Engagement & Retention-Focused CRM Strategy

Direct to Consumer Email Marketing Strategy
Content Strategy & Content Backlog Creation
Segmentation
Personalization
Persona Definition
Customer Journey Mapping

Through a series of strategic workshops, I uncovered customer motivations to build foundational personas and journeys for my client in the financial services industry. I created an engagement and retention-focused CRM strategy.

Unique Project Attributes:

Focus on retention and engagement. The post-acquisition strategy is not centered around "conversion" as they are more like a SaaS company or subscription than ecommerce or product-focused.
Created a net new segmentation and engagement strategy. The client had acquisition and early nurture strategies, but I was starting mostly from scratch on engagement and retention flows.

Key Insights

Their previous strategy treated all customers the same when they first joined, but we identified that some customers start as experts and some are beginners and they have very different needs. My strategy hinged on getting customers familiar with the platform while collecting enough data to segment them. This initial segmentation helped define the journeys and content strategy for each customer type.
I learned that customers are motivated by education (advancing their knowledge) and culture (a niche community). As a highly-regulated industry, many typical nurture and engagement strategies were off the table. I found that content focusing on education and culture would resonate best with customers, help them meet their personal goals, and establish loyalty with the business.

Workshops

Workshop sessions focused on segmentation, customer journeys, and creating an omnichannel strategy. In the segmentation workshop, we used six categories of customer segmentation: behavioral, psychographic, journey-based, needs-based, technographic, and demographic.

Mapping and ideation exercises explored customer context, behavior, mindset, and motivations.

(note: examples have been edited with redactions)

Foundational Personas

Foundational personas rooted our strategy around key customer types. Building these personas helped gain internal aliment around the customer types. They also helped with my own understanding of the customers. In addition to building empathy internally for the core personas, I used them to drive the segmentation and messaging strategies.

Since customers have distinct levels of expertise, I centered our personas around their maturity with the subject matter. The high-level segmentation was novice vs experienced and sub-segmentation dug deeper into the motivations of each segment, allowing the content to help them meet their personal goals through specific campaigns.

(note: persona example redacted for confidentiality)

Content & Messaging Strategy

The content strategy focused on messaging informed by mindset and sentiment.

I created a detailed strategy that helps keep the customer engaged across the customer life cycle, pinpointing key moments to tap into their mindset - based on their behavior.

(note: this is a redacted high-level summary of the strategy)

Content Clusters & Atomic Content

Building on the content strategy, I introduced the client to the concepts of atomic content and content clusters to showcase how content can be reused across channels. These methods are efficient for content production and management, a main concern of the client.

Zero-Party Data

We also discussed Zero-Party data strategies to enrich the customer data profile, enabling the client to better target customers by qualifying, scoring, and segmenting them. Customers will get tailored content the more is learned about them.

User Engagement Map

To summarize the key moments of data collection and engagement opportunities, I took our detailed customer journey maps and simplified them. This allowed me to visually tell the story of how both the business and the customer will experience the new campaign flows.

As more information is learned about the customer, they qualify into segments and sub-segments that nurture them to the next level. I also provided a backlog of content to create, having determined the messaging and content types that will resonate best with each persona at each point.

(note: example heavily redacted for confidentiality)

I not only created the segment concepts, but also defined the rules for segmentation. I provided details for new data collection opportunities for the second phase. I delivered strategy documentation and recommendations, flows and trigger maps for each segment and subsegment, a content backlog, and a roadmap to guide the client through implementation.

The client was thrilled with the level of detail I provided and the depth of understanding of their business and customers.

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