Undermining the Potential of Retention as a Growth Channel - Review

This marks the ninth week in my journey completing CXL Growth Marketing Mini Degree

This week I completed the below mentioned courses:?

• Retention: the most underrated growth channel
• Maximizing audiences for your PPC campaigns
• SEO driven editorial calendar

These three courses were a nice mix of topics. They expanded on previous courses and topics to add a higher level of detail and granularity, which I appreciated.

Let’s start off talking about retention.

With all the clients I’ve worked with over my 5+ year of professional career, there has not been one time that retention has been a key area of focus for my client or company.?

I agree that is the most underrated growth channel, and receives far less focus than it should.

To prove this, I’ll mention some impressive stats that the course instructor Val Geisler included:?

• Bain & Company - the inventor of the Net Promoter score - said that increasing customer retention by 5% can lead to an increase in profits between 25-95%.
• The likelihood of converting an existing customer into a repeat customer is 60-70%.
• The probability of converting a new lead is 5-20%.
• 50% of your customers encounter a problem and never complain about it.

“Most of the leverage in improving these retention curves happen in how the product is described, the on boarding flow, and what triggers you setup to drive ongoing retention.”?

Andrew Chen

Since most companies don’t have a retention strategy, the thousands of dollars that get spent to acquire new customers get wasted because of leaky gaps in the customer lifecycle.

I would also mention in my experience I don’t see enough product testing from the consumer’s perspective. A lot of the testing that I’ve witnessed will be completed from the IT or Development team, and their intuitive way of using a product can, at times, be counter-intuitive to a consumer since they know the backend.

This is why it’s crucial to have qualitative data as part of your retention strategy. I love that Geisler mentions how when doing interviews with your target customer currently using your product we want context opposed to information on how they use your product.?

This valuable qualitative analysis piece mentioned is referred to as “Jobs to Be Done.” This is a source of customer insight; it’s the way to get at what the customer wanted when they landed on your product.

Some questions to ask as part of these interviews include:

• Are enough people motivated to solve this pain?
• What common events trigger this pain point?
• What existing solutions do we not want to compete with.
• Address friction transition points for every stage of the customer lifecycle

This is a course that I can’t wait to come back to the course materials. Retention is an aspect of growth marketing I want to focus more on in my career.

Moving on to the course Maximizing audiences for your PPC campaigns.

Since you’ve been reading my blogs, you’ll now that I LIVE AND BREATHE advertising.

Working for an eCommerce brand, the majority of my time is spent strategizing PPC campaigns. For us, since we carry hundreds of brands there is a high level of research required to understand the current demand in the home renovation market;

What are our big box store competitors priced at for that brand and product lines?

What is our target audience actively searching for?

Michelle Morgan’s actionable, advanced tips were far superior than any content I have ever come across regarding PPC.

My favourite was the discussion regarding the funnel and cross-platform advertising within this funnel.\

What many people – even marketers – may not realize is that the key to successful PPC campaigns is the research. If you have the right strategy for your customer segments that is the recipe for success.

Always a mixture of art and science.

When building a out a PPC funnel for your audiences you’ll want to consider the 4 key stages:

• Awareness
• Intent
• Consideration
• Action

There is a different level of intent at each stage – what Johnathan Dane described in the Google Ads course as temperature and matching up the temperature of the traffic with the temperature of the CTA.

What is the message, offer, and CTA that will resonate with your target audience at each stage?

I love that Morgan mentioned the importance of small CTAs. Even small, softer CTAs are significant and should be used.?

I think these are the forgotten CTAs. The ones that get lost behind “LEARN MORE” and “SHOP NOW”.?

I definitely write myself a large note on not using the same CTAs out of habit.?

And on that note – don’t overlap ad messages; think of how to move each audience to the next stage. That is why audience exclusions are important because you want to limit overlap as it makes your message less effective.

Now, the best part of this course, was going through how to leverage your audience across channels using UTM parameters.

I’m in the midst of planning a large budget advertising campaign in my day job, and a tedious but necessary component of this is creating sheets of UTMs for each channel.

This setup saves a large amount of time at the end when you are analyzing PPC campaign performance.?

But, one of the tactics I will immediately add in my tool belt is retargeting across channel based on UTMs. I enjoyed the actionable example of running a LinkedIn ad to a page with specific UTMs and then retargeting on Facebook.?

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant!?

You can even use “value” in parameters and create dummy tags such as job titles that don’t map to anything by default, but you can be used to retarget.

This expert tip is sure to impress digital marketer and clients alike. It shows an advanced level of audience understanding and PPC strategy. Something I am very grateful to learn from one of the world’s top PPC experts.

Lastly, touching on the SEO driven editorial calendar course by Dan Shure.

This is not a new topic for me since building out SEO lists and content topics has always been a huge part of my repertoire.

The first step is to build a seed keyword list of topics. These are focused on broad intent, single words. You can use a mind map to build out your seed keyword list to make this step more visual.

Then, once you have your seed keyword list, you’ll want to find your topics.

What makes a good, specific topic?

Look for these four components:

1.????Search volume: minimum 10 searches/month

2.????Imply specific piece of content (for e.g. adding the word “tips” to seed keyword)

3.????Medium to high ranking potential based on domain authority

4.????Traffic potential

Then consider these four means of Ranking Potential:

1.????Domain Authority

2.????Relevance Gap

3.????Quality

4.????Topical Authenticity?

This was a great week for courses. Stay tuned for next week’s updates.