Last month, I was invited to speak at a Digital Marketing class at Arizona State University. The class is taught by my friend and former employer, Bret Giles, who cofounded Sitewire and currently runs agencyside.
I was asked to speak about retention strategies and tactics in digital marketing. The majority of my presentation discusses email marketing. I did touch on social media and mobile marketing to a degree, but those topics were covered in previous classes by Jack Smith and Sean Bartlett respectively. Both Jack and Sean are great speakers and extremely knowledgeable practitioners.
Above all, I wanted to impress upon the students how important retention is to an integrated strategy. So many companies who engage in interactive marketing focus solely on generating new traffic and one-time sales. However, utilizing methods for identifying and communicating to an organization’s best and most loyal customers offers many easy wins at little expense.
You can view the entire presentation below. Here are some key slides:
Slide 4: Sample marketing process schematic
Slide 8-11: Stats from Leading on the Edge of Chaos that support adopting retention strategies
Slide 14: Push vs. Pull Strategies
Slides 31-35: Email testing procedures. I opted not to explain Taguchi testing here, but I’ll cover that here on this blog soon.
Slides 37-39: Email marketing tracks (aka drip campaigns), triggers and campaigns with examples and preferred uses of each.
Slide 44: Types of mobile campaigns: quid pro quo, alerts & subscriptions, coupons and contests.
Slide 48: Three core social media objectives: customer service, market research and awareness/revenue.
Slide 55: A quick note on viral marketing. In my opinion, you cannot really cause a campaign to become viral. Campaigns take on qualities of virality by virtue of being shared and discussed by the audience. Marketers can add components to increase the ease with which something is shared, but the audience has ultimate control in these scenarios.
Customer Retention Through Digital Media
Side Note: I was very thankful to take part in the class and really excited that ASU is actually taking a step toward offering digital marketing curriculum. Not enough colleges and universities are doing so, and students interested in becoming online marketers are forced to teach themselves or get internships as a result. I’m not sure why it is taking so long for major universities to build out digital marketing course work and programs. Perhaps things move too fast in digital marketing and customary methods for research are unreliable. Maybe existing university professors and staff simply do not have the expertise necessary to teach it. Budgetary concerns may also be an issue. Regardless, I’m hoping that this is not a passing trend.
Chris, this is some powerful information! I love the eliciting feedback section. A lot of the channels on YouTube with heavy followings are awesome at engaging users for feedback and always pushing their viewers to comment, making for a much more interactive experience.
Awesome job man, love it!
Thanks, Oliver! Yes, it seems that so many organizations with a social media presence are solely focused on attracting more and more people. That is important, no doubt, but I think one of the best ways to encourage someone to join a social community is to show that the community actually exists. Beyond just posting content and hoping for feedback, community managers must ask questions, offer help, make invitations and give control to the members of the community. People will support that which they help to create.
Thanks Chris…found this information useful, cheers.