Marketers, over a period of time, have realised that it’s easier to sell to existing customers than to rely on new leads, nurture them, turn them into sales qualifying leads and finally convert them into customers. This calls for a strong customer retention strategy to amplify your business. As retention is gaining momentum, marketers need to understand fundamental touch points of retaining customers for lifetime value.
It is estimated that 80% of future business comes from 20% of existing customers. As customer retention is taking the center stage, more and more brands are focusing on engaging customers, delighting them with great customer experiences, and winning their lifetime loyalty.
Moreover, digital landscape, as we all know, is ever changing; this makes it imperative for marketers to be familiar with these technology changes with an edge over peers to penetrate the competition. While seminars, discussion forums and similar public events are great ways to stay relevant in the market, but these have limitations in terms of frequency of occurrence. The best way to stay informed about your domain expertise is to follow updates from various digital platforms such as podcasts, webinars and blogs. In the last few years, podcasts and blogs have become a very popular resource for learning about the latest digital marketing concepts.
The best part of any podcast is that you can have on demand content available with you while commuting to work, waiting to meet a client, or getting in a quick workout to ease some of your stress. Irrespective of time and place you can listen to these customer retention podcasts, and gain some valuable insights to implement at your business.
Blogs are another valuable source of information where marketers need to focus upon. This is a great way to stay updated with latest trends in digital marketing. Some of the best blogging platforms such as Neil Patel, Search Engine Journal, Social Media Magazine are offering tips, guides, and trends with lots of graphical insights that are popular among marketers worldwide. Blogs may offer deeper understating with screenshot-based real-time analytics that is rare in Podcasts/webinars. Such insights often help marketers to align their strategy for retaining existing buyers.
With an objective to help retention marketers, we have crafted a meticulous list of 15 Blogs and Podcasts to keep marketers abreast of latest trends in the digital space.
1. The one that tops our list is PNR: This Old Marketing with Joe Pullezi and Robert Rose where the two content marketing giants share their inputs to discuss how through content marketers can attract and retain customers.
2. Customer Loyalty Space occupies the second place in our list which features stalwarts like TechnologyAdvice’s Clark Buckner, BigDoor’s Ashley Tate, and Maritz Motivaiton’s Barry Kirk. Focussing on best practices in customer loyalty and offers maximizing loyalty programs, this podcast adds value to customers via rewards, integrations, and more.
The following three episodes are especially insightful:
- Social Media, Cult Loyalty, and Social Rewards
- Future of Loyalty Rewards
- The “Earn and Burn” of Loyalty Currency
3. The Unofficial Shopify Podcast reveals how to grow your Shopify stores by holding a no holds barred discussion of ecommerce marketing strategy. Senior e-commerce consultant Kurt Elster shares insights and tactical approaches to grow your traffic and improve the bottom line. Three episodes that robbed our heart are:
- Customer Retention: How to Keep Customers Coming Back
- Optimizing for Retention & Repeat Purchases with Eric Davis
- How Beardbrand Built a Better Business by Building Community
4. The Hubcast from Hubspot is a great inbound marketing resource for all types of tips, hacks, and information.
5. Another source of information that takes our attention is from B2B Nation dedicated for B2B sales and marketers. Focusing on customer retention this podcast showcases expert opinion and advice for B2B marketers with their retention strategy.
The key episodes as per our list are:
- Joseph Jaffe: Why Customer Retention is the New Acquisition
- CEB: Applying and Developing Consumer Insight
- Inflictive: Growing Affinity for Your Brand
6. The next one in our list is The Kings of Content Customer Retention Podcast from King Fish Media which is a marketing agency and content marketing leader that helps clients engage customers to grow revenue, and offers customer retention podcast to create customer loyalty and customer relationship.
We endorse the following episodes too follow:
- How to Talk to Your Customers
- How to Reactivate a Lapsed Customer
- The Right Content for the Right Platform
7. The one that we included in our list of podcast is Entrepreneur Podcast Network – Customer Retention that offers podcast programming aimed to help entrepreneurs and small businesses succeed via informative, inspirational, and insightful shows and episodes. The podcast focusses on customer loyalty, customer service, customer experience to name a few.
We emphasis on three key episodes from Entrepreneur Podcast Network – Customer Retention:
- Three Tips to Enhance Your Customer’s Experience
- Customer Loyalty Redefined
- The Strategic Importance of Leveraging Your Customer Service Group to Really Understanding Your Customer.
8. The Chief Customer Officer Human Duct Tape Show with Jeanne Bliss is included in our list is because of Jeanne Bliss has pioneered the Chief Customer Officer role. The podcast is designed to grow companies by focusing on customer experience. Jeanne shares all of her expertise in The Chief Customer Officer Human Duct Tape Show for customer retention.
We mention these three episodes that focusses on:
- Lessons from a Three Time Chief Customer Officer, with Darryl Speech – CB018
- First 90 Days of a Chief Customer Success Officer, with Duygu Cibik – CB22
- The Value of Building Bridges for Customer Experience, with Curtis Kopf (CB7)
9. CX Network Podcast which aims for a global community for customer experience, service, insight, digital, and marketing leaders is included in our next list. The best part of the podcast is its customer retention podcasts that features interviews with customer experience leaders and cover customer service, customer experience strategy, building customers’ trust, personalization, and much more.
Three key episodes we like from CX Network Podcasts:
- The Importance of Going Back to Basics to Build a Successful Customer Experience Strategy
- Ulster Bank’s Ambition? Becoming the Number One Bank for Customer Service Trust and Advocacy by 2020
- Personalised and Data-Driven Experiences are the Future of Customer Experience
10. Transforming the Customer Experience with Kristina Evey is another milestone in our list that is aimed to increase sales and revenue by delivering amazing customer experiences that build customer loyalty. Being a customer service expert Kristina helps customers with her podcasts through Transforming the Customer Experience with Kristina Evey available on both iTunes and Stitcher.
Three worth mentioning episodes we like to list down are:
- Managing Customer Expectations to Ensure Customer Loyalty
- Using Empathy to Build HUMAN Business Relationships
- Five Steps to Building a Better Customer Experience through Better Service
Apart from these listed podcasts, at Netcore, we also recommend some of the blogs marketers need to follow for better customer retention and improve bottom line. These blogs are listed depending on factors such as education, tips, tricks, and more.
11. The most reverent name in blogs category indubitably is HubSpot —the pioneer in the world of inbound marketing. With quite an exhaustive list they cover a wide range of topics which offer many different perspectives and expertise. They set the standard for inbound marketing and surely their blogs are nothing less than a lead generating machine.
12. The next that finds a place in our list is QuickSprout by Neil Patel—a place to find best of the solutions for digital marketing traffic generation and monetising the same. Our favourite pick from here is The Beginners Guides to Online Marketing. In case you want to expand the circumference of your digital knowledge make sure you don’t miss it.
13. The next name to follow our blog list is Mention—a platform which follows a how-to style, making it an easy learning experience. The best part of their blogs is a wrap-up section that helps you understand how to implement what you read. On top of it, Mention hosts regular webinars that tie-in with their blogs.
14. Disrupting Advertising —a paid search and conversion rate optimization agency has analyzed over $800 million worth of ad spend in their lifetime. Disruptive Advertising interestingly audited more than 2,000 Google Ads accounts in recent times and learnt that only 12% of keywords produce revenue. With that kind of analysis, you can trust they do best what they do.
With an aim to educate marketers/readers on best practices of paid search, display advertising, LinkedIn ads, retargeting, and Facebook advertising they have created a niche. Their blog titles begin with a number so you know exactly what you can expect even before you start reading the article.
15. We love to include SEMrush for the types of blogs they post on their platform which is of the nature “How-to” and “What-is” for marketers to gain valuable insights for competitive advantage.
With this list we, at Netcore, attempt to empower modern marketers to map their customers journey and offer them a delightful experience for better retention and more repeat business for revenue generation at enterprise level including mid-size companies. We understand the importance of harnessing technology for customer lifetime value through knowledge dissemination.
