Flip the Funnel: How to Use Existing Customers to Gain New Ones

LACK OF CARING OR SIMPLE NEGLECT

In a world where perception is reality, we’re awfully good at giving the impression that we just don’t care. We’re relatively unreachable, inaccessible, and unresponsive. Truthfully, any business that banks on acceptable or default levels of churn doesn’t care nearly enough about its lifeblood. The very existence of churn requires a third pillar—containing investment, budget, and specific tactics—designed to complement acquisition (gaining new customers) and retention (keeping them). Call it attrition if you like (preventing them from defecting, leaving, or being stolen.) Although retention and attrition might seem to be the same thing, they are most decidedly not.

If acquisition’s weapons of choice are advertising and promotions, and retention’s arsenal consists of customer relationship management (CRM) and loyalty marketing, then attrition’s tools of the trade might include customer service 2.0, commitment to conversation, and affiliate 2.0. (as I’ll elaborate later). So ask yourself:

• How does your organization operate with respect to acceptable levels of churn?

• Do you have specific resources dedicated to preventing churn and/or countering attrition?

• To what extent do you court lapsed or lost customers in a concerted, intense effort to woo them back to your brand(s)?

Throughout this book, I’ll be coming back to an acronym I coined in Life after the 30-Second Spot: C.O.S.T. (Cultural, Organizational, Strategic, Tactical). For every ...