The Cost of Customer Acquisition
Converting Customers to Clients
Customers to Clients? What does that mean? Most companies refer to customers as an entity that engages in a single transaction with them. That’s why we have another term, repeat customer, for the occasional and surprise re-visit of that same entity. Because it’s unique for a customer to come back more than once, we often times don’t put much effort into getting our customers to re-engage. The issue, however, is we all know that the most expensive lead generation activity is new customer acquisition. So why do we spend so much time on acquiring new customers instead of customer retention or customer satisfaction? The answer is simple. Because it’s more difficult, more subjective and takes a team effort.
However, much like a law firm has clients that they’ve represented for years, Clarity has clients that we’ve been working with for years. The key is to get the company to shift their attitude from acquiring customers (short-term prospecting) to building long-term client relationships (i.e. building relationships instead of selling widgets). Once you’ve got the attitude, you need to build a business model that can support that. Clarity has done that over the course of more than seven years and we’re still working on it.
How Does a Community Fit In?
We mentioned above that it takes a team effort, and if labor is your most expensive resource, then the more resources required to convert customers to clients, the more expensive the proposition. But what if you didn't bear the expense of those resources? That’s where a community can help. A well-designed and nurtured community can do more than just convert customers; it can both support and grow your business. How you ask? Customers that can find answers to questions themselves, get both a sense of satisfaction, and are never embarrassed for asking a stupid question. The community rarely judges, because that same sense of pride is gained by the user who answered the question and helped a fellow customer. Meanwhile, you didn't incur any tech support expense and if your community platform is smart enough to self-adjust (users vote up/down questions so only the best/most approved questions show in the search results), then you're golden. This is only one simple example, and there are a ton more.
Key Benefits of a DNN Social Community
- Increase customer engagement (i.e. stickiness)
- Give customers a reason to come back
- Lowers technical support costs
- Improves customer satisfaction
- Provide ready access to FAQs, videos, forums, blogs, etc.
- Allows them to ask questions for free
- Community can rate (thumbs up/down) answers, auto-corrects search results for best answers
- Ideation and Gamification can incent / promote desired behaviors
- Provides feedback platform for Product Management
- Becomes SEO-rich content for search engines
What about Features & Pricing?
We could go on and on about all the benefits and reasons that you need a community, and even more time on why DNN Evoq Social is the preferred platform to use. If you’re interested in more details about the features and pricing of a DNN Evoq Social community, then
click here to read on (DNN Evoq Social Community Platform).