What marketers need to know

Sometimes you can’t help wondering what marketers are doing.

A recent US survey reported by the global customer experience specialist company Right Now (1900 global clients) found that only 46% of senior marketers have good insight into customer retention rates, lifetime value, and profitability.

Let’s just tease this out a little. What this survey result seems to say is that more than half of the marketers questioned:

> did not know the retention rate for their customers – in other words, when they won 10 new customers, they did not know how many on average would still be with them in 12 months;

> did not know how much profit they obtained from a typical customer over the lifetime that the customer stayed with them; and

> did not have a clear handle on how much profit an average transaction provided for the company.

All this obviously relates to fundamental data that marketers must have, to do their job properly.

If you plan to run a campaign, you have to know about profitability in order to gauge whether your proposed initiative is worthwhile.

If you launch a blog or an e-newsletter for nurturing clients in order to keep them, you have to know about lifetime value. What’s the point of spending to keep them if their profitability does not justify such expenditure?

If you acquire customers by, say, advertising, you have to know the retention rate. You might think the advertising is effective, but if the customers walk out the door as quickly as they walk in, then it may well be that the advertising is only marginally profitable – or not profitable at all. You may be attracting the wrong people, or promising too much, or causing brand confusion, or whatever.

As a marketer, do you have access to the information you need? What is the information that you find most valuable for your decision making?

For details about how the Action Words team can help you with all kinds of copywriting, please go to: http://www.actionwords.com.au/home/