Awareness. Perception. Sales. Leads. Conversions.
For most of the last twenty-five years I have spent in media and marketing, the goals of almost all the clients I have served have related to one of these metrics. Marketing naturally leans towards driving more top-line engagement with new customers, and in the B2B and ecom space, towards driving new sales from new customers.
It has been pretty rare to have discussions with senior marketing executives that are related to current customers, the experiences they are having with the brand, how that is translating to advocacy, and other similar post-purchase issues.
In most cases, those same marketers are also tasked with “doing more with less” every year . . . the revenue numbers and marketing metrics almost always increase at a higher rate than the resources provided to achieve those metrics – whether its time, budget, people, technology, or other efforts to support that growth.
What we have come to understand at Science and Magic is that marketers tend to under-value the impact they can have on a brand by focusing on the post-purchase portion of the customer lifecycle and over-value new customer acquisition.
Marketers have been trained around “new” and “more”, rather than focusing on what is already there. But if you can drive small efficiencies in conversion throughout the lifecycle, it makes for large efficiencies in the biggest part of your budget (customer acquisition, media buying, etc.).
If you can deliver a fantastic onboarding experience, and generate positive reviews, it helps drive positive perceptions in the research stage of a purchase.
If you can motivate existing customers to advocate on your behalf, it can reduce your paid media costs, and increase the credibility of your messaging.
This is what Experience Engineering is all about – finding efficiencies in converting customers in every stage of the customer lifecycle, not just in new customer acquisition. We believe it is much more effective to start where we want to end up – with empowered, loyal customer advocates – and optimize that part of the experience first . . . to ensure we are getting all we can from a cross-sell, up-sell, renewal and referral perspective . . . to deliver a fantastic customer experience after the sale, and to be able to leverage evidence of that and the efficiencies in those efforts, so that every dollar we spend on new customer acquisition becomes more effective, more efficient, and more profitable for our clients.
We’d love to show you how this can apply to your business – give us a call or email us if you’d like to learn more!