Page 96 - DMGT308_CUSTOMER_RELATIONSHIP_MANAGEMENT

Unit 4: Customer Retention, Acquisition and Expectation

The goal for the acquisition phase of your program should be deciding which prospects most Notes
closely match your company’s “ideal prospect” profile, but you should also decide which
prospects don’t meet your criteria for acquisition and eliminate them up front. This simple
decision helps focus your marketing and acquisition efforts while saving costs and increasing
your Return on Investment (ROI).
Analyzing your marketing campaigns to determine which are most effective in bringing in new
customers is also important. A CRM system that is able to tag data (assigning each contact to a
specific campaign) lets you analyze the return on the investment you are making in your
marketing effort as well as its overall effectiveness in identifying likely prospects. Another
benefit of tagging is that it lets you look at marketing programs and their related expenses by
leads generated, customers acquired, and potential and realized revenue. This will enable your
company to better tailor campaigns to individual customers and prospects based on response or
effectiveness rates.

While looking at data for individuals can help you better understand their needs and interests,
analyzing data in the aggregate can show which groupings or classes of customers respond best
to your company’s campaigns. This step can help you develop products or services that meet the
needs of specific groups of customers or prospects.
There are a number of other questions you should consider as you develop the acquisition part
of the data strategy. For example,
1. What is our best source of customers?
2. Did they find us on their own initiative or were they referrals?

3. Did they come from external sources such as a direct marketing list or were they from our
own marketing campaigns?
4. When customers first contact us, what information are they interested in?

5. What was the ROI for that campaign?
6. Was it self-service or assisted interaction that eventually leads to a sale?
The absence of certain types of inquiries should also be investigated. For instance, why are there
no Web inquiries from groups of prospects that you know are part of your regular customer
base? Analyzing the use of self support via the Web (such as searches of the knowledge base or
support cases initiated) allows you to see where customers’ interests lie and where self support
can be improved.
Keep in mind that prospects may have significantly different information and support needs
than customers and use this knowledge to tailor your acquisition program to their needs.
Finally, consider how well the company is responding to prospects. As an example, data may
indicate that inquiries responded to within 30 minutes are twice as likely to result in sales as
those responded to the next day. This type of analysis can reveal areas where the company’s
performance can be improved.

Test Campaigns

Once you have a list of prospect customers, there is still some work that needs to be done before
you can create predictive models for customer acquisition. Unless you have data available from
previous acquisition campaigns, you will need to send out a test campaign in order to collect
data for analysis.
Besides the customers you have selected for your prospect list, it is important to include some
other customers in the campaign, so that the data is as rich as possible for future analysis.

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