The prospect of becoming an omnichannel retailer certainly sounds appealing: a seamless buying experience, happy customers and increased sales. However, becoming one is easier said than done.

Customers are now more in tune than ever before with knowing what they want from a brand experience, and how they want to be engaged with. According to Accenture, 81% of consumers want brands to understand them better and know when, and when not, to approach them.

It’s clear that marketers understand this too because 77% believe real-time personalization through customer data is crucial. However, despite knowing this, only 33% of marketers admit to actually being able to truly personalize the customer experience in real-time.

Customer retention is valuable in more ways than you might initially expect. In fact, the cost of retaining a customer is up to seven times less than acquiring a new one. Moreover, repeat customers spend on average 33% more than new customers!

So whilst many companies are borderline obsessed with spending increasing amounts of time and budget dedicated to the acquisition of new customers, retaining customers is where you should really be focusing your efforts. 

Marketers, you should stop acquiring new customers.

Yes, that’s right! It might sound counter-productive, but it’s true.

The facts tell us that it’s becoming increasingly important for marketers to focus less on customer acquisition and more on selling to existing customers. After all, attracting a new customer can cost five times as much as retaining an existing customer.

Bristol, UK and Boston, USA - Aug. 24, 2018: BlueVenn, the first Customer Data Platform to integrate omnichannel marketing automation tools into its data unification solution, has been announced as the winner of the 2018 MarTech Breakthrough Award for “Best Overall Marketing Campaign Management Solution.” This first place has been awarded by MarTech Breakthrough, an independent organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies and products in the global marketing technology industry.

The customer lifecycle describes the various stages that a customer goes through before, during and after they complete a transaction with a brand. Customer lifecycle marketing is therefore the strategy (and execution of that strategy) by marketers to ensure that customers firstly, can navigate those stages easily, and secondly, to affect those stages so they can optimize the revenue potential or lifetime value of the customer.

Whilst there are many naming conventions for the customer lifecycle stages, most customer lifecycle models generally follow these five stages: awareness, consideration, purchase, advocacy and loyalty. For clarity, here is how I would define these stages:

Howard Ormesher, CRM Director at IM Group was interviewed in July 2018 to get his advice and tips on how to select the right Customer Data Platform vendor. In it he covers the importance of gathering requirements and obtaining buy-in across the business from the outset. We thought Howard's advice was so good we just had to share it here on our blog!

Read the full MarTech Advisor interview here or carry on to get our reactions to the article.

Gone are the days when a customer used to be loyal to a brand by default. The abundance of choice in today’s world, the increased competition from digital disruptors like Amazon and eBay, and the accessibility of reviews and third party recommendations all make building a customer loyalty strategy more difficult than ever.

Data analytics is an essential function of any marketing department, but sadly underutilized for a variety of reasons. Firstly, the analysis and preparation of data is rarely the reason that marketers get into the profession. Often a skill that comes with IT and technical-related jobs, data crunching is not always a task that is as glamorous as working on creatives, the brand positioning or briefing in the latest advertisement.

Optimizing the customer experience should be a top priority for every business! Whether this is to boost customer loyalty, create differentiation from your competitors, or provide the best brand experience for your customers, it's essential that organizations focus their efforts on delivering truly personalized and consistent experiences across all offline and online channels.