Win-back strategies are vital to marketers. Every lead matters, and customers are far too valuable to lose to competitors or missed connections. Marketing automation tools excel at organizing campaigns designed to call promising leads and former clients back into the fold. When backed with the power of big data, they can do something even more exciting: prevent churn from happening in the first place. If you never lose them, you never have to win your prospects back.
What keeps leads engaged? Data-driven marketing is a key element to answering that question because it speaks to how your audience interacts with you both individually and as a whole. You gain insight into the entire life cycle of your customers’ relationships with you instead of relying on brief snapshots. Here’s a closer look at how big data stems the flow of leads out of your sales pipeline to a trickle.
Data over Time
Conventional analytics are outstanding at providing a snapshot of your audience at a given time, but trying to use that data to derive insight about greater trends is a time-consuming challenge few marketing teams can manage. Big data applications mean they don’t have to and can instead turn over the number-crunching to marketing automation software designed to provide a continuous stream of feedback. Instead of static snapshots of your prospects, you get images of them in motion over the course of a full customer life cycle.
When you encounter new leads, the historical data your software already has allows you to extrapolate, telling you where these leads are in their buying journey. When you know that, you’re able to deliver specific, relevant content – the kind of information that keeps people engaged.
Getting the Timing Right
People at the beginning of the sales journey are still establishing what their needs are and what their ideal solutions might be. Those nearing the end of it have done their homework and narrowed down their choices; they want in-depth information about the particular options they’re considering. Each lead can only be at one point of the sales pipeline, so calculating the timing of your communications and content flow to them is crucial. Marketing software that uses big-data applications can pinpoint each lead’s location and coordinate communications to deliver right-sized information to the right leads at the right time.
Monitoring Engagement
Once your marketing team has the timing down, big data also helps track engagement and spot at-risk leads before they’re lost to churn. Behavioral data reveals the similarities in audience segments; over time, you get an increasingly clear picture of who’s on the right track to sales readiness and which members of your audience are disengaging. Then, you’re able to give your aspirational leads who are on the right track more of what they want while analyzing other groups to discover why they haven’t yet found their ideal solution with you. Marketing automation software lets you re-draw, compare, and contrast these audience segments so you can focus your efforts where they matter most and minimize wasted time – yours and your leads’.
Without a full, nuanced view of your leads both as individuals and as aggregates, you can’t gain complete insight into why they leave. Without that knowledge, you’re not able to slow the churn. Big data stops this cascade of events before they happen and gives you a chance to recapture leads’ interest before it’s lost.
© Reach Marketing LLC 2016 All Rights Reserved.
