Customer Activation is about improving customer engagement with the brand by accelerating their decision-making at every stage of their journey, whether it’s attracting new customers, getting them to make a second purchase or preventing them from churning.
Customer Activation is based on the in-depth use of data found in existing systems (CRM, ERP, e-commerce) to highly personalize interactions with the customer or prospect across all the channels they use to communicate with the brand.
This marketing strategy requires a fundamental understanding of list of azerbaijan whatsapp phone numbers the dynamics of the customer journey, which is why it places great emphasis on analytics.
Once the customer journey has been mapped, a Customer Activation strategy makes it possible to determine the moments when it is appropriate to either influence at the margin (nudge marketing), or to support the message and sometimes even to refrain from acting. These strategies are formalized in the form of agile scenarios that can be adapted in real time to the customer's situation.
In this article, you will discover all the steps to follow to lead a successful Customer Activation strategy.
Why is Customer Activation important?
Besides the obvious benefit of generating more revenue when your customers return or become repeat buyers, let’s look at some of the other benefits that implementing a customer activation strategy can bring to your business.
1. Reduce your acquisition cost
Acquiring new customers costs 5x more than re-engaging with your existing customers. Creating a customer activation strategy is not only a cost-effective way to bring customers back into your sales funnel and move them through their lifecycle, but it also means you can spend less time and money on acquiring new customers.
2. Increase your return on investment
When you retarget existing customers as part of a customer activation strategy, you’ll already have an idea of their behavior and interaction with your brand. This makes it easier to make targeted, personalized offers to them, which results in higher conversion rates and ultimately a better ROI compared to other marketing tactics.
3. Increase Customer Lifetime Value
Over time, your current customers will likely bring more value to your brand and make more purchases than new prospects. If you can keep them engaged with an effective customer activation strategy, their Customer Lifetime Value will increase, bringing you more and more value.
How to create a Customer Activation strategy?
Here are five steps you can take to activate your customers:
1. Know your customers
To activate and re-engage your customers, it’s not enough to get value from their relationship with your brand, you also need them to get value from you. 68% of customers are willing to pay a premium for products and services from brands that provide exceptional customer service – but delivering that high level of value throughout their lifecycle can be a challenge.
A customer activation strategy starts with knowing your customers, but having their information isn’t enough. So how do you turn your customer data into something actionable? By creating buyer personas.
2. Create your buyer personas
A buyer persona is a way to get to know your ideal customer better. Each persona you create has the ability to capture unique traits about your customers that you can use to activate and engage them. Buyer personas capture everything from your customers’ demographics to their wants, needs, and motivations for buying. For your customer activation strategy, you’ll want to create a minimum of three buyer personas targeting the three groups we mentioned earlier: current customers, past customers, and new customers.
While you can create additional personas (and it can be beneficial to do so), each one should be managed by your marketing team—each buyer persona needs relevant content to support it. It’s easier to activate your customers when you give them a reason to re-engage with your brand by providing them with content that interests them based on the buyer persona they belong to.
3. Identify the customer’s digital behavior
Traditionally, creating buyer personas relies on getting your customers’ demographic data and updating the rest of their information based on their response to your content and marketing strategies. However, by tracking and monitoring their online behavior to get their behavioral data, it becomes much easier to determine what the next step in their lifecycle is.
Sending irrelevant content to your customers during your activation strategy can have negative effects ranging from unsubscribing from your email list to ceasing any business relationship with your company. Tracking their behavior and gaining insights into their browsing habits and social activities is one of the best ways to create effective buyer personas for your customer activation strategy and to know which channels you should target them on and what content they want to see.
4. Map the customer journey
If you’ve already defined your buyer personas, you’re about to create a customer journey map. This is an important part of your customer activation strategy, which helps you retain and re-engage your existing customers. You should create a customer journey map for each of your buyer personas.
Creating your customer journey starts with defining an overarching goal, such as customer activation. After establishing your buyer personas, you’ll define your buying process and customer touchpoints to determine the actions they take across channels. Then, you’ll tackle their pain points and create a multichannel customer journey map to direct them to your solution. We’ve created a detailed guide on how to map your customer journey – learn more here .
5. Identify the client's stage and speed
Your customer’s stage and velocity are two things you can use to influence where they move through the customer lifecycle. Let’s first look at what stage they’re in.
Identifying your customer’s stage means determining where you want them to be in the sales funnel and where you don’t want them to be. Identify the stages where they spend too much time and work to move them out of the funnel faster. Some stages to look at include customers who make a single purchase and don’t return, make a second purchase months or years later, or are interested in your brand but don’t make a purchase. Even if they don’t buy, it’s important to pay attention to them.
Increasing the speed at which your customers move through their lifecycle is the essence of a customer activation strategy. The end goal is to engage with them at every stage of the customer journey and encourage them to continue progressing to become advocates for your brand. The final stage is advocacy, where your customers start sharing your brand with their family and friends, leading to new customer acquisition with little effort.
The best way to do this is to create content and marketing campaigns that follow your customer journey, guiding your customers to the solution to their problems and leading them through their lifecycle.
5 ideas and examples of customer activation strategies
Let’s look at the different stages of a customer’s life and the activation strategies you can use to keep customers engaged with your brand.
1. Potential customers
To move prospects through their lifecycle, your customer activation strategy should focus on providing them with relevant content about your brand. This includes free resources like informative blog posts, newsletters, and promotional content like one-time discounts and free trials.
Here is a great example from our client Damart who offers a €20 discount on a future purchase in their welcome email:
