Customers don't always announce their departure with a megaphone. Signs of displeasure are often subtle and rarely direct. Luckily, customers’ online research behaviors often provide telltale signs if they’re at risk of churning.
That's where intent data provides a valuable benefit. By surfacing those at-risk customers and their concerns, it enables your customer marketing, account management, and customer success teams to mitigate any issues before you lose important business.
From Reactive to Proactive: 3 Ways Intent Reduces Customer Churn
Early Warning System
Intent data acts as a proactive alarm system, identifying at-risk customers before they even consider churning. With insights into their online research patterns, you can detect early signs of dissatisfaction, such as:
- Increased competitor research: Are they exploring competitor websites or solutions like yours?
- Specific pain points: Are they searching for topics related to features your product lacks or issues they're facing?
- Negative sentiment: Are they engaging with content critical of your brand or service?
This early warning allows you to intervene before they reach the point of no return.
Personalized Outreach & Intervention
Armed with customer-intent intelligence, you can craft personalized outreach campaigns tailored to each at-risk customer's specific needs and concerns. Imagine finding that a customer is researching issues they’re having with your product and comparing it to competitive products. You can take the proactive step of sending an email highlighting best practices similar, successful customers are to solve specific pain points and achieve similar goals.
This personalized approach shows you care about their concerns and positions you as a true partner, rather than just another vendor, fostering trust and loyalty.
Retention Strategies & Product Development
Intent data goes beyond individual customers, offering valuable intelligence into broader market trends and unmet needs within your entire customer base. By analyzing intent data in aggregate, you can:
- Identify common pain points and dissatisfaction triggers
- Prioritize product development efforts to address customer needs and frustrations
- Refine marketing campaigns to better target specific customer segments
This proactive approach to understanding your customers' evolving needs can fuel meaningful improvements across the organization.
Putting Intent Data into Action: Tips for Success
Now that we understand the power of intent data for churn prevention, let's explore how to put it into action.
Select the Right Intent Topics (Intent Keywords)
The intent signals fueling your customer intelligence is dependent on the intent topics selected to calibrate your intent models (and how they’re weighted). When it comes to customer retention, you’ll want to track topics related to:
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Competitor brand names
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Competitor product names
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Your product category
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Challenges your product solves for
Develop an Intervention Strategy/Playbook (for Sales and CS Teams)
You’ll want to ensure the roles and individuals responsible for customer success, contract renewals, etc. and properly trained on how to both interpret intent insights and use those insights to rectify the relationship with at-risk customers. This should involve standard processes that link specific customer intel to:
- Customer-engagement channels (e.g., email, phone, direct mail, etc.)
- Messaging
- Content assets
Create customer-intervention marketing campaigns
Demand generation and/or customer marketing teams can use intent data to develop semi-personalized outreach campaigns based on common churn drivers. These should offer relevant content, address specific concerns, and showcase solutions that directly address their needs.
Feed insights back to product/product marketing teams
Regularly monitoring customer behaviors to identify patterns of displeasure is a great way to inform and help prioritize product development. Customer interviews are incredibly important, but you won’t always get candid feedback friendly customers or any feedback from displeased users. Product teams can learn a lot from trends that emerge in customers’ online research activities and content consumption.
Turning data into loyalty—before your competitors do
In today's competitive landscape, retaining existing customers is more important than ever. By harnessing the power of intent data, you gain an invaluable window into your customers' minds, enabling you to predict churn, intervene proactively, and foster deeper relationships.
Surprisingly, compared to other intent data use cases, churn prevention is seldom used. According to a recent survey conducted by Ascend2, only 32% of B2B marketers use intent data to prevent churn. Of the nine intent use cases covered in the survey, only event planning was selected less. This presents a great opportunity to get ahead of your competitors.
Remember, it's not just about preventing churn; it's about transforming data into genuine customer loyalty, ensuring your business thrives in the long run.
