Unfortunately there aren’t really any shortcuts and 10 facets are needed to build an effective strategy.
Trying to shortcut your approach is likely to disappoint your customers, your business or both.
What is a contact strategy?
- Conversion from prospect to customer
- Cross- and up-sell
- Nurturing of new customers
- Repeat visits and Advocacy
So how do you build a good one?
Follow these 10 steps and you will have a solid strategy that is grounded in customer insight and business requirements.
1. Start with the customer
- Customer Segments – how you split your customer base depending on value (e.g. RFV), behaviour or demographics.
- Personas – defining how the needs and motivations of your customers differ
- Lifecycle stage – the length of relationship (tenure) that you have with customers. Your CS could be very different for new customers compared to long standing customers even though their profile (segment) and needs (persona) could be similar.
2. Be clear on your objectives
- Increasing customer numbers – via new customer acquisition, retention or reactivation
- Increasing visit frequency – getting customers to engage or transact more frequently
- Increasing spend (or ATV) – getting customers to increase their repertoire or buy into more expensive categories
3. Consider the whole customer journey
4. Understand lifecycle flows
5. Plan to measure
6. Your customer "moment of truth"
the points in the relationship with a customer where you have the opportunity to earn their true loyalty by engaging with them.
7. Ensure it's feasible, desirable and viable

Your strategy needs to be balanced.
It’s no use designing something brilliantly customer-led but having no way to fund it or deliver it internally.
A balanced strategy will be genuinely innovative and disruptive.
8. Data you will need
9. Set contact rules
Contact rules are an agreed set of business rules which govern which customers you communicate with, when, how and how often.
They help to give precedent to certain communications and ensure that you don’t over-communicate with your customers.
As you build your strategy, define the priorities of messages that you want to communicate and use these as the basis for your contact rules.
10. Specify your communication channels
These 10 Steps
These steps should be applied holistically. Unfortunately there aren’t really any shortcuts and all of these facets are needed to build an effective strategy.
Trying to shortcut your approach is likely to disappoint your customers, your business or both.
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