Following on from our recent video blog on the effects of Ad Blockers, we interviewed Florian Rieupet, Product Manager at AT Internet about the ways to boost your customer Retention levels.
Watch the video to learn more!
Customer retention
refers to the ability of companies to keep hold of their online audience,
reduce the impact of the churn rate and boost customer value over the long
term.
Effective customer
retention will enable you to secure new revenue from existing customers in the
form of repeat purchases, boost subscription rates, initiate repeated article
viewing and generate additional purchases. It’s also an effective way to help
maintain and increase ad impressions over time as well as keep your audience
re-circulating through your brand’s network of linked sites. It’s well known
that retaining an existing audience is far less costly than acquiring or
converting a new one – a 5% increase in retention can increase profits by up to
95%.
Customer retention and digital analytics
The three guiding
principles of customer retention are – understanding your customers: paid vs
organic sources generate visitors with varying rates of loyalty – segmenting
them into relevant groups – and creating a strategy to efficiently target them.
Media companies can
use analytics to drive their retention actions and segment their audience. This
will obviously involve different methods depending on the type of media
organisation but can include some of the following groups:
- The most and least frequent users and the longest-term loyal users
- Recent or new subscribers
- Specific themes (such as ‘culture’) or publication titles (e.g. Le
Monde) - Specific publication usage to identify new possibilities for crossover
subscription offers
It’s also essential to
segment populations that are at risk of churning. For media publications and
subscriptions, you might segment on subscribers who visit your site less
frequently (churn indicators obviously vary between companies). Digital analytics and segmentation can help you deepen
brand engagement, increase visitor spend, create brand ambassadors, and predict
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). Once the segments have
been identified, it is important to track and target users across their
devices.
Cross-device analysis of retention
Cross-device
usage is essential to measure as it will significantly affect your analyses –
online audiences are likely to use a range of devices to visit a site on any
given day, and this can be difficult to recognise. Users can often appear to
leave a particular site or app, when they have in fact simply changed device.
Harnessing cross-device analytics is therefore crucial to obtain an accurate
view of how users interact with your content and media brand. One way to do
this is to encourage your audience to login permanently to all your sites.
Permanent
login is where a user remains signed in across connected sites thanks to
cookies and the ‘remember me’ option. It will give you an insight into audience
behaviour and provide a more reliable level of cross-device measurement. A more
effective method is single sign-on (SSO) where a user only needs to login to a
single account to be recognised across a network of sites belonging to a
particular publisher or media group. This goes a step further than permanent
login by making it easier and more appealing for a user to login – they only have to sign in once to get access to all
their accounts across a range of sites. It is an efficient way
to gain a comprehensive overview of cross-device usage and reliably measure
your audience.
Building a retention matrix
A retention graph or matrix is a visual way to compare different aspects of your visitor population –its main advantage is that you can focus on specific campaigns, sites and the different devices used. Obtaining a holistic view of repeat visits through cross-device analysis will help you comprehend not only who is visiting your sites, but also how often.
Analysing the behaviour of visitors is essential for understanding audience loyalty, and to carry out a thorough analysis, you need optimal and quality data. Using retention graphs is an effective way of visualising repeat visitors. A great place to start is with AT Internet’s cutting edge digital analytics solution, the mobile CRM platform provided by our partner Batch and our upcoming RFE module. By gaining a solid understanding of visitor loyalty and churn rates, you can take proactive measures to boost your retention levels.
