Customer retention should start immediately after the sale. This is true for e-commerce stores and for publishers, although in the first case it means repeat purchases while in the latter it means continuing a subscription.
Some retention strategies are common to stores and to publishers. For example, both should …
- Establish a relationship immediately after the sale
- Send engaging emails
- Have great customer support
- Collect and act upon customer feedback
- Use a referral program
- Make returns or cancelations easy
But today I’m reacting to an article I got yesterday from Bo Sacks about The Washington Post’s retention program.
They realized that a single welcome email wasn’t enough, so they built an onboarding journey with tailored emails over the course of several months.
This would be a great use case for a customer data platform. I don’t know a lot of the details of what The Post did, but by reading between the lines, and adding my own insights, here’s what I’d do.
First, you have to establish some metrics to define what “engaged” means, and you have to track changes in engagement over time.
I would use a point system. For example …
- A point for every article viewed
- 10 points for every e-newsletter signup
- Two points for every click from an e-newsletter
- 10 points for a comment on an article
- 20 points for tweeting an article
You get the idea.
Second, I would create journeys for people depending on their engagement score, and changes to their engagement score. You need to be able to follow recency and velocity.
For someone who is trending up, you might encourage them to recommend you or promote your service. With someone who is trending down, you might make special offers. The idea is to create custom journeys for each scenario.
Third, in all cases you’d want to track the user’s interests – either by observation, or simply by asking them what they’re interested in – and make sure you’re providing more of what they like.
Fourth, you want to make sure people know how to use your service. Provide helpful tips, how-to guides, and videos.
If you have a mission, you want to educate users about that, and if you have celebrity authors or personalities, you want users to feel as if they’re fellow members of an exclusive club.
Some of these details will vary from company to company, but in all cases, you don’t want to take users for granted. Find ways to make your content engaging – specifically for them – customized to them – and check to be sure they’re becoming the loyal subscriber you want them to be.
If you’re curious about how to do this, give me a call. I’d love to discuss it.
