Review – 3
Exchange4Media: “Retention marketing leverages the foundation of trust and satisfaction built with current customers. By focusing on existing relationships, brands optimise their marketing efforts, tailoring their messages and offers to those who are already familiar with and fond of their brand. According to marketers, this approach is not just cost-effective but also deeply impactful, as satisfied customers often turn into brand advocates, furthering the reach and credibility of the brand organically…The buzz around retention marketing isn’t solely due to the rising costs of customer acquisition—there’s more to its appeal. Beyond just a reactive measure to economic pressures, retention marketing represents a proactive strategy with substantial rewards. As brands are struggling with the high stakes of acquiring new customers, the potential of retention marketing to generate higher returns with lower investment is becoming increasingly evident.”
Deepak Singh writes on LinkedIn that Retention is widely regarded as the hardest metric to move for product managers. To master retention, it’s crucial to go beyond theoretical understanding and examine in-depth case studies. His suggestions: Duolingo successfully utilized leaderboards, streaks, and notifications to boost retention, Google Play and Pinduoduo leveraged gaming and gamification, Amazon Prime’s loyalty program has had great success, and Spotify’s focus on playlists significantly improved retention and monetisation.
From one of my essays (Extreme Retention = Profit-centric Marketing) a few years ago: “B2C/D2C Businesses are hurting with rising CAC, increasing discounts, attention recession and data poverty. All these are driving them to keep spending increasingly larger parts of their marketing budgets on adtech (new acquisition). Half of the money being spent on adtech is being wasted (“AdWaste”) because of reacquisition (of inactive customers) and wrong acquisition (of customers who churn quickly). The focus on adtech has resulted in many profit killers. These spends and the focus on growth-at-all-costs is hurting profitability. What businesses need is a framework for profit-centric marketing, with profit creators. This can only come from existing customers – combining retention, repetition, referrals, reactivation (as opposed to reacquisition) and replenishment (targeted new acquisition). This 5R focus needs the 4P framework: pipes, partitioning, properties, and prospecting…Existing martech platforms tend to be focused more on features than on outcomes. They do not factor in the power law of marketing: 20% customers generate 60% of revenue and deliver 200% of profits. What marketers need to do is to therefore go beyond retention (of all) to extreme retention (of few)…In short: better experiences for better customers.”
From another of my essays (Hotline: The Crux of the Brand-Customer Relationship): “Building the hotline with existing customers is the only way brands can get their attention and solve for data. It is one of two ways to bring customers back to the properties (app and website) – the second method being big spends on branding. The hotline is the trick marketers have missed in the two other obsessions – new customer acquisition and adding bells and whistles to the app and website.”
