killer customer marketing strategy that you need to develop and deploy, including…

1: CX-first approach to customer acquisition

With the bulk of your customer acquisition coming from repeat customers, a focus on creating a satisfying customer experience from the very beginning is a must. When used in combination with effective marketing automation, customer experience software can play a significant role in amplifying your efforts.

According to the latest edition of the Customer Experience Impact Report from Temkin Group, the most effective customer experience strategies are those that focus on giving customers what they want at each point of interaction.

That means timely and relevant communication, clarity on expectations, and product/service quality. The report also revealed that the majority (66 percent) of respondents said they were likely to stop doing business with a company that had a bad customer experience.

2: Person-centric data analysis

Data plays a huge role in customer marketing strategies — its importance can be measured in direct customer impacts.

It's crucial for marketers to leverage big data and small data to find correlations and look for opportunities to engage customers. In addition, look for commonalities among your most successful customers and use this knowledge to create more targeted offers.

It's important to invest in customer analytics, data quality, and business intelligence tools, and to establish a single customer view that will help you see patterns in behavior and purchasing power.

From there, you can segment customers and identify the right offer and the right touchpoints. It's also vital to prioritize mobile customer data collection and mobile channel monitoring.

3: Efficient budgeting and KPI monitoring

Being efficient in the way your budget is used is a crucial aspect of customer marketing. It's crucial to map your customer journey from start to finish and evaluate your customer acquisition cost and lifetime value for each touchpoint.

It's equally important to monitor your key performance indicators (KPIs) so that you can quickly identify opportunities to improve. Metrics such as customer acquisition costs, customer engagement rate, average customer lifetime value, and conversion rate are great for tracking results.

Customer data comes in many forms, so try to find the one that is most relevant to your customer journey and assess whether it's telling you the story you need to hear.

4: Test and optimize

The best strategy is the one that has been proven to work. Only 10 percent of marketing strategies are ever successfully executed. This is mostly because we're more focused on execution than we are on testing and learning from our mistakes.

As a result, we don't know which strategies work until they're put into action, at which point it can often be too late to change course.

So, try out new strategies. Test them. Track the results. If the data shows you that a specific offer doesn't resonate with your audience, don't be afraid to change your approach. At the same time, watch for data that suggests customers want more of something that's working.

Whether it's an offer, a promotional touchpoint, or a segment, be sure to amplify it by promoting it to the right audience, through the right channel.

5: Consumer-centricity across all touchpoints

Finally, a customer marketing strategy must prioritize the customer at every step of the journey. This includes avoiding channel conflict by making sure that whatever touchpoints you employ — online, mobile, email, social media, chat — reflect the same tone, messaging, and visual identity.

Lastly, focus on metrics that are relevant and meaningful to customers. Be careful not to collect data just because you can. It doesn't matter how much information you collect, if it's not actionable for the customer, then it's useless.

The future of customer marketing lies in redefining the role of the marketer to that of the true customer advocate. It's not about quick wins or short-term wins. It's about transforming your customers' experience.

That’s a wrap!

In summary, the 5 points mentioned here are intended to help you define your customer marketing strategy by clearly establishing the role of your customer in everything that you do, from the overall customer journey, right down to touchpoints.

Make sure your customer is at the center of all your marketing activity by including them in the process, and not as an afterthought.