As we’re gearing up for Activate London in the fall, we’ve been considering loads about the impactful classes shared at this spring’s convention in San Francisco. Brands in every single place are investing in bettering their buyer experiences, however few share a behind-the-scenes have a look at how they’re truly doing it—which is why we’re diving into an excellent presentation by Fender.
Brian Schmidt, Director of CRM & Retention at Fender, showcased an efficient method for outlining your model’s most essential differentiators to actually win over long-term prospects for all times. We’ve put collectively a high-level overview beneath, however we extremely advocate testing the full session for a deep dive.
Tuning Into the Sounds of the Market
Every consumer-facing model on the market wants to remain on their toes in relation to providing a best-in-class expertise. With competitors abound, entrepreneurs should rabidly benchmark themselves in opposition to the “industry standard” to seek out out the place they stand, and the place they’ll get a leg up. But how precisely do you try this?
To amp up their buyer journey, Fender gathered their workforce to get a lay of the land and begin distilling down the explanation why guitar fanatics had been selecting Fender over the relaxation. As you begin to take observe of what’s occurring in your trade, listed here are three core questions Fender requested to seek out the key items of data they wanted to start out their market evaluation:
1. Are you one product of many serving the similar operate?
Over the previous 70 years, Fender has produced some of the most iconic guitars and amps in historical past, however such tools gained’t supply gamers a lot in the event that they don’t know the way to play. Fender discovered their key buyer alternative by increasing their training and studying initiatives.
2. Are you a service that facilitates a broader journey?
Fender is synonymous with music tradition and gamers of all ability ranges, which leads to loads of variance as to why gamers select them for guitars. This recognition helped them establish the want for designing a number of buyer paths for a extra customized expertise.
3. Is your product a high-frequency buy? Or a low frequency, however excessive use buy?
Players won’t purchase a guitar each month, however they flip to Fender for extra than simply the instrument. Related gear like strings, amps, and different equipment are all out there for buy and can expertise moments of excessive relevance throughout the buyer journey. Fender explored how they might enrich their experiences with complementary promotion and cross-sell methods.
Once they understood their function of their market, the Fender advertising and marketing workforce constructed cross-channel packages to assist construct the buyer expertise round particular essential milestones.
Personalizing the Player’s Path Along the Journey
With a deeper understanding of their match inside the basic market, Fender acknowledged the want for his or her advertising and marketing to successfully facilitate the totally different paths of their prospects journeys. Why? Their analysis confirmed that 90% of first-time guitar gamers will give up inside 6 months.
Survey information pointed them to design their advertising and marketing expertise round three core buyer questions on studying the guitar:
- Why do they wish to play? (desirous about growing a brand new ability; motivated by a particular occasion; impressed by an artist, a pal or relative)
- Where can they get a guitar? (bought, rented, gifted or inherited, borrowed from somebody)
- What comes subsequent? (guitar books, YouTube tutorials, on-line programs, personal classes)
Fender’s analysis confirmed that a good portion of new gamers’ journeys finish shortly after guitar acquisition.
Personalizing an individualized expertise differentiated Fender inside the musical instrument market. They deduced that if they might help the buyer journey earlier than the typical expertise cliffs, then they’d be well-equipped to nurture long-term loyalty.
Find the Customer’s Rhythm
By conducting this journey-mapping train and looking out into the richly nuanced layers of buyer experiences, Fender found new methods to help the gamers’ “purpose” (from studying via mastery) and finally positioned their model as not solely a number one guitar producer but additionally a trusted companion.
Fender additionally discovered a trusted companion in Iterable to translate their buyer journey into refined cross-channel campaigns, with workflows particularly designed to extend engagement and retention.
“Iterable allows us to drive the customer journey in a completely different way than we were able to before,” stated Schmidt. “Centralizing in-app messaging, push messaging, and email on one platform, with a unified customer profile view, enables us to seamlessly engage across our digital and physical universe. With all our data in one place, we can strategically drive lifetime value.”
This highlighted recap solely scratches the floor of their presentation—watch their full Activate video to find out how they tailor-made their findings via each stage of their acquisition funnel.