A core part of your marketing, the contact marketing strategy, is your roadmap for getting in touch with potential customers. Are you wondering how to build an effective contact strategy?
From small setups to large corporations, customers are at the heart of every business. This is why how you interact with them and appeal to them is of utmost importance. A contact strategy is a crucial part of customer marketing strategies as it determines how you can contact and communicate with your customers.
Contact Strategy: What Is It All About?
Simply put, a contact strategy is how you reach out and communicate with your prospects. An effective contact strategy allows you to have a strong foundation, which allows you to cultivate long-term and valuable relationships with prospects. When you have a good contact marketing strategy, you have a clearer picture of the how, when, why, and what you need to communicate with your customers at each stage of their journey. Along with that, a competent contact marketing strategy allows you to focus on the needs of your customers.
When you have a solid customer contact marketing strategy in your retinue, you can support your overarching business objectives like meeting cross and up-sell targets, converting prospects to consumers, repeat purchases, lead nurturing, and customer advocacy better. An effective contact strategy will help connect the communication tools that you have at your disposal to how you want to shape your business’ relationship with prospective customers. Ultimately, a reliable contact marketing strategy can help you optimize your marketing communication and subsequently, sales.
How to Build a Solid Contact Marketing Strategy
Given below are some of the tips you can follow to build an effective contact strategy.
Know Your Customer Well
A good contact strategy can help you deliver an excellent customer experience and thus play a crucial role in acquiring and retaining customers. To execute this, you need to understand what your customers’ needs are so that you can tailor your communications accordingly. Needs won’t be the same for every customer, which is why you need to build customer segments or profiles based on similar characteristics. Segmenting your customer base allows you to set specific objectives and targets for every segment. The segments could be based on behavior or demographics. You can also segment your target audience by personas. This will allow you to see who your ideal customers, what their needs are, and who you should be approaching. Furthermore, the lifecycle stage of the customer will also be a crucial factor. Your contact strategy would be different for new customers as compared to long-term customers, even if their profile segments and needs seem similar.
Knowing your customers will ensure that you are contacting the right ones and providing them with personalized communications depending on their specific segment, their needs, and the history of your relationship with them.
Set Objectives
When you are building your contact strategy, besides focusing on your customer’s needs, you should also be clear about your company’s marketing objectives. Establishing your objectives can help you plan, execute, and measure the performance of your contact strategy effectively. For instance, your marketing objective could be increasing customer numbers, whether from new customer acquisition or by retention. It could also be increasing the visit and engagement frequency or increasing your brand recognition and sales. Moreover, it could also be a combination of all these objectives and some more, depending on what your business is aiming for. When you have your objectives set, it becomes easy to build a contact strategy that can play a crucial role in identifying the right customers and approaching them.
Map Out the Customer’s Journey
Your contacts will have different requirements depending on where they are on the sales funnel; thereby, they will be needed to be treated differently at each stage. Even though a customer journey is rarely linear, mapping it out will give you an idea of the different elements that impact the customer’s experience at each stage.
Typically, a customer’s journey can be broadly divided into the following stages - awareness, consideration, decision to make the purchase, and post-purchase. Prospective customers who are on the awareness stage and aren’t even close to making a purchase will have different requirements than a customer who is already in the post-purchase phase. It will do your business no good if you send awareness-stage prospects special offers through email that only long-term customers find a use for. Therefore, when building your contact marketing strategy, you must have the journey mapped out to have a clearer idea of where your consumers stand and when you can reach out to them. This will enable you to identify key communication and content needs at various stages of the journey. All in all, this will ensure that you are sending the right messages at the right time.
Set Contact Rules
The fundamental goal of a contact marketing strategy is to offer an excellent customer experience at every stage of the buyer journey. To achieve this, you need to have contact rules in place. Contact rules are an agreed set of rules which direct your decisions, such as which leads and customers you communicate with, along with how, when, and how often do you do it. This becomes crucial as you shouldn’t be bombarding your prospects and customers with communications; this could be off-putting. Moreover, you also shouldn’t let your leads turn ‘cold’. This is why you need to come up with a set of contact rules when building your contact marketing strategy, which can define the messaging priorities for your different contacts at different stages of their buying journey. Your marketing strategy is all about creating depth in your relationship with your customers. The contact rules can help you achieve this by creating the right balance between how frequently and when you should contact your consumers.
Specify Your Communication Channels
Along with setting contact rules, specify what communication channels you will be using at which stage. When you are building your contact strategy, you must ensure that you are using the right channels to communicate with the right prospects at the right stage. For example, you should know when it will be a smart move to opt for email marketing as a lead nurturing tool or when your sales team should make a phone call to the prospects. Also, it is advised that you set up a measurement framework and outline the essential metrics for measuring the performance and outcome of your contact strategy.
To summarize, building an effective contact strategy becomes crucial as it determines how you get in touch and interact with your prospects to build long-term business relationships. While developing a contact marketing strategy, it is vital to understand that it should align with your larger business objectives. Along with that, you should have a thorough understanding of your customers as they are the ones who drive your sales. Once you nail these steps down, you will be able to move your hot leads to the point of sale in a jiffy.
