How publishers can minimize customer churn
Earlier this year, CloudSense hosted a media-themed roundtable event in the Asia-Pacific region, with attendees from Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and more. Our speakers had excellent media credentials: David Rowley, Senior director of data and identity product platforms, products, and platforms at NewsCorp USA, and Carolina Fernandez, Platform solutions consultant for AdForm, and former Director for customer success and Ad Operations at Advanced Local/Condé Nast. We summarized the key points from the first half of the roundtable in this blog. Below, we’ve put together highlights from the remainder of the event.
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A post-third party cookie world is soon approaching, the struggle for ad dollars is ramping up, and publishers are realizing the need to focus on different strategies to keep their audiences and advertisers from churning.
Advertisers have significantly more options today, including previously niche platforms that have joined the vast array of search, display and social marketing channels. It's not going to be enough to just tweak your programmatic strategy; you need to also find a way to provide a positive user experience that you can then monetize.
Customer churn currently costs US companies $168 billion a year. This is to be expected in any rapidly changing digital market with low entry barriers and high market saturation. But any revenue that can be retained by keeping clients satisfied with their ad campaign results is well worth pursuing, especially if it spares you the time, effort and resources of having to replace that customer entirely.
66% of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations. Focusing on customer support goes a long way in satisfying customers. Including a client services team from the start allows you to identify if there are potential gaps in product execution, ensuring that things are done right. On top of this, involving different teams from different departments in this process creates a rhythm of upskilling on top of churn reduction.
Whether it’s from ongoing support throughout the campaign, providing high-end reporting or making sure that all the correct information is given, customer support goes a long way. In doing so, media companies create space to improve campaign optimization, customer reporting and client services.
Revenue is already in the hands of the publishers, and so for this reason, having a customer success team in place is critical to ensure that it doesn’t slip through the cracks.
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While print revenue continues its downward trend, the pandemic didn’t cause much more than a wobble to digital ad sales, which have only picked up speed since 2020. Digital ad spend is up significantly across most segments, and although marketing departments have seen an overall drop in their total advertising budgets, digital is the one area that is retaining the lion’s share.
While it is important to be able to offer a diverse range of products, it’s easy to lose focus of what really matters and what brings in the dollars. In order to bring in higher revenue and higher margin products, publishers and advertisers need to make sure that they are fully evaluating and updating their product catalog.
Advertisers know they have to develop sophisticated marketing strategies to get the most out of their budget, which means broadcasting their messaging across multiple channels. But they also have significantly more options today, from video and social, to newsletters/email, search and display of various kinds.
Through a diverse product catalog, publishers spread the revenue loss risk, rather than sitting on a single cash flow. The best place a publisher can be is where the people are, and that’s online, email and newsletters. Publishers now have a greater need to be able to equip themselves with the tools they need to advertise on high-yield channels, quickly and efficiently.
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After years of heavy reliance on cookies to drive targeted advertising, the (third-)party is almost over. Now, with audience expectations more exacting than ever in the digital age, publishers need to reel their audiences in more and maintain loyalty by providing customized content and high quality user experiences.
Doubling down on any strategy that involves first party data is essential. 82% of advertisers in Europe feel that they should be focusing on first-party data. Publishers and advertisers need to find new ways to interact with users, to collect data and turn those interactions into profiles that can be analyzed and turned into various segments.
49% of businesses view second-party data as a high priority. Introducing second-party data allows publishers and advertisers to gain a deeper understanding about a profile, giving them the ability to create larger, more unique segments around that data.
The shift away from third-party cookies gives publishers the ability to draw on something more powerful; zero-party data. Provided by customers, as opposed to inferred from their behavior, zero-party data is how the individual wants the brand to recognize them, allowing advertisers and publishers to tailor their offerings to the customer. 77% of CMOs are investing more in zero-party data as a means to retain customers.
With these different data sets, advertisers and publishers are able to collect data from multiple sources, allowing for more accurate and efficient advertising. Publishers are then able to create a true value exchange for the consumer, allowing access to exclusive content, personalized content, subscriptions, offers and discounts.
