Tips for Optimizing Digital Marketing Performance
Total Retail, in conjunction with SMG, a leading experience management firm, recently produced a new report, The Changing Consumer: Adapting Digital Marketing Strategies to Acquire and Retain Today and Tomorrow's Customer. The comprehensive report addresses how retailers must adapt their marketing tactics to acquire and retain digital-savvy, channel-agnostic shoppers. This week I address best practices that retailers can implement to enhance digital marketing strategies, leading to increased engagement and purchase activity from consumers.
Before retailers start planning future customer acquisition and retention efforts, they should audit their current digital marketing channels. Are the return on investment levels acceptable? Where should they be investing more based on those ROI levels, and where should they be cutting back? Let the data dictate the spending.
Furthermore, retailers should be thinking about where their target customer demographic is spending time online. If they're trying to reach younger consumers, for example, then paid social may make sense. Be sure to invest in technology and tools to enhance what's working as well. Use technology to improve any experience that engages the customer, as well as helps your brand better understand the customer journey. Understanding your customers through data capture, including their behaviors, wants and needs, and preferences, will help your business better meet their high expectations. Furthermore, this valuable customer data can be leveraged to fuel personalized marketing campaigns, which are proven to perform better than mass, generic "spray and pray" messages.
Along with an initial audit, retailers should be sure to measure efforts regularly across all of their marketing channels, both online and offline. Track analytics from email, social, search, display, affiliate, etc., but also seek feedback from customers. Aspects of some brands’ digital experiences can be clunky; make sure you’re communicating with your customers to ensure a seamless experience no matter how they choose to engage.
It’s also important to collect feedback on how a customer prefers to be marketed to and engaged with. Let this feedback inform future efforts. For example, perhaps some customer segments want to receive text messages from your brand, while others find this approach intrusive. Give customers options for how they can engage with your brand.
While you certainly know your customers, there’s value in partnering with a customer experience service provider that knows the digital marketing landscape. Brands are monitoring numerous marketing channels and metrics, making it time and resource intensive. The right partner can maximize digital efforts and provide expert insight, helping brands to analyze, interpret and take action based upon the data.
With more competition online than ever before, it’s vital for brands to focus on both the acquisition and retention of digital customers. Consumer behavior shifted with the pandemic, leading to more digital customer journeys. Many of these new trends will stick, such as increased consumer adoption of online and cross-channel shopping behaviors, so the customer experience is more important than ever. Retailers’ marketing strategies must also change and evolve to capitalize on this digital opportunity that's here to stay.
For more insights and analysis on how retailers can adapt their marketing and engagement strategies to optimize customer acquisition and retention efforts for a digitally driven retail environment, download The Changing Consumer: Adapting Digital Marketing Strategies to Acquire and Retain Today and Tomorrow's Customer today!
