icm27

ICM January-February 2017

you let them run out of oil twice, they are very unlikely to come back. This is all logical, but most win-back campaigns make the same offer to everyone. Two prominent missteps are: making only one offer when you should know what might bring them back (depending upon why they left in the first place) and making an offer to all, when some of the lost accounts are simply not coming back and your data should be telling you that. So ask yourself, should we even send the postcard or letter? After the cost of delivering oil, the next most impactful and inefficient expenditure is in sales and marketing. Companies often spend about $60 per customer per year —of the $200 SG&A dollars—to retain existing customers and to solicit new ones. Too often there is no clear delineation between dollars spent on retention and new customer acquisition, but given what we have seen over the last 25 years in this industry, it is clear that there is a “spray and pray” approach to customer retention. Send everyone a newsletter, even without knowing who may or may not open it. Give everyone who calls about “price” a $25 credit, regardless of their longevity or their customer score (yes, you need to segment your customers; they are not all the same). Email marketing has improved customer communications and is a step towards better ways of engaging the younger homeowner. However, as tech trends come and go, and email has been around for a while, it is starting to be perceived as this millennium’s version of “snail mail.” Communicating with customers is of the upmost importance, and proper, professionally crafted messages are absolutely necessary. Otherwise, you might just be sending out noise, no different than the teacher in the Peanuts comic strip. Combining the right messages with the right methods of communicating is key. Almost everyone has a smartphone (at least almost every single family home owner) and, as we all know, when the phone buzzes, we look. It can be a text message or a “push notification,” but the statistics are that about 97% of text messages are read within three minutes on a smartphone, while less than 30% of emails are read on a smartphone, even hours later. It isn’t an accident that the “delete” button is far easier to find for an email than for a particular text message on a smartphone. Steve Jobs’ legacy still lives! When you match the desire and need to communicate with your customers with proper and customized messaging, along with a strong knowledge of which customers need which message at any particular time, it is likely a much more efficient way to communicate than an ad in a newspaper or even on a nice website. The message here is that we all need to communicate. We need to send timely and relevant messages to customers. They are no longer out there looking for us—we need to look for them and to engage them. If you have the data, and you have the message you want to convey, shouldn’t you look for the best way to spend that part of your SG&A? ICM continued from p. 30 ICM/January/February 2017 27


ICM January-February 2017
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