Customer Centric Marketing Strategies – How to Plan An Ideal One

Customer centric and customer focused although sound similar to each other but both these terms carry a major difference in their meanings. Customer focused approach means delivering consistently delivering satisfying and great experience to the customers taking care of their time as well as budget. On the other hand, customer centricity means analyzing the lifetime value of your treasured patrons and concentrating on marketing efforts for driving profit to a new level of success. In this techno savvy generation, your digital patrons might not get easily satisfied with your services as they want to have a significant and impressing experience with your products or services right from the beginning.

Exploring the meaning of customer centricity in deeper will give you a clear understanding of today’s customer centric strategies, which will help in you in enhancing the profit level of your business. If you want to explore the significance of customer centric marketing strategy in this technological world, you must be aware with its essential principles, which are listed as follows:

• Use the customer database efficiently to get better understanding of the varied requirements of today’s digital customers, which will eventually help you in segmenting your customer base judiciously.
• Use techniques for identifying your continuing customers.
• Use focused attitude on your products and services for your long term and best customers.
• Use the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) for segmenting your customers.

Perception of customer’ demands

Customer centricity can only be achieved if you are well aware of the demands of today’s digital customers since they do not need instant satisfaction from your services but an engaging experience will surely bound them to rely on your brand value. The obligatory demands of today’s patrons include the following points:

• Accessibility for multiple platforms
• Search outcomes in adherence with their purposes
• Structured and useful information
• Varied contact means encompassing the social media platform
• Comprehendible yet straightforward calls to action without any confusion

If you check on today’s scenario, you will find that both online completion as well as offline competition is increasing at a faster pace than your expectations and the reason behind this is the over-crowded marketplace where all retailers are struggling to establish their brand values among their esteemed patron. In the process of establishing themselves apart from their rivals, they are also struggling to challenge e-commerce tycoons like Amazon along with “big box” moguls like Target and Walmart. If you are not able to withstand the pressure of modern marketing strategies that relies heavily on social media marketing strategies and content marketing strategies, you will definitely drive out your customers to your competitors.

Confronts of contemporary customer-centric approach

Creating a database of long-term customers by delivering them flattering customer experience is not an easy task as no two customer voyages are same. In the process of developing customer relationship, you might have to go through varied communication channels and ways and there are several points, which might generate hurdles in your customer dealing process. For this reason, it is very important for marketers of today’s competing marketing environment to deeply analyze and comprehend the customer expectations to cater their speckled needs. For delivering seamless experience to the customers, you must evaluate the context to know how they are engaging with your products and services and then use this information wisely to drive relevance in your business’ profit. It clearly means that you must prepare a database of customers by pulling the data from different sources and then perform filtration of the data to form a database of great customers.

Understanding Customer Heterogeneity

Before exploring the customer centric marketing strategies for achieving winning milestones for your business, the understanding of different customer types is very essential. Breaking your customers into groups will help you in creating an imperative client database. Customers are generally categorized in three groups, which are listed as:

Meh Customers are those who are not committed towards your brand and can opt for another if they found something less expensive or better. Therefore, these customers are very high attrition value but their lifetime value is very low and hence, it is not wise to retain those customers as they are more expensive than they worth.

Good Customers are those who have a low attrition rate and high lifetime value as they like your brand and can go for long-term relationship just like great customers with right customer centric strategies.

Great customers are also known as loyal customers and they are those who hold a strong believe in your offered range of products and services. They can only leave if they are given a better incentive to do so. These customers have very low attrition rate and they have significantly higher lifetime value and they worth for your business helping in taking your revenues to new accomplishment point.

Often it seems to be a one dollar question but it always proves beneficial for generating high revenues for any business process.  The question is that among customer acquisition, customer development and customer retention, which one will you choose if you have left with only one dollar in your pocket?

If you want to know the best answer to this question, let us explore what these terms mean and what role these terms will play in enhancing the profit level.

Customer acquisition is the process of searching new and great customers and sustaining those customers for long term. Every dollar spent in searching these customers worth more than your expectations since they directly influence the revenue of your business. The more customers will you acquire, the larger the database of great customers will be created thus augmenting the outcomes of your business.

Customer development simply means getting more profits from your present customers, which is not an easy feat.

Customer retention is the process of keeping Meh customers, who do not worth more for your business. Hence, among all the above mentioned terms, customer acquisition is best policy of modern customer centric marketing process as it helps in acquiring more great customers for your business, which is necessary for your success in today’s jammed marketplace.

Customer-centric marketing strategies for catering customers’ demands

In current scenario where contention has become very tough in this internet driven world, marketers are using a perfect blend of tools such as search engines, social networks, online communities, customer generated reviews and blogs, personalization and broadcast media for improving customer experience and creating engagement for their brand value. Customer centric approach begins with developing customer rapport amidst the competitors and it ends up with an enduring relationship. The formula for a successful marketing approach requires the understanding of the differences between different marketing strategies, application of the right strategy towards the target audience along with a multi-layer approach for using all delivery techniques at the right time.

Retailers or marketers can easily set up their brand value by following the accurate customer centric strategies that will add value in their customer experience.

Establish one-to-one conversations

During past days, marketers have based their strategies on customer segmenting approach that requires moving from marketing to segments and vice versa for each individual customer. A latest research has suggested that 75 percent of total customers are interested in establishing one-to-one communication, which is tailored according to their past experiences. Personalizing the communication for each customer’s buying process will help in rewarding the marketers with more sales leads and better customer engagement. The best way is to use the online personalization technique that includes emails, website recommendations and banner displays as they have a greater impact on customer buying habits. The studies conducted on these methods have shown that more than half customers are agreed to receive website recommendations according to their browsing history.

Engagement through multiple channels

Consistent messaging through multiple platforms is the best way to ensure the success of customer centric strategies. Researches have shown that more than 40 percent of customers prefer to choose or buy products from the retailers, who offer them with multiple channel tailored shopping experience. The multi channel technique helps the marketers to engage their valued customers across all essential touch points, whenever the customer will interact with the media. The analysis report of a recent research has shown that the retailers who have implemented the multiple channels marketing strategy in their business processes have received significant growth in their purchase frequency along with a 50 percent improvement in their order value and 25 percent increment in the adaptation of shopping cart abandoners.

Alignment with the customer lifecycle

Analyzing the customer lifecycle carefully helps the retailers in broadening the prospect of their loyal customers, which ultimately strengthens their customer relationship by accomplishing maximum customer relationship. By thinking wisely across the customer buying process, retailers can send tailored messages to their customers that are customized to their stage in purchasing process. If you efficiently conclude who your prospects are and efficiently engage those prospects to become your loyal customers, you can easily generate leads, change those prospects into trustworthy buyers and cultivate your present customers to impel the repeat purchase. Research has proven that the “readiness” of any buyer depends on the search of the right product at the right price. Therefore, by correctly understanding the lifecycle of a customer, retailers can send personalized messages to their customers that cater their exact requirements and also motivates them to purchase the product when they are planning to do so.

Use customer data for your advantage

You can create a profitable customer centric strategy only if you are aware about where, when and how you can collect instantly actionable teachings about your customers from your past customer dealing experiences. You can create a separate database for your good and great customers so that you can send them customized offers for motivating them to plan their future buying from you. For creating the database, you are also required to make sure that the analytics methodology used by you is capable of providing the necessary information. Out of all the methodologies, the most commonly used one is the Recency-Frequency-Monetary (RFM), which gives the accurate figure of the loyal customers with whom you can raise your business’ revenue considerably.

Personalization and customization

For retailers, it is very easy to collect the customer data through various sources including in-store sign ups, email registrations, website purchases, notifications and queries send over emails. As a retailer, it is very necessary for you also to arrange this data in particular order for individually tailoring the buying experience of every single customer. Personalization simply means to refer a customer by his or her name like “Dear Jonathan” and it helps appreciably for attention, foundation and cosmetics for customization.

Customization has much more value than personalization and segment specific messaging technique is the common form of customization however, neither of personalization and customization advances the effectiveness and relevance of perfectly individualized communications where the customers are selected according to their behaviors and their individual purchase propensities.

Overall, customer centric marketing relies on the customer level analytics and it could be slightly less obvious but it is considered as an absolute requirement. Being a retailer, you might develop customer centric messages without requiring the customer level analytics but you cannot create customer centric offers. As customers appreciate and acknowledge customer centric marketing but applying these strategies for deepening engagement, augmenting buyers’ readiness and enhancing both life time value and sales value is compulsory for furthering the success level of modern marketing techniques. The strategies discussed in this articles along with the meaning and challenges of customer centric marketing will surely help the marketers and retailers to meet confronts current overcrowded marketplace where competition is very tough to sustain. The comprehensive knowledge about the prospects and customers will facilitate the retailers in optimizing their strategies to change them into potential revenues of their business.