We spoke with Zak Normandin, founder and CEO of Iris Nova, about how his company has leveraged SMS to better serve its customer base.

Why personalization and retention are important now more than ever

The retail industry has faced major changes this year, both good and bad. Companies have had to adjust budgets, reimagine marketing efforts and adapt to new consumer behaviors. Uncommon Goods, an eco-conscious online and catalog retailer of unique gifts, is no stranger to this variety of operational shifts brought on by the pandemic.

This report examines how B2B marketers and other customer-facing teams should approach their customer growth efforts.

In a January 2020 study from London Research and customer experience management company Reputation.com, 49% of client-side marketers worldwide reported that they use customer satisfaction as a KPI to measure and monitor CX. Customer retention was used by 44% of respondents; another 43% used conversion rate.

Starling has been focused on building out its Marketplace with more services, which could help it simultaneously drive retention and customer acquisition.

Small and midsize FIs should decide whether their priority and motivation for new innovation projects is customer retention, acquisition, or both—and tailor their strategies accordingly to make the most of their limited budgets.

Retailers often focus on customer acquisition—a costly prospect—at the expense of customer retention. Instant gratification can be a bigger incentive than building loyalty over time.

You must be seeing an uptick in new customers. We are. As a result, we’re accelerating our plans around retention strategies—specifically around data, segmentation, and personalization—and around the tools and platforms to execute those strategies. We’re working to deliver highly relevant and engaging experiences to retain those customers. What do those tools and platforms look like?

Mike is responsible for marketing the company’s event cloud portfolio, including defining and executing go to market strategies to drive new user acquisition, installed based revenue growth, and customer retention. He has 20+ years of industry experience in deep product marketing and management experience for event and education tech, broadcast media, and telecoms companies.

That in turn will also lend itself to customer retention—particularly as competition picks up from fintechs and neobanks. Leveraging fintechs’ technology through partnerships can be a faster route to rolling out new upgrades than building and testing proprietary features.