Cutting the Customer Attrition Rate with Surveys

Cutting the Customer Attrition Rate with Surveys

Brands must monitor their customer attrition rate regularly, as customer attrition occurs in all businesses. Gauging the rate at which customers churn, this measurement is crucial to keep track of, as it directly affects subscriptions, sales, revenue and a company’s general stance in regards to its customers.

23-30% of all American companies lose their customers annually, due to a lack of consumer loyalty. This rate alone is severe, yet it only measures customer attrition that springs from a lack of consumer loyalty, pointing to many other existing reasons that cause customers to churn.

Another cause behind customer attrition is customer service, as 71% of consumers end their relationship with a business due to poor customer service. While the loss of a customer will vary from business to business in terms of value, the average value of a lost customer globally is $243. 

These figures present the serious consequences and implications of customer attrition. Businesses can nip it in the bud or at the very least, stay aware of it by studying its metric. 

This article explains the customer attrition rate, the importance of studying it, its two main types, how to calculate it, how surveys help reduce it and more.

Understanding the Customer Attrition Rate

Interchangeably called the customer churn rate and customer turnover rate, this rate refers to the percentage of customers lost within a given time period, which can be weekly, monthly or annually. Although this metric is typically defined by customers, it can also be defined by products. 

Although this rate is used interchangeably with the customer churn rate, it should not be confused with it, as the customer churn rate focuses solely on lost customers, whereas the customer attrition rate considers both how many customers were lost and how many were gained during a specific period. 

This rate is the antithesis of the customer retention rate, which measures the number or percentage of customers that a business retains over a given period of time. Ideally, the attrition rate ought to be kept as low as possible in order to sustain higher retention rates and keep a business profitable. 

Consideration of the attrition rate is especially important for businesses with recurring revenue models, such as SaaS companies and subscription-based businesses. In these businesses, the customer attrition rate refers to the number or percentage of service subscribers that discontinue their subscriptions in a given time period. 

However, all companies ought to monitor this rate, as all companies lose customers, even some of the most loyal. In addition, there are also customers who make one-time purchases. All in all, customer retention is not guaranteed and a customer relationship with a business is rarely, if ever, permanent.

The Importance of Studying the Customer Attrition Rate

This rate is crucial to track periodically and most importantly, to keep it at a minimum. There are various factors that make up the importance of studying this metric and keeping it low. 

First off, it is crucial to track this rate, as every lost customer requires acquiring a new one. While important as well, customer acquisition is more expensive and not as convenient as customer retention, as it costs 5 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one. Existing customers are also far more valuable, as customers will pay up to 57% more on brands they are loyal to. 

Although acquisition costs are required in sales, marketing, advertising and customer onboarding efforts, retention is still more profitable, as merely a 5% increase in retention rates can reap 25-95% in extra profit.

Customer acquisition can be difficult, but winning back a lost customer is even more difficult, as the damage has already been done and they’ve made up their minds. The loss of customers is also obviously harmful to revenue and can therefore reduce profits significantly. 

Next, this metric is necessary to check, as it is a key performance indicator (KPI) that businesses need to stay aware of to ensure that they are making the correct decisions in their strategic planning process and beyond. To this end, this rate also affects a business’s ROI.

It is possible for some customer acquisition expenditures to represent a negative ROI for a company, which represents a loss of money for the company. This occurs when a business substantially invests in its customer acquisition efforts, yet new customers don’t stick around for long enough.

Another reason behind the importance of performing a customer attrition analysis is that if a customer attrition rate is too high, it may be due to a fundamental problem with a company’s offering. It may also signify problems in other areas, such as customer experience, the products and services, the prices and more.

Additionally, it is critical to measure this rate, as a high customer attrition rate often carries a far-reaching impact, which can manifest in reputational damage

When more and more customers become unhappy and leave a business for good, a significant chunk of them will make their unhappiness known and spread it to the public — whether through social media, review sites, forums, comments on blogs and other digital properties or simply poor assessments via word-of-mouth.  

The Two Kinds of Customer Attrition 

There are two forms of customer attrition; it is vital for marketers and market researchers to differentiate the two of them. The two forms are active customer attrition and passive customer attrition.

Active Attrition

This kind of attrition is typically associated with subscription business models. These include businesses in the SaaS, telecom, publishing and Internet industries. Active attrition occurs when a customer cancels their subscription to a SaaS product, a phone line, a magazine, a newspaper, an app, a streaming service, etc.

A business’s retention experts who are tasked with lowering active attrition have an advantage: they know precisely when a customer is going to leave. This allows them to carry out marketing tactics bent on changing the customer’s mind. These include lowering subscription costs, offering free add-ons and more. 

The disadvantage lies in having to change the minds of consumers who have decided to churn, as there is no guarantee that even the most aggressive marketing techniques will bring back this patronage.

Passive Attrition

Passive attrition refers to the phenomenon of a customer who simply stops buying from or engaging with a business. This kind of attrition is predominantly associated with e-commerce websites, retail stores, on-request service providers and other kinds of non-subscription-based businesses.

There is a major challenge in reducing passive attrition, as it relies on predicting when a customer is about to leave. At times, marketers and market researchers will be able to pinpoint “churn signals” before a customer leaves. In this instance, they can perform marketing techniques to prevent customers from churning. 

This involves providing customers with relevant offers and otherwise enticing them to remain active customers. There are also times in which businesses can regain lost customers. However, it is typically more feasible to retain customers with a risk of leaving than it is to regain customers who have churned.

How to Calculate the Customer Attrition Rate

Calculating the customer attrition rate is a simple process for many businesses, especially subscription-based businesses and agencies, as they hold lists of active clients. These kinds of businesses can easily refer to their active client lists when working out this rate. 

But for businesses in other verticals such as retail stores, this is likely to be a more difficult and less accurate process. This is because for these businesses, determining the exact number of active customers is rather subjective.

There are two ways to calculate this rate. As such, there are two formulas making up this metric. Before plugging the variables into the formulas, businesses should first narrow down how they intend to measure attrition. This can include:

  • Measuring the number of lost clients
  • Expressing customer attrition as a percentage 
  • Discovering the loss in recurring business value
  • Calculating the percentage of loss in recurring value

Customer Attrition Rate Formula

The basic gross customer turnover rate formula is simple and can apply to the first two points above. The formula is as follows:  

The number of churned customers by the end of a period divided by the total number of customers at the beginning of that period.

For example, a company that had 700 customers at the beginning of the month and 600 customers at the end of the month would use the following attrition rate formula:

Number of customers lost: 700 – 600 = 100 customers

Number of customers at the beginning of the period: 700

Attrition rate formula: 100/700 = 0.1428 or 14.28%

The second customer attrition rate formula involves new customers that a business has gained by the end of the same period. 

For example, a company that had 800 customers at the beginning of the month, lost 120 customers by the end of the month and also gained 70 new customers by the end of that period would use the following attrition rate formula:

Number of customers lost: 120 customers

Number of customers at the beginning of the period: 800

Number of new customers by the end of the period: 70

Attrition rate formula: 120 / (800+ 70) = 0.1379 or 13.79%

Good Vs Bad Customer Attrition Rates

A common question to consider is what constitutes a good and a bad customer turnover rate? There is no definitive answer to this question. Ideally, brands should keep their customer attrition to a minimum, which means keeping lower rates.

In this regard, a rate at over 50% is evidently too high; they signify that at least half of your customers are churning. However, if your business falls under ecommerce, on-demand services or retail, this may be a typical rate of passive attrition, as plenty of customers make one-off or infrequent purchases.

If, on the other hand, your business is SaaS or uses some other sort of subscription-based model, this rate is objectively bad, as it shows customers are breaking their subscriptions. When customers don’t stay within their expected subscription time, a business loses streams of expected revenue. 

This rate can also point to customers who don’t renew their subscriptions, which can be an indicator of poor UX, products or losing out to competitors. As such, a 50% attrition rate is especially harmful as active attrition.    

Businesses should aim for low rates of customer attrition, which although aren’t definitive, typically exist in rates of 25% and under. This indicates that about a quarter and under of your customers churn. This is especially a low rate for non-subscription businesses

For SaaS and other subscription-based companies, 25% is still a high attrition rate, given that retention is much more valued in these businesses, given that they thrive on the longevity of their customer relationships, which exist in the form of subscriptions.

Successful SaaS companies typically see a customer attrition rate in the single digits. As such, in this industry, a good turnover rate is under 10%. 

The Customer Attrition Rate Across Industries

This rate varies by industry and business. While it is not possible to tally this metric across every business in a niche, it is practical to gain a high-level view of it across industries.

The following lists the customer attrition rates across industries:

  • Cable: 25%
  • Retail: 24%
  • Online retail: 22%
  • Financial services: 25%
  • Telecom: 21%
  • Travel: 18%
  • Electronics: 11%
  • SaaS: 6%

How Surveys Help Reduce the Customer Attrition Rate

Survey research can go a long way towards reducing the customer attrition rate, as it brings businesses a wealth of customer intelligence. First off, surveys can identify dissatisfied or unhappy customers, along with those who seek better CX, more reasonably-priced products and much more.

As such, surveys provide businesses with a means of catching unhappy customers before they churn. The insights that businesses gain from these surveys allow them to take the appropriate actions to reverse customer dissatisfaction and fulfill their needs, desires and the like.  

Surveys allow market researchers to deeply examine virtually any issue they choose. This makes it possible to understand customers at a granular level, as researchers can question them on specific topics. 

Survey research also equips businesses with both quantitative and qualitative market research, providing a holistic market research approach for examining customers. 

In terms of quantitative research, researchers can deploy thousands of surveys in just one round (depending on the online survey platform they use), granting them a means of statistical significance for quantitative data. They would need to set up multiple-choice questions to gain quantitative data.

As for reaping qualitative data, market researchers can create surveys with open-ended questions, allowing respondents to express their ideas, opinions, unique needs, aversions and more. This grants businesses a deeper understanding of their customers, allowing them to strategize accordingly to ward off customer churn.

As such, businesses can use surveys to fully understand their customers, cater to them aptly, reverse any negative feelings towards their company and much more. Essentially, surveys are customer intelligence powerhouses that make it quick and convenient to study customers, along with trends in an industry. 

Keeping Churn at Bay

While customer attrition is inevitable, businesses can still keep a pulse on their customers to retain them, minimizing their customer turnover in the process. Surveys are the key tools for achieving this, as they allow businesses to probe deeply into the minds and habits of their target market.

With this in mind, businesses need to use a strong online survey platform to carry out successful survey campaigns. Such a platform should make it easy to hyper-target respondents, create and deploy surveys, extract the highest quality of data via artificial intelligence and machine learning, set quotas to fine-tune the respondent pool and use an intended sampling pool size and more. 

A business that uses such an online survey platform is well-equipped to study its customers, along with their needs and dissatisfactions. This will enable them to make informed decisions that thwart their customers’ unhappiness and retain more of them. Thus, this kind of survey software has a direct effect on reducing the customer attrition rate. 


Optimizing the Customer Buying Journey with Surveys

Optimizing the Customer Buying Journey with Surveys

To properly execute their strategy, businesses need to study their customer buying journey, adapt to it and optimize it so that customers experience a quicker path to purchase.  

Marketing and market research departments, therefore, need to actively engage in their sales cycle to optimize their customer journeys. 

Given that shoppers today have a wealth of information within reach, it affects their customer buying behavior and in turn, their buying journeys. 67% of the customer buying journey takes place digitally. Businesses can take advantage of this digitized shopping, by nurturing and studying their target market online. 

Surveying customers as they meander through their buying journey is a solid technique to better understand them, their thought process and their buying journey.

This article delves into the customer buying journey, explaining its importance, its three main stages, how survey research can help optimize this journey and more.  

Understanding the Customer Buying Journey 

This concept refers to the customer’s path to making a purchase. The customer buying journey is a process in which customers become aware of, examine evaluate and make the decision to purchase a new product or service.

This occurs, as most customers do not suddenly decide to purchase something on a whim; rather they consciously wade through three main stages that make up the typical customer buying journey. These stages are the awareness, consideration and decision stages. 

The customer buying journey is essentially an active kind of research process that customers participate in before they make a purchase. During this journey, they encounter both customer and brand experiences, both of which impact the course of their journey, along with the customers’ final decision. 

In a nutshell, this process involves everything that a customer would need to do before deciding whether or not to purchase from a business. 

The Importance of the Customer Buying Journey 

The buying journey holds an abundance of importance for businesses and customers. Businesses can take advantage of it by providing value and answers to customers at each stage. By doing so, they can successfully nurture customers to decide to buy from them. 

By mapping out a customer journey and studying it, businesses can avoid making mistakes, such as those that come from traditional approaches, including waiting for customers to be ready or using a hard sales pitch. 

Businesses can instead take the approach of giving customers all that they need based on the stage in their journey and steering them towards the business. Businesses can also use the buying journey stages to build trust with customers, rather than forcefully egging them on to buy. 

This is important, as trust has a massive influence on customers. Nurturing potential customers according to their position in the buying journey gives brands a high potential to build trust, thereby later converting their prospects into customers.

Additionally, the customer buying journey is important because it offers a strategic approach to better understanding customer needs and expectations. When market researchers map out and study this process, they are far better equipped to provide their customers with a good customer experience (CX). CX alone is largely important, as 86% of customers will pay more for a better customer experience.

However since customer expectations are constantly shifting for all businesses, regardless of their size, all businesses must pay attention to their customer behavior in their buying journeys. Becoming attuned to this journey enables businesses to understand their target market better, giving them the advantage to optimize their customer buying journeys and win over leads

Mapping the customer journey also includes the benefit of allowing businesses to improve and accelerate their customer onboarding process. This will allow new customers to get acquainted with and begin using a new product more efficiently and with ease. A quickened customer onboarding process delivers value to customers much sooner, granting them more fulfilling product satisfaction

Moreover, studying the buying journey enables brands to understand the key differences in their customer personas as they move through the stages of the buying journey. Not every persona can feasibly convert from a prospect to a paying customer through the same efforts. As such, businesses should be aware of their customer journeys within all of their customer segments. 

All in all, the buying journey is an increasingly important framework that all businesses should use to outline their marketing and strategic planning process, as it can improve sales.

The Three Stages of the Customer Buying Journey 

As aforementioned, this journey is composed of three main stages: awareness, consideration and decision stages.

When planning out marketing strategies, businesses need to lay out this process for each of their customer personas. That way, the content and other marketing collateral they produce will be useful for each persona at every stage. 

The following explains the three stages of the buying journey:

The Awareness Stage

In this stage, customers become aware that they have a problem. As a means of addressing the problem, customers will search the web for resources. These include consuming content on the cause of the problem. 

While reading through this kind of content, which can include blogs, videos, infographics and articles, the customers identify the source or core of their problem. As such, at the end of this stage, customers often leave with a new sense of their true problem, meaning that it may be slightly or entirely different than their original problem. 

To adapt to this stage, brands ought to focus on content that addresses customer pain points, which can help customers extract more issues related to their problem (that your business can solve). 

Brands should implement industry-focused content and social media to grant an authoritative point of view. Advertising and PR that make mention of the customers’ problem is also necessary for this stage. 

The Consideration Stage

In the middle stage, customers define their problem after narrowing it down in the previous stage and consider their options to solve it. In this stage, customers become solution aware, as they evaluate specific products and services and consider different buying criteria. 

To adapt to this stage, businesses should show prospects what it is like to use their products and services specifically, focusing on how they provide solutions. 

As such, they should use the following marketing collateral and content to nurture prospects in this stage: webinars, case studies, demos, vendor comparisons and trials, along with offers to entice customers to a brand, such as free samples and trials. 

The Decision Stage

In the final stage, customers understand the solution they need and just have to decide on which provider, product, or service to use to carry out their solution. It involves customers deciding on their purchase; as such, it often includes speaking with a salesperson, especially in B2B industries.

In this stage, customers are provider-aware; for brands to adapt to this stage, they need to understand the objections that their prospects may have and handle them immediately. 

They also need to provide their customers with a unique selling proposition. This will show customers how a business offers value to them and what sets the brand apart from its competitors. 

By this stage, the potential customers will have done all the research to be well informed on the services that will fit their needs best, along with the companies they believe are most suitable. As such, businesses must prove their superiority through customer reviews, testimonials and case studies

Additionally, any content that posits a business as the better choice over a competitor is necessary to persuade potential customers to buy.

How Surveys Optimize the Customer Buying Journey 

Optimizing this journey involves understanding your customers at a granular level, especially as it concerns their purchasing behaviors, as every customer persona, let alone an individual customer, is different. 

No matter how well a business understands its customers — whether it involves their lifestyle, demographics, opinions, wants, or needs — these aspects are subject to change. With new technologies, innovations to products and changes to services, customers acclimate and change alongside them.

Businesses must follow suit by keeping up with not only the changes within their industry but also their customers’ reactions and subsequent behavior in light of those changes. Surveys are the most equipped tools for garnering granular and up-to-date customer insights. 

That’s because, with surveys, businesses can obtain customer feedback within all the stages of the customer buying journey. Moreover, surveys equip businesses with a deep understanding of their customer segments, allowing them to perform market segmentation and identify customer personas. 

With these insights in tow, businesses can map out the customer buying journey for each of their customer segments and personas, creating a more personalized experience, which is key to a good CX. 

Businesses can also survey their customers on their experience and expectations in each stage of their customer buying journey. This will ensure that they are properly marketing to them, answering key questions and setting themselves apart in a competitive setting.   

Surveys also provide insight into customers’ specific problems, showing businesses how they can innovate and perfect their existing products, services and experiences. As such, surveys are the lynchpin to understanding a target market, allowing businesses to optimize each stage of their buying journey.  

Being Attuned to Customers in an Omnichannel Setting

Customers seek highly personalized experiences as they wade through their customer buying journey. They reach a particular brand through various channels in their buying journey, which is known to brands as using the omnichannel approach.

To deliver a viable omnichannel approach, businesses must map out their customer buying journeys for various customer segments and personas. To do so aptly, they need to use surveys, as explained above. However, they must decide on a robust online survey platform to obtain valuable results.

To do so, they ought to use an online survey platform that offers a user-friendly interface for creating and deploying surveys to a massive network across websites, mobile sites and apps.

A strong survey tool offers advanced skip logic to route respondents to relevant follow-up questions, implements quality data checks via artificial intelligence and machine learning, offers a wide range of filtering data options, engages respondents in their natural digital environments via random device engagement (RDE) sampling and much more.

With such an online survey platform, businesses can easily glean insights into their customer preferences and buying habits, allowing them to accurately map out their customer buying journey and optimize it to increase their revenue


Acclimating to Market Research in a Post-Pandemic World

Acclimating to Market Research in a Post-Pandemic World

The COVID-19 pandemic has upturned the world in many ways, including the world of market research. However, the post-pandemic world has been gradually emerging, with mass vaccine rollouts, reopenings, office returns for certain workers and the lift of various pandemic-related restrictions.

There are still many market changes that market research constantly seeks to better understand, such as customer expectations, customer behavior, expenditures, loyalty and all other consumer-related factors. 

One such change involves customer shopping behavior; three-quarters of Americans changed their shopping behaviors since the pandemic began, with 40% of customers switching brands. The percentage of brand-switching is double that of 2019, showing that customer loyalty is not permanent and many customers will patronize new businesses, should those businesses meet their demands more effectively. 

These customer buying behavior changes along with the market at large, have incited even further alterations in market research, several of which entail adapting or getting left behind. This article discusses the new changes and challenges of market research in a post-pandemic world, along with how to conduct market research in this post-COVID world.

Acclimating to a Post-Pandemic World

As we steadily wade into a post-pandemic world, there are many changes and challenges that market researchers and business owners alike must address and adapt to. Many of these deal with changing customer behaviors, along with their behaviors in relation to the market research campaigns they partake in. 

The post-pandemic world has been making motions in technologies, approaches and methodologies, many of which were applied during the pandemic, carried over to a post-COVID world. In this way, it is clear to see that the market research industry was not spared changes that need accommodating as the pandemic eases off. 

For example, there is a heightened need to use ethically sourced and smart market research, as consumers become more aware of the impact and security that goes with sharing their information. As such, there is more concern over data privacy and certain jurisdictions have enacted changes accordingly

For instance, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been updated, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) has been established, along with newly emerging antitrust laws.

On the business end, there have been cuts to both marketing and market research budgets, with some market research cuts being as high as 71%, despite the scope of market research needs not being in decline. Although it may appear to be reasonable outwardly, businesses should avoid market research cuts, as slow sales periods (such as those induced by the pandemic) point to the importance of studying a target market and understanding the causes behind customer attrition and customers who switch brands.  

Businesses and market researchers should keep track of these shifts, as many of them signify the need of making changes to their business in order to adapt to the malleable market research space. 

In order to stay updated on market research changes in a post-pandemic world, researchers should conduct secondary research, such as staying on top of industry news within their niche, along with reading authoritative market research websites, such as the Pollfish market research content library.  

The Post-Pandemic Changes in Market Research

There are various instances of observable and measurable changes to the market research sphere in the wake of the pandemic. These include changes in consumer behavior, challenges to data and research collection, increased digitization, automation and the market research shift to mobile.   

In this section, we explore each of these changes, their ensuing challenges, methods of adaptation and more.

Consumer Behavior

  1. Brand switching and loyalty changes
    1. 45% of consumers say that COVID-19 changed their brand preferences, and 62% of them expect permanent shifts.
  2. Consumers have discovered the convenience of getting all of their needs met at home, whether through digital services or contactless delivery.
  3. There is a greater desire for convenience, as consumers continue to make many purchases online.
  4. Constant consumer change is part of the new normal, as only 16% of US online adults say they will revert to a pre-pandemic sense of normalcy after the pandemic ends, 75% say that the pandemic will create long-term changes in their behaviors and preferences.

Data Collection

  1. Several developments that have been unfolding since 2020 will force the digital ecosystem to brace itself for changes, especially those that deal with privacy. 
    1. For example, to improve consumer privacy and mitigate excessive data collection, Apple now uses an opt-in consent to its Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA), so that iOS owners can choose whether to allow their IDFA to be collected and shared across apps. 
    2. Google is going to remove third-party cookies from its browser by 2022. 
  2. These changes will usher in a digital upheaval that will be felt across industries, especially in online market research.
  3. In response to these changes, market researchers will need to find ways to get first-party data, since they won’t have access to tracking cookies.
  4. This involves making personal and direct connections with online consumers.
  5. Market researchers need to be more careful and select the correct digital solutions to the adjusting digital ecosystem.

Increased Digitization 

  1. The digital economy grew since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, as digital sales increased across all industries.
  2. The rise in digitization will continue during the recovery phase of COVID-19.
  3. There has been an ongoing digital transformation across all industries, with many finding novel ways to cater to consumers online.
  4. Internet traffic in some countries rose by up to 60%, as consumers took to the internet in lieu of making in-store purchases, and using in-person services. 
  5. In order to survive, companies must adapt, reorganize and implement new digital technologies.

Automation

  1. Routine and repetitive tasks, including taking surveys and analyzing data can be automated by machines, a boon and a bane for the market research industry.
  2. Artificial intelligence and machine learning can easily parse and process large amounts of data. 
  3. Chatbots are being employed in online market research studies as a means of getting respondents.
  4. Market research and online survey software will soon be widespread and available to clients, removing the need for agency-based syndicated research
  5. Consumers and market research workers alike will have quicker expectations of turnaround.

The Shift to Mobile

  1. As mobile traffic continues to rise around the world, market researchers must take advantage of this landscape, as it provides another medium to extract consumer data. 
  2. This involves creating and deploying surveys online and conducting studies purely through mobile. 
  3. Mobile market research costs are lower than that of a research panel.  
  4. With the shift towards ethnographic research, researchers can observe their participants in their natural environment, as people use their mobile devices voluntarily. 
  5. The medium of mobile helped improve this methodology with observational research apps allowing researchers to examine behaviors in natural settings.
  6. RDE (random device engagement sampling) is necessary to tap into ethnographic mobile research, as it reaches respondents through randomization, in a wide swath of mobile apps and websites. In this way, it gains data from consumers in their natural mobile environments.  

Conducting Post-Pandemic Market Research

With all the ongoing changes the pandemic and its post-pandemic era have brought about, it may appear murky if not extremely difficult to conduct a market research campaign

However, market researchers who pay heed to the changes, build a solid agile research strategy and use the market research correct tools will be able to both survive and thrive in the post-pandemic world of market research. 

There are several best practices to conduct a solid market research campaign post-pandemic. Researchers ought to perform the following steps to maintain a useful market research study during the post-pandemic age.

  1. Conduct secondary research by visiting industry-specific websites and blogs.
  2. Read market research blogs and resource pages, such as the aforementioned Pollfish resource center. 
  3. Consider the changes you’ve observed from conducting secondary research and ideate on how you can acclimate to those changes, whether they involve new customer desires, preferences or needs,  methods pertaining to research. 
  4. Conduct primary research. The most efficient way to go about this is with a DIY online survey platform.
  5. Use an online survey platform that offers a mobile-first design. Test it before choosing the correct platform, as many such platforms claim to be mobile-first, but offer surveys that lack in the mobile experience. 
  6. Conduct various market research studies, from brand tracking, to product satisfaction, to VoC (voice of the customer surveys). 
  7. After analyzing your survey individually, consider all of your studies collectively. 
    1. What are the recurring patterns and actions that you notice across studies?
  8. Create a strategy to address the concerns you discovered in the primary research stage.
  9. Test the strategy through the 6 main types of research, along with survey research and A/B testing. 
  10. Iterate, test, discuss findings with your team members and take the necessary actions to improve your research, along with serving your customers.

Acclimating to a post-pandemic World

While 2020 has been a time to pause and reflect on changes, 2021 and the rest of the post-pandemic period require studying and implementing new market research strategies

After all, with changes to customer behavior and preferences, there have also been changes and innovations to technologies, strategies and methodologies. As such, market researchers must stay on top of emerging trends, market research techniques and most importantly, their target market, to properly execute their next major action.

Thus, businesses and researchers need a strong market research tool to accommodate all the post-pandemic changes. A strong online survey platform offers a mobile-first design, random device engagement (RDE) sampling, AI and machine learning to conduct quality checks on the data and effortless deployment across mobile and other digital properties to lure in a diverse set of respondents

When researchers use such an online survey platform, they are well-equipped to study their fickle consumers in a constantly changing post-pandemic world. 


Taking Market Insights Further with Mobile Market Research

Taking Market Insights Further with Mobile Market Research

Mobile market research has ushered in a new era of market research that connects businesses with their target market more efficiently. As such, businesses should take advantage of this novel form of research to fulfill all of their customer intelligence and market intelligence needs.

Global mobile ownership and use has been steadily growing and is now at an all-time high, as 5.27 billion people have a mobile device, which is equivalent to 67.03% of the world's population.

In America, smartphone usage is frequent and ongoing, as Americans check their phones 262 times a day, which totals to once every 5.5 minutes. Given the abundance of and reliance on mobile devices, it would be wasteful for market researchers not to conduct mobile-facilitated research.

This article covers mobile market research, its benefits, its makeup, how to conduct it and more.  

Understanding Mobile Market Research

Mobile technology has greatly evolved in the past ten years, so much so that businesses can go beyond communicating with and serving customers through their mobile phones. Mobile market research was born on this idea, accommodating the new era of high mobile traffic.

Mobile market research refers to the method of collecting data through the use of mobile devices, particularly smartphones, but can include tablets and other mobile tools. It extends mobile use and engagement to the sphere of research, as it requires engaging mobile users so that they take part in a market research study. 

All the data derived is used for market intelligence, as it is a means of research and is therefore conducted with objectives similar to those in traditional market research

Given that customers make transactions and engage with businesses on their mobile devices, mobile doesn't merely provide another avenue of commerce, but another means of customer intelligence.

This kind of intelligence is not limited to customer buying behavior, as businesses can use mobile devices alongside various market research techniques. As such, mobile market research is not a standalone affair; as it is often used with other forms of research, such as secondary research, along with primary research such as online surveys, focus groups and one-on-one interviews. 

The Importance of Mobile Market Research

Brands should recognize that they can now obtain insights in new ways, ones that were simply not available ten years ago, such as those that use the medium of mobile. 

Mobile market research is a  kind of intelligence that provides deeper, richer customer insights. As such, businesses must adapt or get left behind, casting aside a swath of customers who have flocked to the mobile medium. 

Given that mobile devices continue to power daily activities and open new possibilities for collecting market research data, mobile market research is becoming increasingly important. This kind of research can be used for extracting both qualitative and quantitative market research.

Aside from these areas of importance, mobile market research provides various other benefits for businesses. They include the following:

Mobile marketing research brings businesses closer to their customers than ever before. The kind of data it extracts augments the research experience with more extensive findings than other forms of qualitative research. 

It has the capability of connecting with a broader respondent base, including respondents that are difficult to reach. This eases the issue of finding the correct customer segments, be they demographics or psychographics, and allowing only the qualified ones to take part in the study. 

Mobile market research is also convenient for both the researcher side and that of the customers. That’s because with mobile, surveys can be answered from anywhere that has a Wifi connection. 

Additionally, given the sizing restrictions of a mobile device, mobile research tools must be optimized for mobile, or mobile-first. This approach keeps mobile surveys short and succinct, typical best practices for all surveys, as simplicity helps increase the survey completion rate.

Mobile research offers simplicity and ease of use, which pares away survey fatigue, a prevalent concern in the sphere of market research. There is little to no effort required of customers to take part in a mobile survey. 

The device is already in their hands and typically with just one tap, they can enter the survey. In this way, it is far more simple and engaging to participate in mobile market research than in traditional research, especially for those who are time-poor. 

This kind of research creates agile market research, as mobile surveys employ quick transmissions and can extract all the customer data, along with the preset quotas within days —sometimes hours— depending on the mobile research platform. Additionally, such a process allows businesses to iterate their marketing and market research campaigns, to truly execute an agile research strategy.

The Makeup of Mobile Market Research 

A successful qualitative mobile market research study depends on the quality of the research tools and the techniques for carrying out the study. Both of these aspects must be intuitive and mobile-friendly.

Another key aspect of mobile market research is the element of mobile ethnography. This refers to the qualitative research of a particular society as well as its customs of individual people and its cultural trends. Ethnography provides a full account of everyday life, behavior and practices of a specific group of people rather than statistical data (which mobile market research also involves). 

Ethnography traditionally involves conducting fieldwork so that the researcher can experience a culture firsthand as part of their studies for a certain period of time. This way, the researcher is able to garner critical information about a particular social group or community in regards to their culture and customs.

In market research, ethnography grants useful market insights, especially those that pertain to a business’s target market, allowing businesses to understand how customers use their products and services, along with those in their niche. 

Mobile market research offers a faster and more effective way to secure ethnographic data, which would otherwise take years to extract should it be conducted through traditional methods. Mobile ethnography offers several advantages, such as feedback in real-time, without the need for being in the same location as the customers under study. Researchers can thus get a glimpse of their global consumers without the need to travel. 

Mobile market research is highly reliant on specific tools to carry out the research, such as mobile surveys. These surveys should be easy to deploy across a wide span of mobile websites and apps. They should be designed in the mobile-first approach, so that they are easy to use for mobile users and do not appear as merely an afterthought of online surveys.

These surveys should allow for mobile monetization, which businesses can use as survey incentives. In-app incentives often apply to gaming, that is, as non-monetary incentives that reward respondents with points, game money, extra lives, etc. This kind of survey experience enhances the mobile experience for mobile users, as they get rewarded within their game of choice.

Another important part of the makeup of mobile market research is a mobile online survey platform that filters out and disqualifies respondents that provide low-quality data. This involves using machine-learning to disqualify respondents on a VPN or a bot, those who provide gibberish answers, those who fail tests showing they’re paying attention and other kinds of poor survey respondents. 

How to Conduct Mobile Market Research With Surveys

Market researchers seeking the mobile research approach should deploy online surveys, those that offer a mobile-first experience. 

Not all online survey platforms offer mobile surveys and within those that do, the mobile surveys aren’t designed through a mobile-first approach. As such, these surveys appear lacking or not as easy to use as their desktop counterparts. 

To conduct a mobile market research campaign, begin by narrowing down the high-level needs and themes of the research campaign. Decide on whether your business needs a longitudinal survey, which is a more ambitious project, or a short-term study. Decide on where your study is in the research process, which involves six main types of research.

Use an online survey platform that excels in mobile-first surveys. Your best bet is to opt for a platform that allows you to make your own survey in a few easy steps. This platform should do all the heavy lifting, so that all researchers have to contend with is setting up the screener and questionnaire. 

In such a platform, the surveys would be automatically deployed across a broad network of websites, mobile sites and mobile apps, especially highly-trafficked ones. This ensures that the surveys will reach a wide mobile audience. 

You should then customize the surveys to your liking, such as adding the A/B testing function if need be, or incorporating multiple audiences into one survey. 

Once you receive your mobile-facilitated data, you should analyze it through the online survey platform’s dashboard. You should also export the data as a spreadsheet or whichever file type is convenient for your team, should you prefer to view the data outside of the survey platform. 

Making Mobile Strides

Establishing mobile market research campaigns is more important than ever, given the globally widespread use of the mobile medium. This form of market research opens doors to a wide swath of domestic and international consumers brands would be remiss not to study.

The key is to use a strong online survey platform to create and deploy surveys, as well as analyze mobile surveys results. Such a platform should provide relentless quality, making it practical for researchers to set up a customized survey, choose the respondents of their survey, set quotas, get estimated survey completion times, deploy to a network of millions of mobile users, disqualify poor-quality responses and more.

Once a business operates a potent online survey platform, it is setting itself up for successful mobile market research campaigns, the kind that deliver speedy and relevant insights on consumers and the market in general. 


Reducing Customer Attrition With Survey Research

Reducing Customer Attrition With Survey Research

All businesses deal with some degree of customer attrition, even long-established ones that hold high consumer loyalty. This includes prominent brands like Apple, Nike and the Home Depot. 

Given that even these major brands contend with lost customers, startups and younger businesses ought to pay attention to their own customer attrition and work towards lowering at whenever possible. 

Attrition is a serious consequence for businesses, as American companies lose 23% to 30% of their customers each year from a lack of customer loyalty alone. 

50% of customers naturally churn every 5 years. While this statistic may not seem as severe as the prior, only 1 out of 26 unhappy customers complain to a business; the rest simply churn. This is a grave detriment to businesses, as it averts them from finding the root cause of their attrition.

This article examines customer attrition, its two main types, why customers churn, how to avoid it and how survey research helps reduce attrition.

Understanding Customer Attrition

Also called customer churn, customer turnover, customer cancellation and customer defection, this phenomenon deals with the loss of customers from a business, especially the kind in which customers never return to a business they had frequently or occasionally patronized. 

Businesses can acquaint themselves with their customer attrition, by calculating their customer churn rate, a financial metric that measures the percentage of customers churning within a certain time frame. 

Most customers do not remain active customers permanently; there are several reasons behind this. Some of these reasons are preventable, as they occur due to issues that a business itself causes, whether it is a poor product, experience or lagging behind competitors.

Other reasons for customer turnover spring purely from the customers, such as a life event that greatly reduces their purchasing power, such as the loss of employment, or a lack of interest in patronizing certain niches.  

As such, whether a customer makes a one-time purchase or is a loyal customer of many years, every customer will eventually cease their relationship with a business.

The Two Main Types of Customer Attrition

There are two main types of customer defection that businesses should consider to be able to distinguish among the kinds that occur to their customers. These two are known as active and passive attrition. 

Active Attrition 

This is typically associated with subscription-based business models, the kinds that are commonly used in the Internet, publishing and telecom industries. As such, it refers to customers who cancel their subscription to a phone line, magazine or newspaper. It also involves the cancellation of digital services, such as app, data, streaming and SaaS service.

Passive Attrition

On the other hand, there’s passive attrition, which simply occurs when a customer stops transacting with a business, even if it is to make one-off purchases. This kind of attrition is predominantly associated with physical retail stores, e-commerce websites, on-request service providers and others.

Typical Reasons Behind Customer Attrition

Customers can churn for whatever reason they like, especially one-time shoppers, who may not have paid attention to the brand or store they bought from when they made an emergency or rushed purchase. 

Then there are the more conscious and personal causes as to why customers end their business relationship. The following lists the typical reasons behind churning customers, including consciously and unconsciously-made decisions :

  1. Poor service
    1. This involves customer service and support, along business services on offer
  2. Lack of a personalized service and experience
    1. Marketing personalization is a must, as greeting signed-in customers by their names is insufficient. Personalization allows customers to feel as though they are not being marketed to.
  3. Cost / value breakdown
    1. Customers may find certain price points disagreeable and switch to competitors.
    2. Customers may not feel prices are commensurate with the value of company offerings.
  4. Lost customers (contact information outdated)
    1. Some customers change their contact information without updating it across company databases.  
  5. Competitor superiority
    1. Competitors can outshine a business when they offer innovation, better products and services, personalization, lower prices or a number of other offerings.
  6. No longer in the market (doesn’t need)
    1. Customers don’t require buying the same things regularly when the need for it  runs out. 
  7. Customers cannot reach goals
    1. This occurs with digital experiences, for example, a website with a poorly working search function or the products themselves,

Avoiding Customer Attrition

There are various strategies that businesses can use to ward off customer attrition, including mapping out plans via a strategic planning process

Firstly, businesses should hone in on their customer acquisition, making it more targeted so that new customers are better-suited for retention. One of the major mistakes businesses make in acquiring new customers is netting those who are not the best fit for the company.

Some efforts to gain new customers yield the wrong kinds, such as those with loss-leader offers or those from a particular channel. To avoid bringing in the wrong customers, businesses should hyper-target their customers via market segmentation and forming customer personas. At times, it is going to be reasonable to spend more to target customers who will bring a long business relationship, including those with a higher customer lifetime value (CLV).

Next, businesses ought to improve their business offerings, whether it is a product, several products, a service or an experience. All of these tie into a business’s performance and factor into customer retention and loyalty. Brands must improve their customer loyalty, as it is the primary driver of retention — the polar opposite of customer attrition. 

In order to improve in all of these areas, businesses need to assess their current products, services and experiences. They should consider the following: does their business hit or miss the mark when it comes to their products and services? Does their business provide useful and positive customer experiences? After considering these questions and others, they should work towards innovation and improvement, which they can later promote. 

Brands must augment their marketing strategy, making their marketing efforts more personalized and up-to-date. If not, their competitors surely will. Many businesses already use a next generation approach to appeal to their target market. For example, Glasses USA offers a virtual try-on of their products and Patagonia takes part in sustainability and green marketing, a tactic that resonates with its customers. 

Finally, businesses can cut the effect of customer attrition by predicting it. They can achieve this by implementing predictive behavior modeling, a practice that helps companies predict the future behavior of their customers. This allows marketers to improve on the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. 

How to Reduce Customer Attrition with Survey Research

Survey research goes a long way towards reducing customer attrition. This is because in order to avoid churn, businesses must satisfy and delight their customers. In order to do this, they must know their customers’ needs, desires, aversions, opinions, sentiments and more.

The more intimately a business is acquainted with its target market, the better it can cater to it. After all, how can a business, or anyone, know how to serve and market to customers without knowing their preferences, sensitivities and wants

Survey research uncloaks the unknown when it comes to customers, as surveys allow market researchers to study virtually any topic concerning their business and customers. In this way, innovating new product features, and marketing certain messages will no longer be a mystery for brands. 

When it comes to customer attrition specifically, brands can set up their surveys to study what drives customers away, along with what they look for in a variety of matters. For example, businesses can study customer aversions by surveying them on specific product features, prices, sales, cultural trends and current events.

As for the latter, brands can observe which marketing ads, images, offers and promotions customers crave the most through surveys. Businesses can set up scaled questions and matrix questions so that customers can rate their necessities and desired items. With this information in tow, businesses can make informed and data-backed decisions, the kind that have a far greater impact on reducing customer attrition.

Retaining Customers for the Long Term 

Given the oftentimes staggering customer attrition rates, businesses should work towards strategies to reduce their own customer churn. While there are many tactics that businesses can employ to cut their customer turnover, using an online survey platform is the most proactive way to do so.

By studying all the wants, needs, opinions and aversions of their customers, businesses can avoid ensuing marketing faux pas, product blunders and other snafus that drive their customers away. The key is to use the proper online survey platform.

A strong online survey platform provides artificial intelligence and machine learning that disqualifies questionable users (such as VPNs, respondents that don’t pay attention) offers a wide range of filtering data options, engages users in their natural digital environments via random device engagement (RDE) sampling and much more. 

A business that uses an online survey platform with these capabilities and more is well-equipped to stave off customer attrition and retain more customers.


Using Market Research with Emotional Marketing to Resonate with Customers 

Using Market Research with Emotional Marketing to Resonate with Customers 

Emotional marketing is a useful tactic to employ for a number of reasons. No matter how rational a consumer may be, emotions always have sway, as people are emotional beings that base many of their decisions on how they feel at a particular time.

Emotional marketing connects audiences with brands in a personal and human way and has the power to associate brands, their products and campaigns with distinct feelings. 

As new media channels, devices, and platforms emerge, they provide additional avenues for brands to partake in emotional marketing, which is proven to be effective for various purposes. Firstly, 70% of emotionally engaged consumers spend up to two times or more on brands, as opposed to the less than half (49%) of consumers with low emotional engagement.

Additionally, marketing messaging that is purely emotional performs twice as well as rational content (31% vs. 16%). It is evident that this kind of marketing engages customers and produces key results. 

This article explains emotional marketing, its importance, how market research works alongside it and how to use surveys when building an emotionally bent campaign. 

Understanding Emotional Marketing 

Emotional marketing refers to marketing messages and campaigns that primarily use emotion to make a business’s target market aware of the business and influence the target market to buy, remember and share the business and its offerings. 

This kind of marketing tactic is typically used to evoke a single emotion that elicits a response, particularly one that prompts decision-making, to help businesses achieve their desired result from their customers. It can also use multiple emotions, especially if brands are working on a set of marketing messages and advertisements.

Emotional marketing addresses the audience’s feelings, values and pain points so that brands can better connect with their target market and even form customer loyalty

This is because brand loyalty springs from behavioral, rational and emotional loyalty; emotional marketing works by tapping into the latter. Emotional loyalty entails customers who are emotionally engaged, feel delighted by a brand, would recommend the brand and even advocate for it. 

As such, emotionally engaged consumers hold a great deal of value for businesses, as they are inclined to not simply buy more, as aforementioned in the intro, but to help brands keep their customers, therefore increasing their customer retention rate

The Importance of Emotional Marketing 

Emotional marketing carries significant weight, as emotions play a major role in decision-making, given that 95% of cognition resides in the emotional side of the brain. 

82% of customers with high emotional engagement always buy from the brand they are loyal to during their purchasing decisions. As such, it is no wonder that consumers who are emotionally engaged spend twice more on brands (see statistic in the intro).  

At times, the emotional response to an ad or marketing message influences consumers to buy more so than the content of the ad itself.

When businesses use emotional marketing strategies correctly, they differentiate themselves from other brands. It is generally key to stand out from the crowd, but more so when marketing to an audience, as people are inundated with thousands of marketing messages every day. 

Brands should thus consider the following: out of the thousands of ads consumers are flooded with daily — whether on billboards, emails, websites, social media, etc. — how many of these messages actually resonate with them? 

Given that most of the advertisements and other marketing messages that consumers see on a daily basis will not live to be more than an afterthought, brands should seek to stand out as much as possible in their marketing efforts

Emotional marketing allows brands to achieve this goal, as messages that trigger emotions are not disposed to be ignored nor easily forgotten. Rather, they stir consumers into action and can resonate with them for years to come, depending on the degree of emotion they set off.

Aside from triggering emotions that incite action and deliver unforgettable memories, emotional marketing also allows brands to engage in storytelling, thereby forging connections with their target market. However, to have the correct impact on an audience, brands will need to assure that their campaign is honest and authentic. 

Additionally, when businesses relay their identity and vision properly, it makes emotional marketing simple, as the emotional tone of an advertisement will make more sense.  

Finally, aside from connecting consumers with a brand, resonating with them and inciting them to buy more from a particular brand, emotional marketing helps create customer advocacy. In this form of heightened customer loyalty, customers advocate on behalf of a brand for free, such as on social media, in forums, review sites or by giving word-of-mouth recommendations. Brands must first establish such a connection and state of loyalty and emotional marketing helps them achieve this. 

The 5 Key Emotional Hooks To Use in Emotional Marketing 

Marketers and market researchers can implement different emotions in their marketing campaigns. 

The strongest human emotions have the best chance of success, especially when it comes to resonating with consumers. This is important because, although consumers may not buy something immediately that they discovered from an emotionally charged message, the message will still last within their minds.

This kind of remembrance is powerful, as it can enable the marketing message to live on in the consumers’ minds, eventually making them purchase, or at the very least, engage with a company. 

The following explains the five emotions to use in this kind of marketing and when to use them:

  1. Happiness
    1. Everyone desires happiness and you can tap into this emotion by showing how your brand produces happiness.
    2. This does not have to be directly from an offering, but rather a story including your product or service.
  2. Anger
    1. Inciting anger lets customers realize that something must be done or changed to resolve an issue and achieve justice. 
    2. For example, ads that address stereotypes, painting the narrative of a brand fighting those stereotypes whether directly or indirectly.
  3. Fear
    1. Evoke fear when it aligns with your target audience’s existing beliefs about fear with a product/service you sell. For example, marketers can use the fear of danger in their ads to promote car insurance, as accidents can occur to anyone.
    2. Use fear in the form of FOMO (the fear of missing out) to highlight limited-time offers, which will urge customers to buy within a certain period of time.
  4. Greed 
    1. The emotion of greed comes into play, as customers want to feel that they get more for their buck. 
    2. Marketers can design campaigns centered on major savings to elicit this emotion. They can also employ BOGO deals. 
  5. Belonging
    1. This feeling is part of the mechanism used to avoid feeling alone. Strong bonds and intimacy are a part of human nature and signifies being part of a group. Brands can incorporate belongingness by forming communities (online or offline) for loyal customers to share common interests and passions. 
    2. This also plays a role in brand equity, as it allows brands to be seen as more than simply their products.

Using Market Research Alongside Emotional Marketing

Market research can and should be used alongside emotional marketing. Market research provides a strong method to support all emotional marketing campaigns. This is because it is not enough to build an emotional marketing campaign, or any marketing campaign, off of intuition alone.

Brands will need to know what kind of imagery and messaging that their target market will be receptive to and what kind to do without. After all, it is in the best interest of all businesses to avoid offending and disturbing their target market. Upsetting consumers in such a way can cause customer attrition, which can become permanent. 

Rather than using emotional marketing messages that miss the mark, or even go as far as to offend, brands should conduct market research, allowing them to understand their customers and avoid marketing pitfalls. There are two ways to go about this: secondary and primary research.

Secondary market research involves gathering and studying information that has already been researched and made available. While this is a critical early research step, the information from this research is not always relevant to a business. 

Primary market research, the kind that researchers must conduct themselves, is far more relevant and granular to a business. This is because, in this kind of research, the market researchers and their businesses form all of the inquiries specific to their study.

The most apt means of conducting primary market research is through online surveys. These tools grant researchers full control of their study, facilitating who is qualified to participate, the questionnaire, the visualizations of the results and much more, depending on the online survey platform. 

How to Create a Survey for Emotional Marketing Campaigns

There are numerous ways to prepare and test an emotionally-driven marketing campaign. This includes gauging customers’ emotions towards a brand in general, if brands wish to see the emotions that their companies inspire. As such, surveys can test all emotional ties between customers and businesses, not merely campaigns centered on evoking an emotional response. 

The following provides questions to use with different emotional marketing campaigns, along with questions for measuring all emotional affiliations, regardless of campaign type. 

  1. Question: Considering your overall customer experience with [brand, product, service, experience], which of the following emotions do you feel when thinking about [brand, product, service, experience]? 
    1. Campaign/Purpose: Finding all the emotions that customers associate with a brand or its specific offering
    2. Question Type: Multiple-choice, multiple-selection
    3. Answer examples: happy, satisfied, appreciated, angry, disappointed, relieved, disappointed, stressed, worried, anxious, confused, frustrated, relieved, confident
  2. Question: How does the following advertisement make you feel? 
    1. Campaign/Purpose: Emotional marketing of future (or running) ads
    2. Question Type: Multiple-choice, multiple-selection
    3. Answer examples: happy, angry, scared, in want of the [product, service, experience], like I belong
  3. Question: I have feelings for [Brand/Product] X that I do not have for any other [Brand/Product].
    1. Campaign/Purpose: General emotional comparison with a competitor
    2. Question Type: Yes or no and open-ended 
    3. Answer examples: Yes, no, other [explain]
  4. Question: What does this issue make you feel? 
    1. Campaign/Purpose: Emotional marketing based on a topical or continuing issue
    2. Question Type: Multiple-choice, multiple-selection, open-ended 
    3. Answer examples: It’s disturbing, it’s unfortunate but expected, it needs to change now, I have no feelings towards it, it confused me, I’m not sure what needs to be done about it, Other (open-ended)
  5. Questions: Which ad/message do you feel the strongest for? Which ad/message makes you the most [happy, sad, disturbed, satisfied, etc?]? 
    1. Campaign/Purpose: Emotional comparison with a competitor based on a specific marketing material
    2. Question Type: Multiple-choice
    3. Answer examples: Ad 1, Ad 2, Ad 3, etc.

Resonating with Customers

Emotional marketing has the power to make marketing messages stay with their intended audience long after they’ve seen them. They spur their viewers into action, or at the very least, charge them with feelings stronger than non-emotionally-bent marketing messages. 

This kind of marketing also forms emotional bonds with its target market, a critical component of building brand equity and customer loyalty. However, these kinds of messages must be executed properly in order to not offend, bore or have no emotional effect on their intended targets.

To build a strong emotional marketing campaign, businesses must observe their target market by way of market research, using both secondary and primary market research. An online survey platform is the most effective tool for conducting primary research and can make a lot of headway in emotional marketing campaigns — if brands use the correct online survey platform. 

A strong online survey platform allows you to make your own survey in three easy steps, provides artificial intelligence and machine learning to stave off low-quality data, allows a wide range of filtering data options, engages users in their natural digital environments via random device engagement (RDE) sampling and much more. 

When market researchers choose a platform that offers all of these capabilities, they are setting up their business for success with emotional marketing campaigns and all other kinds.


Creating a Culture of Data Democratization with Polling Software

Creating a Culture of Data Democratization with Polling Software

Data democratization is critical to sustain, especially for companies that heavily rely on using data for decision-making. This concept aligns team members with the critical insights that only data and other digital information can bring. 

97% of business industry leaders agree that democratizing data across an organization is key to business success, and for good reason, given the growing need and prevalence of data within a business. 

Prior to the democratization of data, IT teams would chiefly own and operate all the data that a company housed. As such, other departments and team members that required using data such as marketing, the executive team and even data analysts had to go through IT to access the data.

Data democratization changed all that rather recently, within the past decade, this is. With the abundance of data creation in companies and the emerging technologies that make data more accessible to the non-technical user, strides are being made for democratizing data.  

This article explains data democratization, its importance, its challenges, how to foster it and how polling software can uphold this crucial practice. 

Understanding Data Democratization

Data democratization refers to the practice and condition in which everybody in a company has access to data and an environment where there are no gatekeepers creating a bottleneck to the data.

It requires businesses to accompany easy data access with a means for all team members to understand the data, uncover its opportunities and make use of the data and its implications quickly.

The ultimate goal of democratizing data is to have anybody use it at any time to partake in decision-making without any barriers or limitations to access or comprehension.

However, simply granting data access — whether as raw data in a data warehouse or in the form of visualizations in a business intelligence or product analytics tool — does not constitute data democratization.

This is because data democratization involves a continuous process of enabling everybody in a business, regardless of how technically adept they are, to work with data without constraints. This involves creating an atmosphere of comfort to discuss the data and use it for a wide range of purposes. 

When businesses achieve this kind of environment, their employees can make critical decisions that help the company improve on a variety of fronts, such as advertising campaigns and customer experience (CX).

The Importance of Data Democratization

This concept is important in the modern day, given the overabundance of data that businesses extract, create and ultimately use to drive decision-making. The overwhelming amount of data is known as big data, and it creates bottlenecks across all departments that depend on it in the slightest.

Data democratization works to manage big data through processes and tools that rein in unstructured data and large amounts of it. In this way, democratizing data lessens the chaos of big data and makes it easier to both access and understand, so that it can be used immediately, whether for analyses or making decisions. 

As such, data democratization quickens work that requires using big data, making business operations that depend on it run more efficiently.

Data democratization is also important in that it makes all team members more autonomous and therefore productive. This is because it allows non-technical end-users to comfortably assess the data in a digital format without soliciting help from IT

In turn, this quickens operations and bolsters efficiency, as non-technical team members can use data without asking others for assistance and slowing down other operations. 

Additionally, democratizing data gives businesses the advantage that data was originally meant to provide: that of a competitive edge. Given that data empowers businesses on a wide variety of matters, from web traffic, to their customer behavior, it ought to be understood by all team members. 

Otherwise, they won’t be able to use it, whether it is purely for observations or for making recommendations and using it for non-IT purposes, such as content marketing strategy. When all team members can easily access and understand data, only then can the data in question provide a competitive edge. 

Moreover, democratizing data allows companies to take part in transforming their organization, whether it is via fostering a digital transformation or a new structure within a department. This is because data can be used to unlock key findings, create new opportunities and help businesses execute changes, but this works optimally when every team member has easy access to the data. 

The Challenges of Data Democratization

Supporting this concept comes with its own set of challenges. These challenges stem from two main sources: the liabilities, difficulties and business risks for the company itself and for those of the employees. 

Regarding the former, this involves higher-ups and their concerns in terms of making data accessible to all. As for the latter, it deals with most of the other non-executive or IT employees and their challenges in sustaining data democratization.

Company/Higher-Up Data Challenges

  1. The expanding challenge of employees who know enough to be dangerous, misinterpreting the data and making bad decisions as a result.
  2. The risk of data silos when duplicate data is created in instances within groups across the business, which then necessitates duplicating data management efforts 
  3. The possibility of losing data-related truths as a result of the silos.
  4. The risk of exposing businesses to ethical, legal and privacy concerns
  5. The challenge of designating the correct employees to parse through certain data types.
  6. The technical challenge of analyzing and managing data with a fitting tool.
  7. The challenge of creating processes across departments to work with data alongside their main objectives.

Employee Data Challenges

  1. The difficulty of not having access to the data employees need
  2. The challenge of trusting the data observed
  3. The challenge of lacking the skills to find answers to questions due to the lack of skills of working with data
  4. The difficulty of the tools a company provides that aren’t designed for certain teams
  5. The challenge of collaboration, where data experts at a company are too busy to help other employees
  6. The risk of making false assumptions after studying the data.
  7. The difficulty of using tools that claim to support the democratization of data

Fostering Data Democratization 

Since sustaining this concept is multi-pronged in nature, businesses must consider the various factors that support it. Bearing these factors in mind, they must also be able to answer key considerations to build truly democratized processes. 

Here are several key factors of sustaining data democratization:

  1. Businesses must remember that to gain a competitive advantage, they must use digital tools that support data democratization
    1. These tools should be designed in a way that makes them easy to access, use and interpret by non-technical employees. They should be as user-friendly as possible. 
  2. Companies should empower employees to feel comfortable asking any data-related questions, along with sharing any data-based information and ideas.
  3. Individual departments should encourage employees to use data, especially for departmental needs.
    1. This will give employees a purpose to use the data to begin with.
  4. Training on tools and analyzing data should be made available to employees.
  5. Organizations should consider taking part in a cultural shift so that working with data becomes a priority for all employees and for the democratization of data to become attainable.

How to Approach the Data Itself to Ensure Accessibility

Aside from adhering to best practices that deal with employees to foster data democratization, businesses must also take heed of ensuring accessibility in the data itself. To do so, they must consider how they generate and operate their data.

The following lists the key data-specific considerations to take to ensure the democratization of data. Each step in this approach should be taken in relation to a business’s goals and data intent. This should be an evolving and iterative process.

  1. Data source mapping – Where is the data coming from?
    1. This first step involves using a map of data sources so that everyone can be aware of where the data comes from. This is crucial since not all sources provide the same kind of information and quality.
  2. Data accounting – What are we collecting?
    1. After you find the sources of data, you need to understand what’s coming from those sources. You should organize the data, as you’re bound to receive contact data, metrics, intelligence components and more.
    2. This helps you understand which data sources can benefit a business the most and which are best-suited for role-specific tasks.
  3. Data silo directory – Where is the data stored?
    1. This is especially important for data democratization, as employees need to know where data is stored in order to access it. Some companies extract and store all their data in one system, while others do so in multiple systems, especially when SaaS integrations are involved
  4. Data governance – How do you control it?
    1. Although you need to make data accessible to all, you have to consider data privacy, ethical and other risk-related considerations, especially when employees remotely access data with Personally Identifiable Information (PII), which may contain sensitive information.
    2. You need a data governance strategy to define how data is accessed and treated in the context of democratization. Consider who needs to see what data and what level of security, encryption and other actions are required given the nature of the data.
  5. Data Management – What maintains the data?
    1. Use data management frameworks, tools and processes to reach data governance objectives.
    2. These will help build mechanisms that achieve objectives within data transformation, quality, migration, privacy compliance and more.
  6. Middleware Strategy – How do you connect it?
    1. Create a middleware strategy to unify multi-sourced attributes.
    2. This may include building a master data warehouse connected to the systems and sources of data.
  7.  Data Accessibility – How to expand ownership of the data?
    1. Provide non-technical workers and working groups the ability to interface with, and gain role-specific value from the data.
    2. This involves forgoing coding or using low code and NoSQL platforms to expand data ownership.

Using Polling Software for Democratizing Data

An organization that seeks to democratize data can benefit from polling software. This is the ideal source of data to use for a variety of market research endeavors, many of which drive marketing, advertising and various other business activities. 

The right polling software makes it both practical and easy for all team members to create and deploy surveys. A democratized platform allows you to make your own survey in three easy steps, minimizing the downtime on any data-driven project.

Such a platform should allow for easy access by sharing results with shareable links, that is, links available to the public, aside to just certain users. It should also make it simple to filter all kinds of data — from the screener portion of a survey, to the questionnaire, to the post-survey dashboard.

Polling software can also create a culture of data democratization with simple visualizations, user-friendly navigation, different options for exporting and viewing the data — such as crosstabs — the ability to easily change the status of surveys and much more.

When a business uses polling software with these capabilities, it is on the right track to forming democratized data, as it is the ideal tool for it.

Gaining a Wide Breadth of Data

Polling software provides a vital tool for creating a culture of data democratization. However, not all polling software is built the same or offers the same capabilities. Some online survey platforms may be inept at providing democratized data to businesses, due to a lack of user-friendliness or democratization capabilities.

This is why companies should choose the polling software that is most apt for making data accessible and easy to use. A strong online survey platform should obtain high-quality data, which can be attained with the RDE (random device engagement) sampling method. This method engages customers in their natural digital environments in a completely randomized way

Such a platform must also rely on artificial intelligence to perform quality checks that ensure that brands extract only the highest quality of customer data. These checks should disqualify VPN users, gibberish answers, incomplete surveys and other sources of poor data from appearing in the final survey results.

When a business uses such an online survey platform, it is prepared to generate a culture of data democratization, not to mention, a valuable market research campaign.


Using Surveys to Uphold Cultural Marketing and Appeal to Customers

Using Surveys to Uphold Cultural Marketing and Appeal to Customers

In an increasingly diverse digital and physical landscape, cultural marketing is more important than ever. Diversity in the United States is growing, correlating with the public’s views on the need for diversity in marketing. 

61% of Americans find diversity in advertising important, and 38% of consumers are more likely to trust brands that display diversity in their ads. Evidently, brands must carry out cultural marketing to satisfy a diverse target market. 

To do so, brands should implement a data-driven strategy so that they are properly marketing to and serving consumers from a wide spectrum of cultures, ethnic backgrounds and socioeconomic statuses.

This article sheds light on cultural marketing, its importance, the consequences of neglecting it and how surveys help brands understand diverse audiences and execute cultural marketing campaigns. 

Understanding Cultural Marketing

Also called multicultural or cross-cultural marketing, cultural marketing refers to the marketing practice in which a message, product or service is promoted to a particular group of potential customers who belong to a certain culture, demographic or socioeconomic group. 

The campaigns making up this practice are meant to build consumer relationships with existing and potential customers. In cultural marketing, businesses leverage various aspects of an ethnic group’s culture, such as its language, tradition, holidays, religion and other cultural matters. 

Cultural marketing is also a kind of inclusive marketing, in that it is meant to represent all people, rather than merely those who make up the majority of the population. It is used for both advertising and marketing to people in different cultures as well as appealing to their specific interests and catering to their specific needs

The ultimate goal is to relate and connect with diverse consumers so that they eventually convert or remain loyal to the brand; the latter involves customers who have made at least one purchase. After all, retention is critical for business and cultural marketing can help increase a business’s customer retention rate

This is because all customers want to feel represented and included. Given that retention involves building solid relationships with customers and making them feel included and appreciated, cultural marketing can make strides on increasing the customer retention rate. 

The Importance of Cultural Marketing 

Multicultural marketing is critical in the face of a diversifying nation and an overall diverse digital environment. However, there are many other factors that make up the importance of cultural marketing. 

Brands ought to take them all into consideration, as some of these reasons will also guide them on forming a cultural marketing strategy.

First off, this kind of marketing opens new doors for businesses to engage with consumers who are outside the “majority audience.” By targeting specific target market segments based on their ethnic and socio-cultural facets, businesses can build a deeper emotional connection with consumers. In turn, this increases the chance of a conversion.

This kind of connection also builds customer loyalty, thus playing a role in retaining customers. Retaining customers paves the way for customer advocacy, in which customers act as brand ambassadors, recommending a business to their family, friends and peers. 

Thus, establishing an emotional connection by way of engaging customers is important, as 80% of emotionally engaged customers will promote brands they are loyal to compared to 50% of those who are less engaged.

Moreover, a consumer’s ethnic, cultural and socioeconomic background influences how they behave, from how they consume content, to their customer buying behavior. Marketers should therefore consider their target market’s various traditions, languages, customs, beliefs, and other experiences when developing and delivering marketing campaigns.

Multicultural marketing brings these influences into focus and allows businesses to strategize accordingly, which in turn allows brands to improve their communications with the diverse groups making up their target market.

Additionally, cultural marketing deals heavily with adoption, as there are constant shifts in the  U.S. cultural landscape and abroad.  The onus to adapt to these changes is on businesses.

Finally, there are certain cultural aspects that may be appropriate in some cultures, but not in others. Businesses must assure that they don’t appear culturally ignorant or indifferent to these cultural differences and sensitivities. For example, what’s acceptable to wear in the United States may not be in the Middle East.

What Happens When Brands Neglect Cultural Marketing

To piggyback off of the previous section, brands that neglect understanding cultural differences will poorly execute cultural marketing, if they attempt any culturing marketing endeavors at all. 

Brands that don’t implement cultural marketing in their strategy will have several reputational consequences, along with other business risks. Firstly they are going to appear dated and irrelevant, allowing competitors to outshine them in this regard, as competitors will make themselves appear to be more inclusive, culturally aware and up-to-date. 

Next, it is going to result in at least one marketing faux pas, such as when imagery or concepts in ads are insensitive to certain cultures, or when certain phrases get lost in translation. Either way, a lack of cultural awareness will eventually make its way into a marketing campaign, poorly reflecting on a company. 

This, in turn, will make a business appear to be rude, insensitive or willfully ignorant about a particular demographic, nation or socioeconomic group. It is similar to that of a business simply being out of tune with its target market, therefore sending them irrelevant, poorly targeted, clueless or unwanted messages. 

All of these consequences carry dangerous risks, such as landing into a PR crisis, deterring existing customers from making further transactions,  turning away current customers for good, declining sales and at worst, shutting down due to lack of business. 

Thus, businesses should attempt to understand cultural differences among their target market segments and practice cultural marketing to properly appeal to a wide range of customers. This will show consumers that a business cares about them, their unique cultural needs and sensitivities, and is soliciting their attention in an inclusive manner. 

How to Engage in Cultural Marketing

There are several major undertakings in cultural marketing. First off, a business must become versed in several cultural matters, as they relate to their diverse customer segments. This involves conducting secondary market research to understand dominant cultural trends and matters.

It also involves studying and listening to their target market, in order to address and cater to their unique needs. This involves conducting primary market research, as self-conducted research allows brands to examine things particular to their business and customers, allowing them to inquire into specific cultures. 

The following lists how to engage in cultural marketing:

  1. Understand cultural norms to avoid missteps.
    1. Some nations and their cultures are more conservative
  2. Observe the six dimensions of culture. These provide the key features of a culture, or the mental programming instilled within countries and peoples. Understanding each culture and country’s stance in each will allow you to market to it appropriately. 
    1. Power Distance
    2. Individualism
    3. Indulgence
    4. Masculinity
    5. Uncertainty avoidance
    6. Long-term orientation
  3. Demonstrate relevance in your messaging with marketing personalization
    1. This also involves staying atop the latest concerns and trends. For example, not all ethnicities are concerned with the same issues, as aren’t all socioeconomic groups.
  4. Leverage customer data to anticipate needs and avoid making mistakes due to cultural differences.
    1. This includes conducting market research, both primary and secondary, along with using other customer data tools, such as analytics. 
  5. Surprise and delight customers, while taking cultural norms, practices and taboos in mind.
    1. All customer segments will appreciate surprises that benefit them, such as a sale or promotion, especially if it is tied to their culture.  
    2. Make sure to not offend your target cultural segments. 

How to Use Surveys to Execute Cultural Marketing

Surveys are the most apt tools to use to properly execute cultural marketing campaigns. This is because they can be used in virtually all of the above practices for executing cultural marketing campaigns. 

Businesses can use surveys to identify and categorize their target market into granular segments and personas, allowing businesses to learn about various demographic, psychographic and class-based groups. As such, surveys provide brands with insight into major cultural aspects, such as the six dimensions of culture and marketing personalization.

They are the most potent tool for gathering customer intelligence and data, as businesses can gain insights into any topic of their choice and deploy it to a mass network of digital users (depending on the online survey platform).

Surveys allow brands to stay abreast with the latest cultural happenings, shifts and trends, so long as they are deployed regularly. They are especially useful for cultural marketing, since brands can screen their respondents prior to moving them to the questionnaire to ensure that their respondents belong to the brand’s cultural background of study.  

In this way, surveys help businesses stay organized, ironing out any organizational or categorical kinks from the process, as there are many diverse groups that businesses ought to study in order to take part in cultural marketing. 

After segmenting customers and data, businesses can use the data they extracted from surveys to guide all of their cultural marketing efforts. This is because surveys are essentially a vessel that connects businesses with their customers, revealing all kinds of customer opinions and needs to businesses, so that they can become culturally aware and avoid poorly executed marketing campaigns.

Remaining Culturally Relevant

The importance of culture in terms of marketing is major. The world market is made up of many smaller markets.  As such, the entire world economy is composed of smaller, distinct economies with their own cultures and languages. 

In order to tap into these economies, brands must be attuned to their unique culture. Surveys are an excellent option to use to gain insight into different cultures, cultural needs and differences, allowing brands to avoid making mistakes in their cultural marketing.

To execute a successful survey study, businesses ought to invest in a strong online survey platform, the kind that makes it easy and practical to screen respondents on a granular level, set up a questionnaire, deploy it to the masses and filter data in the post-survey results. 

Additionally, a useful online survey platform offers artificial intelligence to perform quality checks that remove poor quality data from making its way into the results of the survey. When a business invests in such a survey platform, it is on the right track to study different cultures and demographics and successfully execute cultural marketing


Consumer Engagement: How to Make an Audience out of the Multilingual Generation Z

Consumer Engagement: How to Make an Audience out of the Multilingual Generation Z

Gen Z should be part of your consumer research for consumer engagement. No one should ever underestimate a Gen Z’s voice and financial power despite their age.

The best and most accurate moniker that post-millennials ever received is that they’re widely recognized as the next consumer powerhouse, the ideal target for consumer engagement. With a projected $33 trillion income by 2030, Gen Zers are poised to become the second wealthiest generation in US history a few years from now (next to Millennials). Not to mention that just last year, Fast Company forecasted them to account for 40% of all consumers worldwide. 

As the Z generation is considered to be “on the cusp of adulthood”, members of this age group go around with a lengthy list of nicknames, which can be good or bad, depending on who calls them that way. 

Sometimes, they’re praised as being “entrepreneurial” as most of them are business-minded and would typically avoid working from 9-5 in the corporate world. On the other hand, media and market research companies have labeled Gen Zers as “screen addicts”, considering a recent finding that they check their phones more than 100 times a day on average. But you should never underestimate and should always understand the consumer value of Gen Z.

Consumer Engagement For Different Demographics

Born after 1996, most Gen Zers are not yet old enough to vote (the oldest is only 23 this year)  but they’re on track to being the most well-educated generation yet. Before we get into the reasons why, let’s take a brief tour first of this generation’s older siblings, parents, and grannies.

First off are “Baby Boomers” who were born between 1946 and 1964. They're currently between 57-75 years old (Gen Z’s grandparents) and are the biggest consumers of traditional media like television, radio, magazines, and newspapers—thus their alternate name “silent generation”. 

Despite being traditionalists, 90% of boomers own a Facebook account. Boomers are also the most comfortable with using cash as payment for everyday consumption out of all the other age groups.

Then we have the Gen Xers or the “MTV generation.” They grew up spending most of their time in front of the television and also spent roughly 7 hours a week on Facebook, making them a great mix of both traditional and digital savvy. Compared to boomers, Gen Xers would typically do more research when purchasing goods online but still prefer to do transactions in person as this is how they demonstrate loyalty to their well-loved brands. They’re Gen Z’s parents.

Coming next are the viral and always on the go “millennials” or Gen Y. This generation is actually divided into two groups, namely Y.1 (25-29 years old) and Y.2 (29-39) but one common thing about them is their penchant for on-demand services such as Netflix and Spotify. Millennials are known for their penchant for spending, even in a crisis, such as shown in an article about millennial savings and spending during the pandemic.

Because millennials own multiple social media accounts, they’re extremely comfortable using mobile devices but 32% still use a computer for purchases. Compared to Gen Xers, they have less brand loyalty as millennials are typically impatient and particular when it comes to pointing out poor company service. This is a handy-dandy guide for how Americans spend by generation.

Who Are The Gen Z And In What Way Are They Diverse?

Gen Z is the newest generation, born between 1997 and 2012. This age group is different from previous generations in some important ways, but similar in many ways to the Millennials especially when it comes to their social and political views. 

Members of the Gen Z (or simply Gen Zers or post-millennials) are racially and ethnically diverse, making this age group highly multilingual. In the United States, for example, post-Millenials think that the country’s growing racial and ethnic diversity is a good thing which gives them a tendency to be less racist. 

According to statistics, almost half of Gen Zers in the United States are either European, Middle Eastern, or North African Americans while 14% are black, 6% are Asian, and 5% are mixed.

Consumer Engagement For Engaging Your Gen Z Digital Consumers

Gen Zers, more than any other younger age groups, are known to be digital natives, meaning they have little or no memory of the world as it existed before technology exploded. 

While boomers and their parents (Gen X) would most likely opt to update themselves with the daily news by reading the broadsheet, their descendants (the post-millennials) would just simply open Twitter and do some scrolling to get the same. 

This is what makes this generation extra unique–Gen Zers think that they have the power to do almost anything just as long as their mobile phones are wrapped around their hands. No wonder why they’re also sometimes referred to as the “i-Generation”.

The i-Generation is also quite versatile in the sense that they know exactly how to use every single social media platform available in the market. Their approach to posting on these sites is multifaceted as they use different platforms for different activities. 

On Facebook, they follow trending stories; on Instagram, they share how fun their life is; on Twitter, they write their thoughts like an online diary; on Youtube, they compare specs by watching product reviews; and on Tiktok, they challenge themselves by recreating what is currently viral.

The Financially-Conscious Generation

Because the average i-Generation fella received their first mobile phone at age 10, many of them grew up playing with their parents' mobile phones or tablets. When not communicating, they’re either playing mobile games or buying stuff online. Life for them is generally comfortable since their Gen X parents have worked hard for their stability. In return, Gen Zers tend to avoid debts since that’s what they’re told. Debit cards top their priority list, followed by mobile banking. Unlike millennials, very few Gen Zers own a credit card.

What’s even more interesting is that the offspring of the MTV generation love learning about personal finance. Most members of the i-Generation have a strong appetite for financial education and are opening savings accounts at younger ages than prior generations.

And because the parents of post-Millennials are more well educated than the parents of millennials (Gen X), Gen Zers are more likely to put up their own startup business in the future instead of working as full-time employees. 

What Makes The Z Generation Multilingual?

We discussed in the first few parts of this article how culturally-diverse Gen Zers are. If you’re wondering which between them and the millennials win this category, then they're definitely the former as post-millenials are either children of immigrants or immigrants themselves. They’re multilingual, and many learned English as an additional language to their mother tongue.

When dealing with people whether professionally or just to casually hang out, most members of the i-Generation would prefer face-to-face communication. Sure they will post and tweet, but they want to get involved and eventually make a difference. Compared to older generations, a Gen Z’s sense of purpose is unmatched. They won’t do something if it’s against their will.

This makes them accessible personally and virtually. Since Gen Zers are an outgoing and approachable bunch both in the real world and in social media, it’s time for marketers to learn how to reach them.

How You Can Use Consumer Engagement For Your Multilingual Gen Z Consumers

As mentioned a while ago, the multilingual Generation Z is the future consumer powerhouse that’s why now is the perfect time to begin thinking about how to best engage them using a global marketing strategy that appeals to this rather tricky age group. 

Having a global marketing strategy that reaches out to new and international audiences is a must especially if it’s intended for a specific demographic (like Gen Z) but as a business, you also need to think about ways on how you can engage consumers regardless of their generation or age group so it would be best to think about the boomers, Xers, and millennials as well when coming up with an effective consumer engagement global marketing strategy.

Businesses that are targeting to turn them into loyal customers should provide Gen Zers with engaging and immediately beneficial experiences. When making text posts on Facebook for example, make them concise and short because most teenagers nowadays have the attention span of a gnat and they’re easily distracted. 

While a millennial or Gen Xer might stop for a moment to read a longer post, Gen Zers want to get straight to the point so that they can proceed to the next one. Despite these, they relatively have faster processing speed than millennials—so you should also consider this somehow. 

Brands that don’t adapt to the way Gen Z consumes messages might end up losing them as paying customers.

To properly engage Gen Z consumers, one should take into primary consideration their so-called inclusive-first mindset. Although most of the guidelines we have on inclusive communication are geared towards being sensitive to socio-economic issues, we rarely talk about inclusivity in terms of the language itself. 

Projecting an inclusive model of communication by accounting for the languages spoken in your targeted audiences’ regions can help you get better reception from Gen Zers. 

In this case, collaborating with a company experienced in providing translation services for different age groups and can navigate through complex language barriers, yes even generational barriers, can help you capture this elusive and values-driven demographic. 

By translating your content, you can develop a more inclusive approach to engage not only your Gen Z consumers but also their friends and families, which can develop into a ripple effect further fortifying your brand and public image. 

But age group is just one of the many demographic options that a brand should consider when studying the right approach on consumer engagement strategies. There are a few more indicators to consider to get the best results such as gender, location, device being used, occupation, and of course, language spoken since the age group in talks is a highly multilingual one. 

Engaging The Alpha Consumers

If you think that Gen Z is the youngest generation out there, then think again!

Since we’ve already covered the W, X, Y, and Z generations, it’s now time to come back to A! Introducing—the Alpha generation!

They were born in 2012 and will continue at least through 2025 (four years from now), which makes them the “pandemic babies”. This is yet another interesting age group to cover as they’re the kind of digital natives that will expect fully integrated and personalized, consumer experiences. For them, tangible cash was never a thing. Their idea of money is a number on a screen that they can spend through apps and other forms of e-commerce. 

We’d love to tell you more about Gen A but that’s already for another comprehensive article. But if you’re really keen to explore the potential of the Alphas for your business, then you might wanna try doing surveys among mobile users. There’s a new, fast, and amazing way to get the information that you need by just simply creating polls. It works well for Gen Zs so it should work for Alphas too!

The Wrap Up

So are generations the best way to categorize consumer behavior? Not entirely, but it also doesn't hurt to understand these age groups since marketing tools and audience segmentations generally include age as a factor, among many others.

The truth is, everyone grows up, and sometimes, older generations tend to behave more like younger generations. If you want your business to reach the Alphas, you need to start going out often in order to meet and get to know all age groups. Otherwise, surveying millions in just one click for your brand visibility can be of big help. Whatever you choose, the result will likely be favorable just as long as you know where to start and you know who to seek.


Fostering Inclusive Marketing with Surveys

Fostering Inclusive Marketing with Surveys

Inclusive marketing is a critical aspect in marketing, allowing brands to effectively connect and serve diverse communities. Given that a target market is made up of diverse demographics (and psychographics), it is a must for companies to make everyone feel included and valued. 

Inclusive marketing works towards achieving this end, along with cutting out cultural biases and stereotypes, so that all groups of people feel seen, heard, and valued by brands. 

Creating content, other marketing messaging and campaigns that reflect the diverse communities that companies cater to is a requisite, as 61% of Americans consider diversity in marketing important.

In addition, 38% of customers are more likely to trust businesses that show diversity in their marketing. As such, there is clear evidence that inclusive marketing is appreciated and impactful for companies. 

This article delves into inclusive marketing, its importance, current state, and how surveys foster inclusive marketing. 

Understanding Inclusive Marketing

Inclusive marketing refers to the messaging, imagery, processes, and technologies that consider and accommodate all groups of people, allowing them all to fully engage with businesses, in turn. This includes enabling marginalized and underrepresented groups to fully experience and connect with brands.

These marketing campaigns embrace diversity by including people from various backgrounds and the experiences they relate to. In doing so, this involves creating campaigns that break down barriers along with stereotypes

For marketing to be fully inclusive, it must consider all facets and layers of its target market’s identity. These include ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, culture, language, religion/spirituality, size, physical/mental ability, and socioeconomic status.

It should also account for the fact that one person may be a part of many identities and dimensions. Additionally, brands should acknowledge that nuances are inherent in all of their customer personas, including their personality and preferences.

Aside from marketing campaigns, inclusivity reckons forming all of a brand’s products, services, and experiences in ways that can resonate with a diverse swath of people and make them feel included.

The Importance of Inclusive Marketing

Inclusive marketing is ever-important in an increasingly diverse country and a globalized world. As such, businesses must tailor their marketing and business offerings at large to a wide pool of target market members. 

Brands must adhere to inclusive marketing practices, even in niche companies that have very specific target market segments. Doing so will ensure that all of their customers feel recognized and appreciated.

Another critical aspect of inclusive marketing is representation. Marketers must remember that as customers and as people, everyone wants to be represented. When people are not represented in any marketing messages or imagery, they understandably feel left out, as outliers and outsiders looking in, not encouraged to participate with others. In turn, they are being made to feel as the “other.” 

Brands should avoid this at all costs. It is difficult enough to entice customers to buy from them; when a brand doesn’t forge inclusive marketing, it adds another layer of difficulty for the business to appeal to its customers. It also makes a business appear negatively in comparison to its more inclusive competitors. 

It is not enough to declare acceptance of diversity and inclusivity. Businesses must practice what they preach by enacting inclusive marketing into all of their campaigns. 

Inclusive marketing is also important, in that it opens the door to visibly encourage equality in a particular niche or industry. It makes strides towards backing equality, as brands can feature people in non-traditional roles in their marketing deliverables. For example, women in a male-dominated field or hobby. 

In this regard, businesses can no longer be passive; they must actively show that they are inclusive to all identities and support participation from all, whether they are a B2B SaaS business or a sports equipment company.

When brands participate in inclusive practices, they satisfy consumer demands and create a vast amount of opportunities with all of their potential customers. Consequently, this will play a major role in building consumer loyalty.

Inclusive Marketing Versus Diversity and Inclusion

While both of these concepts are important for businesses and show appreciation and respect to a diverse group of people, they are not the same. Therefore, they should not be conflated or used interchangeably. 

The basis of these two concepts is fairly similar: that of fostering inclusivity among all. However, they refer to different areas of practice and have different end goals

Diversity and inclusion is a concept that typically refers to developing an inclusive culture within a workspace, whereas inclusive marketing involves stamping out exclusion via marketing efforts

Diversity and inclusion is predicated on a workplace with a diverse personnel, one in which everyone feels equally involved and supported in all areas of the workplace. 

Inclusive marketing, on the other hand, denotes marketing campaigns that take up diversity by including people from various backgrounds and displaying stories that are relatable to unique audiences

Inclusive marketing efforts should make an effort to break stereotypes and biases, in addition to embracing and reflecting a diverse target audience. This involves becoming better acquainted with different cultures and experiences. 

As such, diversity and inclusion practices have the end goal of diversifying a particular operation or institution, while inclusive marketing is inclined at providing representation and appreciation of a diverse marketplace. 

Both of these concepts are crucial to a business — but serve different areas. D&L is an HR matter, while inclusive marketing concerns marketing departments, along with advertising, PR, and creative departments, depending on the organizational structure of a business.

How Surveys Create Inclusive Marketing

There are many best practices for inclusive marketing. These practices make up the overall marketing process, embedding into the preliminary stages of a campaign up until the review of a campaign’s performance.

For example, businesses should use inclusive language and avoid resorting to stereotypical assertions or messaging. But more importantly, businesses should address the unique needs, perspectives, and issues across demographics, including people with disabilities and from different lifestyles. 

This is where survey research takes center stage. Surveys provide an invaluable method for deploying targeted questionnaires to a wide swath of audiences, extracting customer data in the process. This data represents a diverse range of consumers, allowing brands to tap into the minds of a diverse set of consumers. 

As such, surveys solve the major issue of adequately marketing and serving diverse audiences, given that businesses must understand their customers to satisfy them, and diverse audiences have unique needs and interests.

Surveys provide brands with an easy method of reaching their target market and understanding all of its concerns, requirements, desires, aversions, opinions, and more. Surveys are essentially instruments of data for decision-making, which is much-needed across all industries. 

Customer data carries massive value, as it drives a variety of business strategies and decisions. Without it, a business would be far less attuned to its customers and not be fully aware of how to serve them, including what to avoid.

Moreover, surveys are the most adept solution for inclusive marketing, as market researchers can set granular conditions in the screening section, dictating precisely who can take the survey. 

Researchers can include a wide variety of demographics and psychographics to take the survey, depending on the data filtering capabilities of the survey platform they use.  In this way, they will get easy, automated access to the group of respondents that they are seeking to study to then market to and serve. 

Surveys allow market researchers to assess the results of each demographic group via post-results filtering in their survey. Thus, they can easily reap and review the data on a diverse set of customers with surveys. 

Forging Inclusivity Across Campaigns

Inclusive marketing is no longer a nice-to-have option; it is the future of marketing. More and more brands are incorporating inclusivity into their marketing to avoid seeming non-inclusive, outdated and disrespectful.

Conducting market research is an apt way to become more accustomed with a diverse target market and its closely situated markets. Surveys provide the most potent way of extracting timely customer data, but the success of surveys is largely dependent on their online survey platform.  

A strong online survey platform makes it easy and practical to set up screeners, target respondents at granular levels, deploy the surveys to a vast network of high-trafficked websites and apps, offer various post-survey visualizations, and much more.

Therefore, businesses and market researchers should choose their online survey platform wisely; a valuable one will make it easy to foster inclusive marketing, cater to customers and so much more.