Every business model has its quirks, however not all business models rely on your customers actively choosing to retain a product or service on a regular basis. Here are three tips on executing efficient marketing strategies designed to reduce churn and increase efficiency.
1. Get your data in order
Unlike retail purchases with a set sales price, subscription based revenue can be tricky to calculate due to repeat payment from a customer. The two main metrics for assessing how much your customers are worth to you; Lifetime Value (LTV) which produces the customer’s revenue value across their entire tenure as a subscriber or customer (monthly cost to consumer * subscription tenure), and Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) which assumes all customers are worth the same amount (subscription revenue / number of subscribers). There are plenty of challenges with both of these models, but the key is to keep your data organised so the true value of your consumers can be easily identified. This will be vital if you want to use revenue figures in bidding strategies.
2. Continue the value exchange
Even when budgets are tight, don’t forget to continue to engage your existing customers. Remarketing strategies can tackle the ‘loyalty’ stage of your plan super cost-effectively, bringing customer’s attention to additional features of your product that they may not be using, or help content for any required troubleshooting). One of the simplest ways target a campaign of this kind would be to bid on queries that indicate your customer is looking for a solution they may already have access to. Equally, running search ads directing users to help content should help to decrease discontent and reduce churn. If you have an app for your customers, you could also use push notifications.
3. Don’t waste money accidentally
Despite the above recommendation, not every customer query should be solved by using paid search. My recommendation is always to exclude any and all customer service related keywords if they’re not included within a strategic value exchange campaign. Queries such as ‘customer services number’, ‘address’, ‘account login’; these are all terms which will likely trigger your organic listing, as the content should be pretty well-established and answer the query. There’s no need to run a paid search ad in addition when you know the user will find the required information organically. It’s rarely intentional for a brand to run specific ads for these kinds of queries, yet some larger brands could be paying thousands for traffic through these queries each month, all due to negative keyword oversights.
By Niki Grant, Director of Search