Mumbai: The Media Investment Summit 2024 which is being held on 4 April at Novotel, Mumbai is a dynamic platform that aims to bring together minds from the brand, media, advertising, digital & TV fraternity to explore the ever-evolving landscape of content, Adtech, Martech, metaverse and Web 3.0, the evolution of traditional media planning and buying, data and privacy infringement and ROI on advertising.

The day-long affair is to make sure to tantalise the thoughts of those looking for answers to myriad topics under the branding, advertising, TV, digital media planning, and buying roof.

The key highlights of this session encompass defining customer acquisition and retention within the framework of business strategy. This includes mapping the customer journey from awareness to conversion and retention, identifying touchpoints for continuous engagement throughout the lifecycle. The pivotal role of personalization in both acquisition and retention strategies will also be discussed. Additionally, the session will cover the utilization of various channels, encompassing digital and traditional methods, for effective customer acquisition. Lastly, the imperative for businesses to adapt acquisition and retention strategies in response to evolving market dynamics will be addressed.

The very first-panel discussion of the event is chaired by PivotRoots - A Havas company VP - media & strategy Ashok Shinde, consisting of panelists including - mFunnel.ai co-founder and CEO Chintan Soni, Dr Reddy’s Laboratories India head – e-commerce Reethika Nair, Jio deputy general manager – marketing Shaurya Tyagi, CleverTap Sr VP partnerships (East Globe) Tapan Acharya and WebEngage director of growth and strategy Tanisha Doshi.

Sharing the context of the session, Shinde began talking about customer acquisition, retention marketing and perhaps why do brands and marketers of businesses really need to invest and pay attention to it.

Shinde asked his first question to Tyagi, “What are some of the key elements that are important for making a successful customer acquisition and retention marketing strategy?”

Tyagi answered, “Whenever we look at customer acquisition, more than looking it as a funnel, I look it as a loop. Everytime we acquire a new customer, if that customer makes a transaction or makes an action on the app or website, that customer will talk about their experience or whatever action they’ve taken on the web or the app, to other people also which will further get other people also into that.

Secondly, there would be channels that can be grouped into two buckets. One is always on channel, which will give sustained growth as you continuously optimise them over a period of time. The other one would be, the one giving you the spike when a particular offer or promotion is running for a product. If you think of Instagram as an example, the growth will come from specific events when they’re happening. That’s where you’ll get a lot of growth from existing customers.”

Talking about retention, he added, “Retention can be actually broken down into three parts. First one is activation. For example a customer signs up on the app, that’s where the customer has actually taken an action on the app. Second is the engagement. When you think of any social media pp or any ecommerce app, you’ll have to see what core action you want the user to do and that defines the engagement. The last bit is resurrection which is actually linked to the first two. The customer downloads the app but doesn’t sign up, that means he/she is not activated and resurrecting a customer is not possible in that case. But if you see that the customer is talking daily, weekly or monthly action on your app only then you can call them as an engaged user and if that is not happening then you have to resurrect them and bring them back into the loop.”

Moving on, Shinde asked Soni, “What has been you approach to some of the common challenges that you’ve faced and how did you overcome those?”

Soni answered, “When you talk about acquisition, one of the biggest challenge atleast in the digital media is that there’s a reverse economy. Probably if you go from zero to ten, the acquisition cost will be stagnant but if you go from 10-100, that is where you start seeing the cost of acquisition going up. The reason that happens is that 70-80 per cent of the digital media works on the auction based economy, where you have to actually outgrade another advertiser in the poll, to win that impression.”

He then goes on to talk about analysing the whole funnel and lead indicators in each stage of the funnel. He also spoke a bit about click through rate. Talking about customer retention he said, “Customer retention is almost like employee retention in a company. You’ve to understand why they’re not coming back to you again.”

Moving on to his next question, Shinde asked Nair, “What would be your recommendation on how we should go about prioritizing between the two (customer acquisition & retention)?”

Nair answered, “Firstly, a big question is ‘should you have a retention strategy?’. I think one should know what stage their brand is in. If it’s in the starting stage then forget about retention strategy and focus on whether you’ve built the right product or service to get the acquisition done in a very organic or natural fashion. People say that acquisition is five to 25 times more expensive than retention. But the fact is that acquisition becomes expensive when you want scale in very small period of time. You have to figure out ways of getting acquisition done in a cost efficient manner. The second scenario is, retention becomes critical but retention’s first big soul is your product experience. Today it’s a very difficult problem to solve because of the fragmentation that we live in.”

She then talked about the various types of retention that a brand can have including emotional aspect or the price reason.

Shinde then asked his next question to Acharya and Doshi, “How do you see brands leveraging to try customer acquisition or retention strategies?”

Doshi answered, “Every customer does require personalisation to a really large extent. Being an enabler in this space, there are top three strategies that every brand can inculcate in their retention strategy. One is data is king. When we talk about data,not only online but even offline, data becomes important to merge the data between your online and offline customers so that a seamless customer journey can be created for your end customer, i.e, consolidation of data.”

She then went on to talk about the real power of omnichannel marketing, and personalisation.

Acharya then went on to answer the question saying, “The acquisition and retention juggernaut is actually two sides of the same coin. If you have a leaky boat where you’re acquiring and just draining then it makes no sense. Secondly, we pretty much know th CMP or the LTV formula, i.e., ‘what is one transaction making for you, what is the frequency of the transaction, what are the number of years the customer stays with you, that’s your lifetime value for the customer. Keeping these two thing in mind, if you think about acquisition an retention, the whole communication is about the maturity framework. If your integrated opinion is to have customers for life, then acquisition and retention has to be spoken in the same breath. Once that happens, then ofcourse the whole media has evolved to be bidirectional.”

He then went on to talk about the five parts in which money can be made on the internet, that is, through technology, banking services, advertising, subscription models, and gaming platforms.