How acquisition data can shape your retention strategy

When we’re asked how much data an organisation should collect, we only ever respond in one way.

There’s no such thing as too much data.

Imagine you’re looking for a Valentine’s Day card for that special someone (yes, even your cat). What’s going to speak to them more – a generic Valentine’s message on the front or something personalised with their name, a photo of the two of you, and maybe even an in-joke? A couple of subtle tweaks and you’ll be sending a nuanced message that actually speaks to your audience.

But even though personalisation is a key ingredient of a successful retention strategy, it can only happen if you prioritise data collection from the very beginning of your relationship with your customers.

That’s where a robust CRM strategy comes into play; retention just isn’t achievable without it.

Wait, why are we banging on about retention?

Retention needs to be front and centre of your strategy for secure revenue and sustainable growth.

This is because paid acquisition, although often necessary, is a costly and time consuming process for any business. So it’s crucial you’re getting lifetime value from every customer you bring in. However, it can be easy to take your foot off the pedal once a customer’s in the door, especially when you’re unsure how to maintain a connection with them going forward.

So what’s our top tip for approaching data collection and retention?

Don’t silo your acquisition and retention teams. Instead, get them working together so they can be super savvy with the customer data they collect at the very beginning of the acquisition process.

Because what data you harvest from the outset will help shape the ways you can interact with your customers further down the line. After all, the more options available to support your retention strategy, the more potential you’ll have to connect with your audience as individuals in a way they’ll respond to. That’s how you’ll turn them into a longstanding, high-value customer and justify those initial acquisition costs.

There’s more though. You need to capture and label your data correctly before you can do anything. It’s an easy step to overlook, but without investing a little TLC, you won’t be able to use it. Which means your long-term retention strategy just got blown out of the water.

Here are a few of the essential steps we take when auditing any data:

• Find out what data a client needs and how they’re going to use it.
• Review available data and how it’s labelled to ensure the data properties being used correctly.
• Clean up the data to ensure it’s usable and pulling through correctly.
• Are automations and journeys set up? If not, we can build them from scratch.

It may sound like a laborious task, but building the right foundations and having high-quality data from the start will give you much more scope in the future for a successful retention strategy.

Besides, that’s why we started a specialist CRM agency – because we love data and what it can do for a business. That means you can skip the steps you don’t have time and hire in the experts to fulfil all your CRM requirements.