You’ve come a long way baby, and, by now, you know this is not your grandmother’s consumer audience anymore. As marketers, we must realize that technology and consumers are changing faster than we can grasp. Product development moves so quickly that it’s probably not even relatable to your older brother. For example, how many millennials do you think can recognize where the first catchphrase on this blog came from?
What hasn’t changed, however, is the need to always put your customers and prospects first. And for that, understanding their communication channels preferences is vital.
So, what do successful marketers do? How do they ensure messages are reaching the right consumers? Or building the type of brand loyalty that makes the competition say, “We should have thought of that?”
While there is no silver bullet, knowing how your customers prefer to interact with you is key to keeping them engaged with your content.
What is the importance of marketing channels?
It wasn’t all that long ago that product messaging was relatively simple: print publications or direct mail. However, we’re not in Kansas anymore…nowadays marketers can choose between:
- SEO
- Social Media
- Mobile
- Direct mail
- Outbound telemarketing
- Digital advertising
- Interactive television
The list is virtually limitless, and it’s making consumers very picky indeed. Today, the balance of power has shifted. Customers are adept, savvy, and have the world at their fingertips, and the importance of choosing adequate marketing channels to reach them has never been more relevant.
How do you determine communication channels?
If you use the marketing channels your existing and prospective customers prefer, they are more likely to purchase from you — provided you are communicating with them consistently and effectively.
The secret sauce? Test, test, and test again.
This is done across multiple channels using a statistically valid sample of your customer/prospect base.
Next, send a sufficient amount of marketing messages across these channels. When designed and executed correctly, they will deliver a pool of responses for analysis. From here, you identify commonalities and correlations and begin building predictive models. Once completed, these models predict which communication channels your customers and prospects prefer the most.
Catering to customers by communicating where, when, how, and what they prefer does not only improve their experience, it helps promote brand loyalty and satisfaction while decreasing churn. Using data to predict buying behaviors enhances the customer experience and drives increased revenue and profits.
You can’t stop there, however. To continue increasing the lifetime value of your customer relationships through predictive modeling, you must continuously test and monitor results. Things change. People change. And all of it affects outcomes. There is a place and point where models will no longer predict accurately. When their performance starts to decline, it’s time to redevelop.
Change is the one constant, and success depends on your ability to recognize and adapt to it.
At AnalyticsIQ, we can help you understand your consumers’ data across a range of business verticals such as Health, B2B, Automotive, and many more. Maximize your communication channels with a team that delivers ethical and transparent data. Get in touch with us by emailing: sales@analytics-iq.com.