Customer Lifecycle Marketing

Matthew Barnett 0:31
Good morning, everyone and welcome to the next call Inbox Expo. My name is Matt. And apart by becoming a wanderer, I'm just gonna introduce the panellists for this great session we have today, customer lifecycle marketing, the impact of covid 19 on journeys, and planning journeys, in uncertain future, so we have five great panellists. Today, Emma, Karlien, Ian and Ryan and myself, said, I'm the CEO of a company called Bonjoro. We do one to one, personalised video messaging, and if I can ask the other panellists to hop in, and each introduce yourselves, and we'll start with the wonderful ama.

Emma Egerton 1:10
Hi, everyone. Thanks for having me. My name is Emma Egerton, and I work for a marketing technology consultancy called delivery. And we work every day with ambitious brands to really help solve complicated business problems through the end to end use of data and technology right across the martec ecosystems. So with that, as the customer strategy lead, we focus a lot on the customer. We'll get more and more into that today. But for now, I'll I'll pass on over to Karlien.

Karlien McLeod 1:42
Hi, I'm Karlien McLeod. Fresh rewards is an online booking platform where we give anyone 100 retailers. And I'll pass over to Ian

Ian Deshays 2:01
thanks coming on. I'm from AlchemyWorx. We're a marketing services agency. We help we help brands make the most of their investment in the marketing technology stack. And help them communicate in the best possible way with their customer base. pass over to Ryan.

Ryan D'Souza 2:26
Hey, everyone, I'm Ryan D'Souza. And I'm the Acting Chief Digital Officer at 10 Corp. 10 Corp is a resource consultancy, and essentially we're currently going through a rather sort of large technology. So you enablement process, which Yeah, well, they sort of touch on as we progress through our discussion. I think I think

Emma Egerton 3:02
first topics that we're going to kick off on was really about what lifecycle marketing means to each of us. I know Matt might have dropped off for the moment. But that concept of lifecycle marketing is becoming more and more important about around how we come out of COVID together. So with that, HMS will start to speak through how we see that big topic of lifecycle. I know for myself, we see lifecycle marketing as a really unifying concept across businesses, to be able to unite around a common goal, understanding those five key stages of of acquisition, conversion, retention, loyalty, really setting the gear for a business for how they can start to coordinate and take a whole old approach to the customers journey across the entire experience that a customer might have with your brand. So that's probably one key overarching thing to keep in mind. In terms of how you approach your life cycle, in your day to day being in Do you have to have some flavour for us about what life cycle starts to mean to you.

Ian Deshays 4:24
Yeah, absolutely. So life cycle marketing is a fantastic tool for for engaging your customer base, right across, wide across, you know, their whole journey with your brand and keep them entertained with different conversations and topics around what you're trying to achieve. What are the key? I think what we're all looking at the messaging side of things, I think one of the key things sometimes overlooked is actually the audience side, looking at the data and segments of those groups of people, through their, through their pattern of the journey and like recognising that people are on different journeys, some people like, what I'm engaged with the brand at this time. So I think that was the audience there is key with the messaging.

Emma Egerton 5:37
Definitely, and understanding that data, and those audience groups is almost a Stage Gate is becoming even more precise, with the tools that we have available to us. Maybe Ryan, do you want to share your thoughts about what life cycle looks like in your day to day?

Ryan D'Souza 5:54
Ah, yeah, so for me life cycles, life cycle marketing, is very much a role and personal sort of customer driven driven conversation that ultimately sort of aims to give the customer the best experience they can have with your brand, if you're depending on sort of where they are, sort of along, on their sort of journey with you. So, you know, this may also include actually not talking to them at all, because, you know, they're more than happy with sort of, you know, any past experience, like sort of, you know, having a customer, I used to be empty, too, and she would basically come in, and all she would require is a sort of monthly trigger of, hey, by the way, you know, we realised that given your consumption rate, you should be buying more tea. And that is all like, literally, and she did not basically, when you looked at how to engage with every other columns that would go out, there was literally no open at all bar, that one. And so I think it's that actual sort of relevant personalised, personalised piece, because one cannot sort of concert or have one in a vacuum without the other. So yeah, so that's sort of how I approach lifecycle marketing. And you know, whether that be from sort of ways to sort of grow as a CRM manager, sort of looking at how you know how to expand customers sort of palette across, you know, the different sort of burgers and food ranges that are that we had to sort of where I'm currently how to actually get technicians to actually be go out and actually complete a order work, it's all about keeping that customer group engaged, no matter sort of where they are, in that in their life cycles in relation to your brand.

Matthew Barnett 7:49
So if I, if I remember from my point of view a little bit different, we're, we're a software company, so we deal with a large funnel coming in, so 1000s of users across the world. And so we can take a customer success, approach to it. lifecycle, marketing, we we have aligned with what we call lifetime value. So with us, it's all about getting customers to stay as long as possible. And then also to upgrade and grow with the products bring more team members in so as a client and company, move through that, because we deal with large funnel challenges, really around how do you build relationships at scale, you know, and in product, you have two parts you have, you have portlet actions and product lead engagements. So you know, you have no notifications going out things are using, trying to build habits with a customer. But just important, you have this relationship part with the company. And if you look at software today, it's became more and more competitive than ever, whatever you do, there's there's many other options for solving those problems. And so, you know, the point is not enough these days. And so you find companies like us with these with these big scale funnels, starting to look at how we can connect with customers again, with us, it's a balance of how do you, how do you check with customers at certain points for personal level? How do you let your customer success teams build relationships with 1000s of customers, which are much smaller, you're not turning to meetings all the time, you're not going to seeing clients, but you're trying to check in with with customers on a, you know, at least a quarterly basis instance more meaningful way. And they're more likely to do a lot a lot of this is with video. And we do asynchronous videos, what we find is it doesn't need to be a two way conversation. But what you can do is check in with customers at a certain point say look, we're thinking about you want to make sure everything's okay, hope you having a great week, and spending no more than about 30 seconds to a minute on that. So that's really the challenge of how we look at it is how do you build relationships outside the product. And it's incredibly important and you can measure that back into how long customer stays the ad infinitum.

Karlien McLeod 9:50
And just to build on that, I think for us the cash rewards product is omni channel so we have web. We have Chrome extensions since our extension, so notify And then we also have an n square cloudlink product. So I think really it's it is very much that relationships at scale and having a big customer driven, but at the same time thinking about what's going to be the right channel at the right time and the right message to really engage with that user. So when the important notifications, when do you use your pop ups and emails, and thinking about that holistically? I think that has really been the key to, for us to really taking that to the next level.

Matthew Barnett 10:32
So I think here we go for Yammer. Thanks for taking your why dropped out. Last 12 months have been pretty huge for everyone has been a lot of change around the world, different industries, different challenges, I guess, Would everyone hear that? What changes have you been forced to make since everything started last February, if you'd like to share some your stories, both the positive and the challenges, and if we start with you, that'd be great.

Emma Egerton 11:00
So more and more, and Matt, you touched on this as well, where we're starting to see a few movements with lifecycle as a strategic principle. So with some of our, with all of our ambitious clients, they're starting to see the importance of leveraging what they have. But focusing on the gaps. Sometimes that means being able to drill into other strategic disciplines, whether that's loyalty, or lifetime value, but really bringing that in at the right time in their customer journey. So being able to have that overarching view on a customer to be able to take, as Colleen said, that approach to the right message at the right time, across teams and channels, to really understand whether that moment should be about loyalty, whether it should be about conversion. So it's this kind of approach to focus on where those gaps are, that have resulted in a couple of key things. So firstly, some of the industries we work with, like travel, for example, have been able to use this, this framework that set in place for them, to better leverage the valuable customers, they have to retain them, when things were under the pump, and COVID, all of us were in the same boat, that there was a lot of impact to how we normally do business. And that ability to have a base to values and to retain them was really more important than ever. So being able to leverage what was there was incredibly fundamental. But secondarily, we looked at many of our clients who needed needed to actually hit refresh on what they thought life cycle was. And that concept about refreshing that that means being able to stay up to date as what your customers are telling you. A lot of a lot of our clients saw the need that this principle they had in place, and perhaps their coordination among teams needed to be more in touch with the feedback that they were receiving from their customers. And to be able to do that I won't go into the tactics just yet. But whether that's user testing data, deep dives, really hitting refresh was a second thing. And then thirdly, during the last 12 months, probably the biggest thing was to elevate the customer. So for brands that were doing it really well, they wanted to be able to take what they had, but lift their conversation about the customer, because during COVID more than ever, the customers trends, their behaviours meant immediate impact on the business. And that elevated role of the customer is what allowed them to really pivot quickly and take it seriously. So they're probably some of the key trends we saw in that in that 12 month period.

Matthew Barnett 14:08
Yeah, absolutely. An overview. A few stories on your side.

Ian Deshays 14:17
Well, I think that's Yeah, that's with lots of good points there. I think probably Matt and Carolyn, you've we've seen a large number of like the volume of people going up in terms of leads and people to contact and try to identify you almost with software, you've got the extra channels in within within the platform, not only the call the traditional sources of contacting trying to identify the best way to reach people. And I think that's probably changed. You know, it's With software itself, it's it's a medium of its own, you're able to target people within within the, within the ecosystem itself and try and move people through that journey of adoption. It's kind of a different set of tactics to what you might see in retail, for example. And it's certainly through lots of challenges, not just volume, and how to deal with servicing and supporting those new customers, but from a team perspective as well. Whilst our customers, we're dealing with COVID, are the teams also dealing with COVID. So that three opportunity, unique challenges, hey, work in disparate teams, effectively. That's been, that's been unique changes in itself. And probably most of us have jumped on technology to help us fill those gaps. So that's been a unique challenge itself, just getting everyone on that adoption within your own organisation, adopting new platforms and changes. With that, regardless of meeting our messaging, individual, you know, customer base. So that's definitely been changes to COVID has impacted just in that regard. Ryan, comment on that sort of?

Ryan D'Souza 16:48
Yeah, no, thanks for that, like what essentially has been said to, essentially will cover what I'm about to talk about, which is very sort of grill centric, because there was a grill whilst COVID hit and grill, there were two key movements. One was basically data and aileron. And the other one was digital enablement. From a, because from a growth perspective, we essentially had the life cycle pretty much locked down, like you're sort of going into a burger, you then basically need to explore them in silence. So all of that was out from a data male perspective was actually to get more data coming through, so that we could then mine and, and from from that actually understanding the customer better, and then be able to actually sort of, you know, from them be able to actually better communicate with them, whether that be sort of unlocking sort of other channels such as sort of push, that we sort of did not use as frequently sort of through the pre COVID days. And from a you know, from a digital enablement perspective was very much, okay, we don't have customers coming into 140 restaurants, what do we do, that was where, you know, actually starting to lean in and, you know, offer our own sort of delivery service, as well as sort of combining that with, you know, the, the usual suspects of Uber Eats and deliver, and so on, and so forth. And also then enabling, because we had so much as a student that was dying in enabling a lot of, say, offers and coupons to actually be able to be redeemed online, as well as that whole loyalty programme, to be able to sort of leverage from a, from a digital perspective. So those were the two keys that have unlocked, I think one of the sort of one of the things that everyone liked, because sort of myself, and so it made the team are very much in the sort of digital frame of mind, actually getting the rest of the business to actually sort of go through that journey. But at a light essentially, in 48 hours to going okay, well, we currently have a business. And if we don't sort of move our thinking towards a more digitally enabled customer, and a more designing their product offering, we may not have a business, you know, six months or whatever piece down the track. And so that was for you from a internal business perspective was probably it was a challenge, but essentially everyone haven't got to step up to that. But yeah, I'll sort of pass it on for any of the other sort of panellists to further discuss this.

Karlien McLeod 19:42
And I'll jump in for my Castro's perspective. So we completely opposite her to write experience, we did not have a very well defined lifecycle management strategy, and we were very much our communication strategy was very much focused on providing the widest range appeals to a shopper base, which, essentially, with a loved interactive motor, and but it did did practically mean that there was very little customization. And those are incredibly long and fairly frequent. And I'm in the base reacted really well to that. And I love that and engage with that. But I think as COVID hit, people just didn't have the bandwidth to go through and for 25 years and find relevant to them. And I think it's in general, that sort of deal finding mentors there as much anymore, you know, people are very distracted. And so we just found out overpriced, plummeting, and people are not engaging with us as much as they used to. And we had to very quickly change our tactics. Unfortunately, we didn't have any data enablement, and we didn't have a tech stack that was built for marketing. So we have to go about things in quite a growth hacking sort of way. And started off just by defining our cohorts, you know, people who have not yet shipped, or people who have Mr. political level, they can shop with us last week or last month. And from there started creating crafting app messaging, you know, writing SQL SQL queries, getting those segments, ingesting that into, into our email provider, and having targeted messages and targeted offers to those audiences. And a big issue that we faced was. And so it relied on people. We had to really ascertain and ensure that we had enough people that to drive that strategy. But it was massively successful. We had priests in a practice shoplet crnas. And we are now COVID was an accelerated data enablement strategy. And also, really focusing on building can be much more dynamic. With that sort of communication moving forward, we already have an onboarding journey optimised. So we've got reactivation as the next key one to focus on and retention thread.

Matthew Barnett 22:08
You know, some some some pretty common themes around that a lot of this is obviously around, fast changing, and I call it the other side's gains more type things here. So maybe let's move into a bit of a tactical space around like some more of these positive stories that came out of it. Maybe I'll just chat to us first. So interesting being the video space, you know, you see, on one side, you see this massive growth. And so everyone's just jumping on video and say, like a big change of customer type, and base and try and understand what that means in different countries around the world reacting in different timelines, to openings and closings, and so like your whole funnel just kind of goes out the window. So in terms of what you know, we did well, I think you have two buckets of new new customers coming in and accelerating numbers. And so how does your team start to deal with that, and then you also have your existing customers as well, they need to look after what we saw was really starting to segment down into both new customers coming in to understand them on the fly very quickly, so we can understand why they were coming in all of a sudden, because suddenly, I was going to do a video for us. That's not really normally how we market so you see how there's, like less educated space coming here? And how do we build out new products and pricing to them. On the other hand, existing customers looking after them and having a deeper understanding empathy, with the challenges they're going through. And so you know, from an access point of view, proactively reaching out and digging in and, you know, like, like working out which ones need to be supported, which ones we give free accounts to which ones we put pauses on 12 months, which is it's about both of our user base, those are fine facing difficulty, to make sure that when we come out of this, at the end of it, everyone stayed on with us as long as we could. And I think those changes, I think Ian mentioned with teams as well. A lot of what we did was actually growing, you know, customer facing teams, and empowering them to do whatever it took to support customers. So giving them bigger budgets, allowing them more freedom and trying to reduce the number of customers they reach, like handling sake provided at a higher service to each and every one of those. That's kind of how we approached it again, it was little bit everywhere around the world. But they over to Who else wants to jump in that will, I guess more tactical pieces on how you went about improving that funnel. On that lifetime.

Ryan D'Souza 24:31
I'm more than happy to sort of jump in. Firstly, kind of my heart goes out to you, especially at the start of COVID. When you're what you're describing, I was like, Oh my god, that would have been traumatic, to say the least. But it's good that you got this coming through the other side and that whole you know that essentially the cause and effect of it. But from a tactical perspective, one of the key pieces that we realised was at grill, we had an app essentially was the window integral from our customers. And what we realised very quickly was that we, we actually have to enable that app so that customers could not only shop on there and actually purchase their burgers from there, but also do all their loyalty redemption through this little through this little piece of technology. And what we didn't have was time on our side. So you know, they're literally we were essentially running in almost 48 hour sprints of, okay, we basically need to, you know, you either need to fix or you need to enable x, y and Zed within the app or within our existing customer journey. And once we sort of, as we basically did that, and the data that would come in, was actually to literally sit down and go, Okay, how do we take this data, and then weave it into what our current life cycle is, but because what we don't want is to be suddenly sort of, you know, COVID-19, being this sort of Pandora's box or something, open it, everyone's busy, you're communicating with everyone so many different times, in all these different ways, because you're getting all this data coming in. And then suddenly, you do see, you know, open rates, your click rates, and, you know, was one of my basic KPI that essentially wants to actually make sure that our customer making one additional transaction, and actually having that sort of dropped out. So it was, it was essentially having to work very quickly, but in a very strategic manners so that you know, where we're communicating and still moving people through that lifecycle, but also being very cognizant of what that overall lifecycle that we already have. We don't want it's not that we don't want to break, but we can actually mould and add things to wear, when not, then we're going to dispose with one sort of COVID is done. And I think that's was one of the keys that are essential to this whole sort of tactical piece was the ability to actually sort of work very quickly, but also very strategically, but not actually impacting the customer from a, say over communication or, you know, being a bit overbearing in regards to sort of, yeah, their relationship with grill at the time. I'll open up this or anyone else who might,

Emma Egerton 27:24
or might even jumping there, Ryan, that was a really good one as well about being able to look at those data points specifically, that might feed into your life cycle marketing strategy, but where we spend every day defining data points that provide the entry and exit criteria for communication for an in app notification, and more and more, it's becoming so important to really share what that data is across the entire martec ecosystem. So whether that means that we're getting a lot of new information in from customers, as we put new, fast, iterative tactics in market, or whether we're realigning a lifecycle marketing strategy, I think being able to take that two fold approach and define down to a data point level, what a trigger is, is just really hot of being able to not over communicate and cause, you know, inbox clutter, at the end of the day. So that that ability to get right to the trigger, has been able has been enabling a lot of our clients to then plan strategically, but also means that they're able to do sort of quick wins. So put a new onboarding into market, get the data and the feedback from the customers, but iterate in a really fast and meaningful way. optimise and iterate as they build out these programmes. So that's probably one of the biggest call outs really being able to segment well, and sometimes start small start with the openness to iterate to. And Colleen, I know you mentioned a lot of the different tactics that the cash rewards went through in being able to I think use growth hack your way into this, maybe you can tell us about some of those tactics as well.

Karlien McLeod 29:26
Yeah, for sure. So where I would recommend anybody starting certainly where we started before we started looking at my tech stack or what our current technology enablement is just a whiteboard just to map out your life cycle, your life cycle flow, I guess, and understand what each of those stages look like for walk up the mountain in your business. Because once you go once you start saying, oh, we're trying to target somebody who has joined cash or wants but has not yet made the first transaction, it becomes really easy to craft a compelling message. And then start sort of targeting those cohorts individually. And next thing is, you know, HTML code and people emails and things that are dynamically filled is this fantastic, but you can be very creative with gifts, subject lines, and punchy content will be just as impactful as having, you know, a fully automated content strategy, which is obviously the next thing that I'd like to get to. But those that just being really clever, and using those tactics never really has had for us. And finally creating I think, to your point, Emma, how do you have that incrementality and this AB test and ensure that you're building on what has happened before, we have a Google Sheet where we document all of our experiments, and we can see what the target was, what the outcome was, what the uplift was. And then from there, we've crafted an experiment experiment so it's really about ensuring everything we can at one point so that you can easily refer back and understand what's been done before Yeah, did you have something to add from

Ian Deshays 31:13
I thought that was that's very useful advice I think almost to Ryan's point as well this everyone all the businesses have had to react and move quickly and was almost had a check to go and just iterate through different changes. So try this do testing learn now try the next thing and all of it's worth looking at your if you have an existing life cycle strategy whatever you know, whatever that might look like and however mature that is do an evaluation of where you are with that and what gaps there might be what gaps perhaps COVID is driven and the change for those new customers that have come in you know, there's every chance that they're they're quite different to your previous place you had last year and just work and work through iterative changes on on those tactics in been using before and keep keep a mark of those people that have never arrived in the last 12 months and just evaluate, you know, are they acting the same as we've seen previously, you know, General pace so this is a different group of people parts of that audience different I think that that's probably some of the things I recommend just looking at

Emma Egerton 32:53
to evaluate how they're reacting but also adapt approach so whether that means potentially a different message in the email to really reflect what this new updated experiences are not just email to more and more in carpet we've found shifts in how people consume different types of content so being able to take that lens across channels and making sure that you can evaluate and adjust to to this new COVID normal has is a pretty big thing as well so it's good call out in

Matthew Barnett 33:30
a shot I think with those as well it says of data sources you you've got data for your product and your service but I think also it does to pay out to pay to get there and gets the qualitative research as well. So with users coming in especially where users are changing if you don't have a research team pull pull someone in to help get out get on it yourself you know, or potentially engaging an external agency within getting on calls with users especially with new types of users coming in and an existing users behaving in different ways so you know with us we have free and paid plans so we'll see it was all much more particular in the free offering of the product as we look at that as we go well this is a change like fundamentally what is happening here and so then gain the research teams get in there and talk to us understand what those take changes both psychologically and in terms of behaviour the products and then the other thing to do is look at putting you know your market teams like on board with your product teams if if you have products so we started to build Trump like growth teams where marketing kind of works a lot close together because we saw these these pilot loops starting where you have free usage times get the roof and you think well this is fascinating. So maybe in you know in lieu of some of the revenue gains we get, let's focus on you know, active user gains because we know that in 12 months time or 24 months time we'll be able to get the rewards from those if we've done a good enough job so again, like a mentality shift in the company, which is okay, like it's all about usage and so bad For us, it ends up being promoting certain parts of the product that normally we wouldn't promote and actually building out some new parts or products. But we're not on the roadmap before and being flexible around that, to understand that changing usage and behaviour. So I think it's definitely quality research, talk to users talk to customers, whether there is lacking and then you know, get your marketing teams closer together, to start to look at that research and start to look at how you can change your overhead and go gamma,

Emma Egerton 35:40
I was gonna say where to go next, there's so many topics to that point as well, being able to really look at more than just revenue. Sometimes I think, as we step into what is now a new normal, we really have to consider how we set up things like even business case creation, or planning for big investment. So we we have got some, some really advanced clients who are taking that sort of elevated approach to the customer. But in a literal sense, that means exactly having conversations about NPS, it means being able to start small, sometimes, maybe going to market with a PRC or pilot, but making sure that the measures of success that aren't just revenue, sure, they are needed sometimes, but include that and balance that with what will impact your business in one year, in two years, in three years, include revenue and conversion with NPS include team adoption, and the other factors that will really start to pay off in the long term, because now more than ever, we need some short term gains. But now more than ever, we need to be able to look at those long tail returns as well and plan for the future. So that's a great call.

Matthew Barnett 37:09
I ran wind gave you an insight on or

Ryan D'Souza 37:13
I just want to say I completely agree, because especially at grill, we sort of went from being you know, there was a very large revenue component, but actually then sort of also, we actually started getting mould in the whole customer engagement piece and how sort of long, you know, a customer sort of sits on the database, but also how well they actually are engaging with the loyalty programme. And you know, and the easiest way to find that out is doing how they actually moving through that right like that, that lifecycle. So when once we sort of just see, oh, someone's just basically hovering around that, you know, onboarding. Actually, now we're sort of seeing those cohorts sort of moving through and coming back to us point as well. Is that where the actual the new people sort of, you know, new customers coming through onto the last loyalty piece actually looking at them and saying, How did they stack up with the guys who actually first joined the Lord programme? How do they stack up with all the others that are acquisition pieces? So I think, I know from my perspective and grill, it was very much a holistic view of, you know, just not only engagement, but yeah, as well as that sort of financial trigger there as well.

Matthew Barnett 38:24
Awesome, always a time. So I think Ryan will wrap up on that excellent point to finish off. So thanks, everyone, for coming along. Thanks, Ian, Emma, Ryan and Colleen. Thanks for great chats, and thanks the audience. Thank you.