216: Pay attention when your customers stop paying attention

Here’s another quote from Amanda Landsaw’s talk at MACMA Industry Day. 

“Stay on top of inactivity in the database. If a known audience member has not visited in a certain number of days, send an email.” 

I’ve seen a surprising indifference to this sort of analysis. It’s surprising because everyone knows the old saying that it’s easier to keep a customer than get a customer, which means we should be spending a lot of effort on keeping customers, and one key to keeping them is engagement. 

This doesn’t only apply to visits, but to every engagement metric you have. That would include … 

• Opens 

• Clicks 

• Site visits 

• Page views 

• Video views 

• Logins 

• Comments 

The message is relatively simple. Keep track of the engagement trajectory of your audience and when someone starts trending in the wrong way, see if you can reverse that trend. 

It might be, as Amanda mentions, sending an email. It also might mean that you have to rethink how you’re engaging your audience. 

You’ve all seen the meme of the guy walking with his girlfriend and another woman catches his eye and the girlfriend is furious. That can happen too. 

The world changes. A drop in engagement might be because your audience is shifting its preference to short-form video. 

That implies that you have to look at engagement trajectory in at least three ways. 

• At the level of your individual audience member 

• At the behavior of your entire audience, and  

• At social trends – that is, what’s happening outside your audience. 

That’s a lot of homework, but if you want to dig even deeper you can add segmentation. Not just the individual and the whole audience, but all your sub-audiences as well. 

Another thing to consider is to use predictive analytics and be proactive about this. Re-engage them before their activity drops.