Under all circumstances, customer attraction and retention are one of the main things to focus on to create lasting relationships and ensure the longevity of your business. And marketing communication is key to keep the conversation longer than the last sale.

That’s why we asked Rebrandly Founder Davide De Guz and Salesmate Digital Marketing Consultant Mehul Shah to share their communication strategies, effective channels and communication calendar planning.

What communication channels (Email, SMS, Web Push, Mob Push, other) do you use to keep the conversation with your customers?

Davide De Guz: We use the blog, email, newsletter and chat -- specifically Intercom. We also use social channels such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and our video channel on Youtube. Additionally, we have an offline channel and a great community with Meetup. At the moment we can not do physical meetings and events with the current situation of Covid19 but these are the main communication channels that we currently use, although we are always open to exploring new ideas and channels.

Mehul Shah: The main concern for many companies is evaluating the best communication technique to increase customer engagement. Email, push notifications and SMS are all popular methods of communicating with customers, but it can be tricky to discern when to use what while maintaining a good balance of delivering the right information at the right moment – all without sounding spammy.

We normally use Email, SMS, Mob Push, and Calls to reach out and stay in conversation with our customers.

What services, tools or solutions do you use for marketing communication?

Davide De Guz: Meetup, Mailchimp, Intercom, Wordpress, WooCommerce, Hubspot, Trello and Slack. We use a lot of tools - this is only the tip of the iceberg. We constantly test and try new tools but these are the main ones.

Mehul Shah: As a marketer, there is a treasure trove of tools at your disposal to help your organization generate awareness and support marketing efforts. We mainly use Advertising & Sales Promotions, Social Media, Email Campaigns & Newsletters, and Organic search.

Which one works the best for you? Why?

Davide De Guz: We think that chat works very well as it puts us in direct contact with our customers and community. It’s a live setting and therefore we are able to clearly understand feedback, issues, and answer questions and other queries in a quick and efficient manner. This is the reason why it’s one of the best ways for us to communicate with our audience.

Mehul Shah: Advertising is one of the most prominent and widely used communication tools by us in a marketing campaign, as its main feature is increasing awareness. Ads can be effective not only for marketing your product or service but also for marketing your brand.

Do you use different channels for B2C and B2B segments?

Davide De Guz: B2B - one segment.

Mehul Shah: Majority of the channels will remain the same, but some of them will be changed as B2C marketing is focused on appealing the emotions, simple messaging and solving the problems whereas B2B marketing is logic-driven, time and money focused and favors in-depth promotion.

Which channel is the most effective for customer acquisition in each segment?

Davide De Guz: I’d say that the most effective is word of mouth. We are really focused on creating a great product with a great UX - continuously changing and optimizing our platform. We do at least one change per day on the platform in order to ensure that it is the best it can be, and for this reason, our customers love our platform. The more customers we have the more we are able to grow word of mouth.

Mehul Shah: For the B2B segment, the most effective channel is Webinars. As webinars are an excellent way of engaging with your target audience, you are always in full control of your content and therefore can go into greater detail about your product than you could on a mere landing page. You can engage your audience through interactive polls and by giving a live demo of your product, and also have Q&A sessions.

For the B2C segment, the most effective channel for customer acquisition is Remarketing Ads. Remarketing is a process of targeting people who are stuck at some level of your conversion funnel (for example, cart abandoners) and need to be pushed further (example- make a payment) with a tweaked marketing message.

Which channel is the most effective for customer retention in each segment?

Davide De Guz: Mainly based on the usage of the product. Again I would say that the chat is the best one in order to get feedback and requests quickly. This way we know if we need to prioritize any issues, bugs or requests for example. Because of this we have a great retention rate.

Mehul Shah: The most effective channel for customer retention in both the B2B and B2C segments is Social media without any doubt. As most of the companies are using their social media pages to provide instant support to customers apart from their regular channels like live-chat or ticketing system etc. It helps companies in identifying small errors at an early stage and resolve it asap before the issue gets bigger. So it is beneficial to both the parties and its cost-effective as well.

Which metrics do you use to measure channel effectiveness?

Davide De Guz: We have satisfaction rate metrics, specifically for the chat. For other channels such as email, for example, we have the classic ones such as open rate and click-through rate.

Mehul Shah: The first and most important metric is ROI, it gives you a clear idea of where you stand in terms of earnings compared to your spending. Apart from ROI, there are various other metrics that play an important role in defining the effectiveness or success of any particular marketing campaign. Some of them are COA (Cost of customer acquisition), CPL (Cost per lead), LTV (Customer lifetime value), etc.

Do you plan ahead a communication calendar?

Davide De Guz: We have both a calendar and update ‘breaking news’ communication when there is something interesting happening on our platform straight away in our ‘What’s new section’. We want to communicate news to our customers as soon as we can so they are informed of any updates or changes.

Mehul Shah: Yes, we plan a monthly content calendar in advance by selecting the topics that we need to cover to attract more visitors to the blog and also retain the old visitors by providing them helpful content.

How often do you revise your marketing communication model?

Davide De Guz: Continuously! We are always thinking of new experiments and try to execute them. If they work and are successful we create a procedure around these.

Do you run customer satisfaction surveys? How often?

Davide De Guz: No, not specifically but we have this rating of the chat. It’s a rating of the support and communication that we use so any time we communicate with a customer we ask them to vote on the quality of the communication so we know what can be improved.

Mehul Shah: No.

We thank Davide and Mehul for sharing their experience. By learning from experts, you inherit their knowledge and expertise and get a better perspective of where you need to be moving .