How to build a winning contact strategy

Like any kind of Marketing strategy, a good contact strategy is almost always the simplest and sometimes the most obvious. It seeks to mitigate communication saturation with your customer base and drive effective, relevant and targeted communications to increase engagement and ultimately revenue.

At Loop Horizon we like to follow a simple approach looking at the WHY, WHO and HOW.

Starting with WHY you need a contact strategy – setting realistic and immediate goals to measure the effectiveness of your approach.

Critically this then needs to be followed with an understanding of WHO you’re looking to target, with insight and segmentation models developed to really understand your customer needs and how effectively your business is meeting those needs.

Once the groundwork has been done, then attention turns to HOW you might develop a contact strategy with key elements such as lifecycle journeys, contact rules, calendar plans and an omnichannel approach that maximises Marketing awareness.

Finally, and almost crucially, measurement and testing frameworks should be developed to offer up a robust and accurate view of the impact of your contact strategy.

Like all strategic approaches, we truly believe that a Marketing contact strategy must be continually optimised through refreshed customer insight, learnings from a parallel test and learn workstream and incorporation of new data or technical capability feeds.

‍The WHY

From the offset, it’s essential to establish your reasons for wanting a contact strategy - setting realistic and immediate goals to evaluate the effectiveness of your strategic approach. These goals should focus on short-term, impactful KPIs that assess immediate performance uplift and progression.

Our experience of many corporate clients is that they often develop 3-5 year strategic objectives backed by eye-watering financial forecasts. This forecasting exercise, whilst useful in supporting resources and budgets, fails to identify the immediate obstacles in the way of progress by looking too far ahead.

To add to that, most Marketing challenges don’t arrive in convenient annual timeframes, they are episodic, and as such a good Marketing contact strategy needs to be ongoing and evolving in shorter sprint cycles to smash through short-term goals and create immediate tangible value.‍

The WHO

To start building a robust contact strategy, begin with customer insight. This involves understanding how your customers interact with you, how engaged they are and how they respond to your marketing efforts across different channels and platforms.

A good marketing strategist will then be able to identify the 2 or 3 actionable insights within this to focus on; ones that have the power to scale performance.

A critical aspect of understanding your customers involves the development of customer segmentation, dividing customers up by common characteristics to understand their needs.

Our approach at Loop Horizon is to utilise customer behavioural data to effectiv0ely segment customers into cohorts – for a retail client, this might involve analysing spend frequency and value, alongside cross-category behaviour. For other clients, this could include engagement metrics such as platform visit frequency or grouped marketing response metrics. Regardless of the metrics within, the segmentation must be actionable and grounded in reliable and readily available data rather than hypothesised personas.

‍The HOW

Stop– you can’t ignore lifecycle journeys

A robust contact strategy should incorporate existing Lifecycle journeys and respect the customer experience within that journey. If there are no established lifecycle journeys, we recommend pausing the development of your contact strategy to focus on mapping these journeys – journeys are far more powerful in responding to customer needs than a contact strategy based solely on one-off tactical communications.‍

Contact rules to protect the customer experience

• Lifecycle Incubation: Reviewing of the impact of lifecycle journeys within a contact strategy needs to consider incubation rules, such as refraining from sending other tactical campaigns while a customer is engaged within a lifecycle. This ensures the customer experience within that journey is protected and they are able to complete the ‘next best action: without being distracted by competing communications.
• Lifecycle hierarchy: Additionally, it's crucial to examine "lifecycle clash" rules to address situations where a customer may be within multiple lifecycles at the same time. In such cases, establishing a hierarchy for the lifecycles is advisable, or even better, revisiting conflicting journeys to create new, complementary, and interconnected paths.
• Volume/ frequency capping: Setting a comms capping rule is best practice, on average we would recommend not more than 4 channel communications in a rolling 7 day period (e.g. 4x emails, 4x push etc) but this can differ from industry to industry. This ‘capping rule’ protects the customer from over-communication, this should be measured by monitoring opt-out and campaign engagement trends against frequency to understand the ‘tipping point’ of comms saturation.

Layering your seasonal campaigns‍

Layering a seasonal calendar plan into your contact strategy is useful. A coordinated calendar of seasonal campaigns facilitates effective campaign planning and helps prevent scheduling conflicts when different business units have campaign requests during the same week. Careful planning and scheduling are crucial to maintaining a balanced communication frequency without overwhelming customers with too many messages.‍

Bringing it all together‍

Bringing everything together could feel daunting, but by following the steps outlined above, you’ve pretty much got there. You have established SMART success criteria, identified your customer needs and therefore your segmented target audience, you’ve got proactive customer journeys in place to react to customer behaviour triggers and you’ve planned your messaging via a seasonal calendar laydown.

Begin by outlining a topline action per customer segment. For instance, for high value, highly engaged customers, your action might be to ‘maintain behaviour’, while for low value, highly engaged segments, your focus should be on ‘conversion’. Dormant customer segments require a bespoke contact strategy that determines the right combination of comms frequency, content, incentivisation and omnichannel approach. This is often best approached through a test and learn framework to identify effective engagement levers.  

With a topline ‘action’ agreed, the next step is to map out specific campaigns types for each segment and determine the desired behaviour you want to encourage. It is important to acknowledge that for low engaged segments, the next best action for the campaign may simply be an email click through or website visit, rather than aiming for a high-level conversion as the ultimate goal – small incremental steps are more effective to move the customer through desired behaviours.  

Multi-channel and the Rule of 7

Incorporate your multichannel strategy by identifying the channel preferences within your segments. Call me old fashioned, but I like to live by the age-old ‘Marketing rule of 7’.  The Rule of 7 determines that a potential customer is typically exposed to a marketing message at least seven times before they take action, emphasising the critical role of an omnichannel approach that feels more organic to a customer through more subliminal web overlay and social retargeting than simply sending seven emails.

Measurement and testing

Finally and not because it’s the least important – At Loop Horizon, we always recommend having a robust measurement framework to prove the value and effectiveness of your contact strategy:

• At a macro level key indicators such as customer base growth, overall engagement and value are key, alongside data capture success and opt-in rates.
• Also within this macro view should be a regular view of segment migration, to understand how effective your customer segmentation and targeting is. How many customers are moving ‘up the segment chain’ to the highest value.
• Total customer metrics by channel and platform to provide overall indication of the ‘health’ of the customer base and the effectiveness of your contact strategy.
• Followed by micro metrics at a campaign level – looking at both engagement and revenue drivers.

As a final note – no contact strategy should be stagnant. Like all strategic approaches, it must be continually optimised through refreshed customer insight, learnings from a parallel test and learn workstream and incorporation of new data or technical capability feeds. If in doubt, draw out a roadmap of likely optimisation feeds to understand when is the best time to review your contact strategy for future optimisation.