Churn is an important metric for companies offering cloud-based services and in startup companies your churn percentage is always reasonably low, in the beginning – you may actually manage to retain around 99% of your existing business. However, if your focus is growth then, as well as cross-selling, customer acquisition will be a major focus for you while sustaining existing relationships.
If you’re on a growth track, within a few years, you will reach a point where the challenge in churn management becomes the growing loss of revenue, as both your churn and revenue start to increase. For example, a churn of 1% of £45K turnover looks and feels a lot different from a 5% of £63K. Your revenue may have increased by 40% but your loss via churn has rocketed from £450 to £3150 and growing. A 600% increase in lost revenue is a major concern.
![By Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC (http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_rec.php?id=6089) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](http://www.brightfire.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/cloud-churn-300x300.jpg)
Here is some valuable information for your Sales Department on how to gain business intelligence using marketing automation software Hubspot’s Prospect tool.
What the Prospects tool doesn’t provide you with is contact names and email addresses, but it does provide you with company IP addresses and pageview information that can seriously pay-off if you are willing to do some detective work and assimilate the intelligence to establish your leads. (more…)
Brightfire normally adds to the pile of New Year check-list resources at this most wonderful time of year.
(N.B. See if you can find the 27 festive song references – one in each paragraph)
This year, to save you from tears, we have gathered together some of the most prominent advice that is already out there.
So here it is, Merry Christmas, our distillation of the top 20 Google search results for ‘New Year marketing check-lists and we’ve found that the advice falls into two broad categories: Review and Plan.
At this week’s UK Inbound Marketing Conference I ran a breakout session on lead nurturing. In preparation I had researched and composed a bunch of slides on how to use sophisticated tools and techniques to pull prospects down the marketing funnel and generate marketing qualified leads.
Just before the session started I realised that time was too short to work through the material and so I decided to spend a good portion of the session asking the group of about 70 content marketers about their concerns related to lead nurturing.
It was impossible in 30 minutes to discuss all these concerns and tap into the collective wisdom and experience in the room which meant that the session provided more questions than answers.
However, a number of things occurred to me when reviewing what they said which I wanted to share in this blog and which might have made for a better session agenda (isn’t hindsight great!).
In today’s multi channel world to reach increasingly connected prospects, a company needs to provide a user journey across channels and platforms that are part of their target audience’s world.
Indeed, marketers are increasingly aware of the need to connect with so-called “consumers of information” through the savvy use of data and targeted engagement strategies. But are they doing it effectively?
The Digiday/Acxiom State of the Industry study found that while most marketers want to understand their customers and engage with them with bespoke experiences “in this era of the empowered consumer”, the majority haven’t yet found the optimal way of tapping into user data effectively.
Did you know that that 40% of web visitors never return to a website after a bad browsing experience? Businesses by and large have come to understand the value of creating compelling content for attracting and retaining web visitors. But it is also important to ensure that a website is designed in a way that it offers a compelling user journey.
You surely don’t want your visitors to head to the exit door of your web real estate as soon as they have entered, right? (more…)
‘Big data’, relevancy and personalisation have been all the talk in the digital marketing world over the past year. But while marketers by and large have acknowledged the rising demand for content and services specifically tailored to the individual, the actual implementation has been seen as near impossible, mostly due to the segmentation limitations of existing social websites. This is now starting to change. Guess who is leading the way? (more…)
While business social media engagement was all the hype in the first few years following the advent of Facebook and the subsequent like, now the big digital marketing debate is centred around the monetary value of social media – something that is admittedly tricky to measure in absolute terms. As we asked in a previous blog post, exactly how do retweets translate into clients and how do you determine the direct impact of social media on the bottom line? (more…)
You may have seen the recent publicity over the EU Cookie Law (aka The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) (Amendment) Regulations 2011) and wondered just how it affects your website and your business.
You’ll find some simple steps to understand that impact below, but just in case you aren’t aware of the new regulations, here’s a quick round-up. (more…)
“Social media is cool… but what’s the ROI?” This is the first question that is sure to pop in the mind of a CEO upon the very mention of “social”. And rightly so. No self-respecting marketing officer should approach social media without a clear view of the objectives of using the channel in question and an estimate of the impact social marketing activities would have on the bottom line. But while the objectives are fairly easy to set right, linking ‘likes’ to sales seems to be quite a challenge, even for the most seasoned of marketers. (more…)
