Retain more customers by expanding on the open web

When it comes to customer retention, marketers tend to focus on their owned media channels. It makes sense; they can enjoy one-to-one relationships with known customers and personalize each interaction.

The catch? According to Epsilon, marketers could be missing up to 88 percent of customers who spend their online time on the open web. In addition, owned channels are not truly representative of your customer base: not everyone accepts messages from apps or opens email or SMS. Furthermore, overcommunicating across owned channels can cause friction with customers that leads to attrition.

Expanding from an owned-channel retention strategy to the open web allows brands to tap into a broader and diverse audience pool, reaching potential in-market customers who may not actively engage with the brand's own channels.

RELATED CONTENT: How to grow your customer base in 2024

What is the open web?

The internet that we use for everyday activities — like browsing, searching, reading the news, online shopping and social media — is known as the open web.

According to the Mozilla Foundation, the open web is “by and for all its users, not select gatekeepers or governments”. It comprises technical concepts like open-source code and open standards and also encompasses democratic concepts like free expression and digital inclusion.

Don’t just stick to what you know

Owned channels – including websites or ecommerce sites, social media, mobile apps and blogs – offer clear advantages. The more owned media channels a business has, the larger their digital footprint, which also means there is greater potential to connect with customers and followers.

Organizations have full control over what is published on their owned media channels and when, enabling them to build a comprehensive strategy for communicating directly with their audience. This control can be incredibly helpful in ensuring brand consistency, as well as providing a high degree of flexibility and agility.

Owned channels also generate large amounts of data that can be used to further tailor retention strategies, personalize communications and enhance the customer experience.

Conversely not all brands see advertising as a similar investment quality – It can be hard to measure and even harder to understand who is being communicated to. It is often seen as a cost of business rather than a CAPEX investment like CRM. Yet it has massive scale compared to owned channels.

The silver lining here is that the technology now exists to execute digital advertising one-to-one, over time, with every interaction measurable exactly like CRM. This is why brands should feel confident in expanding their retention efforts to the open web. Doing so will allow them to tap into a far broader and more diverse audience pool.

It will also help them reach potential in-market customers who may not actively engage with the brand's owned channels.

RELATED CONTENT: 3 ways AI can automate customer support content

How to expand customer retention to the open web

Often, businesses will partner with a digital media specialist to find and address their target audiences on the open web. Finding the right partner is key: they should provide a robust, people-based identity solution for messaging real in-market customers – allowing the brand to identify those individual customers who are already in their loyalty customer database and those who are not.

Additionally, being able to connect online and offline purchases lets organizations track full customer journeys and customers’ in-market status based on their buying behavior.

Predictive AI can help drive real-time decisioning and optimization. A partner that uses AI well can help a brand understand who to message, where to reach a person across channels, what to say and when, to ensure you communicate with them at a time when they are most receptive to your message.

Organizations should also ensure their partner can provide granular-level measurement to prove the program’s value and improve its performance. This includes reporting on every impression and outcome across touchpoints, and tying both online and in-store purchases back to the ads they serve.

Avoiding overlap on the open web

A common barrier to open web expansion is the issue of overlap.

Without proper coordination, brands risk sending redundant messages to customers who are already engaged through a brand’s owned channels. This can lead to message fatigue and frustration, not to mention wasted resources and decreased ROI for the brand.

To avoid this, brands need to use an identifier that enables them to run additional campaigns across both owned and open web channels, tailoring content to align with previous interactions and preferences. Optimizing the frequency and timing of messages also prevents overload. For example, coordinating the release of messages to avoid simultaneous delivery across channels, ensuring that customers don’t feel inundated.

Incentives – such as exclusive promotions or early access – based on the channel through which customers engage, are another effective strategy to prevent message fatigue caused by overlap. All of this coalesces to create a seamless experience regardless of the channel.

RELATED CONTENT: The CX practitioner's intro to cyber security

Key points to consider

Brands seeking to review and expand their existing customer retention efforts should ask themselves the following questions:

• What is the size of our customer file today? Do we know what our reachable audience is in our owned channels?
• What percentage of our customer file is currently subscribed to our emails? What is the open rate?
• How many unique individuals does our email or text database represent? What percentage of our total customers does this translate to?

Understanding these points will help them identify the largest gaps in their customer communication strategy – and address them effectively.

The open web offers a vast, but often untapped, landscape where brands can discover and engage with a much broader audience than on their owned marketing channels.

Running supplemental open-web retention campaigns alongside their existing owned channel strategies will help brands reach more people – and importantly, reconnect with a large proportion of their customer base they might not have even realized was missing.

Get the latest CX resources straight to your inbox

Sign-up to the CX Network newsletter today to stay informed about new CX resources and industry updates. 

Learn More