Pritama Sarkar

PORTFOLIO : PRITAMA SARKAR SAMPLE PUBLISHED ARTICLES How Marketing Automation Can Boost Customer Loyalty A single tool that automatically analyzes your customer data, derive insights from them, act on those insights in real-time, and streamline your workflow consistently doesn’t sound too good to be true at this point of time. All thanks to the advent of marketing automation. From customer acquisition to retention, marketing automation optimizes all of your communication efforts by reducing repetitive and time-consuming tasks, thus freeing up time and resources to focus on more pressing matters that hamper company growth and productivity. To give you a clearer picture, it helps you design a closed-loop marketing campaign by integrating and collecting insights from your CRM, lead management system and analytics platform. Marketing automation takes care of all the legwork for you – data analysis, audience segmentation, personalization, execution, analysis and reporting, leaving you time to plan targeted campaigns for your prospects and existing customers. Why existing customers? Well, in this day and age, your business needs to be customer-oriented to survive in the highly-competitive market. Today’s empowered customers are armed with the right resources to help them make an informed purchase decision and if you’re not their first choice, that means your competitor is. Fighting for prospects’ attention and eventually, their business, is a costly activity with no sure-shot strategy or tricks. However, retaining your existing customers by delivering value at every step of the way and not to mention, an expeditious customer support is completely in your control. Retention is the key to a sustainable growth model. Your loyal customers are worth up to 10 times as much as their first purchase – they are committed, willing to re-purchase, and they are more likely to pay premium prices for superior services and support. There’s no training cost associated, and on the top of that, they bring you similar quality customers by referrals. Also, their valuable insights and feedback will help you refine your product and services. Then again, customers do evolve, their needs change with time. Their expectation from your product will change as time passes on and you need to reinforce your value constantly to keep them hooked. After a one-time purchase, your strategy should be to help them steer the next decision in your favor by delivering value-based offerings based on previously-defined customer segments. The most efficient way to predict your customer behavior is to map out the entire customer journey. It helps you refine the whole process, pinpoint the loopholes, detect opportunity areas and plan timely campaigns. Marketing automation tools lets you design the customer journey for better understanding of the buyer intent, and to help you reach out to your customers with appropriate content at the right moment, delighting them and guiding them through the sales funnel in this process. Read the entire article on the WebEngage blog. Advocacy Marketing Strategies to Scale your SaaS “The best companies understand the compounding power of growth from their existing customer base through expanded use and customer advocacy and don’t leave those important growth levers up to chance.” Lincoln Murphy, Customer Success Evangelist at Sixteen Ventures hit the nail on the head in an expert round-up by Appcues. In today’s subscription-based economy, SaaS businesses need to focus on user retention and engagement more than acquisition to stay afloat. Marketers need to optimize the entire end-to-end buying cycle to turn skeptical customers into loyal ones, and the loyal ones into brand advocates. According to a Nielsen study, 85 percent of consumers seek out trusted expert content – credible, third-party articles & reviews – when considering a purchase, and 67 percent of consumers agree that an endorsement from an unbiased expert would make them more likely to purchase a product. Advocates help speed up the decision-making process by providing expert content, and by recommending your brand to their network. They are emotionally invested in the success of your brand and are willing to go out of their way to share their positive experiences with their industry peers. They are 5x more valuable than average customers - they help your team refine the product by providing insightful feedback and suggestions, they shorten the sales cycle by warming up the leads, they are less likely to switch vendors, and will take you with them when they change companies. Advocates deliver a much-needed realism in the era of paid marketing initiatives. They add to the mix a refreshing dose of authenticity and frankness that’s markedly absent from any branded marketing communication. Read the entire article on the Incredo blog. Promoting your Ecommerce Referral Program on Social Media the Right Way With 3.196 billion people using social media from the moment they crack open one eye in the morning to the time they doze off scrolling through Instagram, you can’t take the risk of disregarding the social platforms as viable customer acquisition channels. Everybody and their grandma is on social media. Your existing customers, your potential customers, and your competitors are already there. Leverage these social channels to bring new life to your lead generation campaigns and usher them down the sales funnel. Same goes for your referral marketing campaign. Don’t launch your ecommerce referral program without a solid promotional strategy in place. Lack of proper awareness will lead to your campaign falling flat on its face. You need to have an integrated marketing strategy in place with enough resources to promote your campaign on all available channels, including social media. Continuing along that train of thought, your promotion game plan should be a part of the existing social media marketing strategy. Your audience won’t appreciate on-your-face promotional posts; you have to build up authority to induce trust and boost engagement. A study shows that 51% of participants would unfollow brands on social media if they posted irritating posts and 27% would mark/report the brand and page as spam and block them. Offering incentives isn’t enough to solicit referrals, you need to feel the pulse of the crowd and appeal to them in their own language. Read the entire article on the Business2Community blog. Why Product Reviews Are Important For B2B SaaS Now More Than Ever Exciting new products are cropping up almost every day, trying to penetrate the market with brilliant new growth hacks and impressive tactics. Their strategies may differ, but the end goal is the same — convert more leads. To achieve that target, first they have to go through the intermediary stages of building awareness, driving people to the website, and inspiring trust amongst potential customers. Getting prospects to trust you is not an easy task. And it’s getting tougher with each passing day. It’s the age of ‘informed consumers’ — disrupting all kinds of traditional marketing ideologies and kicking sales pitches to the curb. They aren’t buying whatever the brands are claiming to sell anymore, they have their own ‘sources’ (no, not Wikipedia). They do not shy away from spending quality time researching before making a purchase and undeniably, a major step in the whole research process is looking for online reviews. Where can one find legit information about a product or a brand, than unbiased, unedited customer reviews? As marketers, we will most definitely publicize the best features of our products, but today’s consumers don’t care for our version of the matter. They are more interested to know what their fellow customers think of it. Brands can’t hide behind heavily-embellished marketing promos anymore, their pros and cons are laid bare by customers with real issues and real inputs. Fancy features aside, what the buyers need to know is if the product can offer a simple solution to their problem. That’s it. With the vast treasure trove of information available on the web, digital customers are well equipped to choose what’s best for them. They are smart, tech-savvy, quick to make logical decisions and most importantly, a cynic group of people — and by they, I mean us. All of us. Moreover, for brands selling SaaS products, the challenges are a bit different from brands catering to consumers directly. Their market, the research habit of the buyers, the sales funnel are not only different, but multi-layered. Read the entire article on the GrowthScore blog. How to Retain your App Users using AI Planning, designing and executing marketing campaigns to get users to download your app take a heavy toll on your resources. On top of that, 24% of users abandon an app after just one use. The reason is quite simple, if your app is not indispensable, they’ll abandon/uninstall it and move on. Considering the fact that your existing customers are much more profitable than the new ones, retention should be on the top of your mind. If you manage to lower your churn rate by 5%, you can increase your profitability by 25-125%! No matter how much you spend on acquiring new users by bulk, if you don’t have a plan to retain your existing app users, you’ll end up losing valuable prospects who’ll just take their business elsewhere. People abandon apps if their expectations are not met; if your app isn’t “sticky” enough. The stickiness of an app is calculated by dividing your daily active user count (DAU) by your monthly active user count (MAU). The closer your DAU is to your MAU, the stickier your app. Users voluntarily download an app and provide personal information to enjoy a tailored experience. As app marketers, your job doesn’t end with app installation, you have to utilize the user information to predict the user journey and provide a cohesive experience that’ll pave the way for upsells and continued loyalty. You have to coerce your users to make your app a habit instead of a one-time fad. How does AI fit into all this? AI-infused mobile apps give marketers a complete understanding of user behavior and help refine the entire journey by delivering value at every step of the way. It sifts through a huge number of data points to isolate actionable insights that’ll pave the way for a more meaningful relationship with the customers. ● ● ● ● ● AI/machine learning streamlines the gathered data, filters it to reveal critical insights and preferences for a more targeted user experience. It helps automate routine marketing tasks to free up more time to strategize and modify lifecycle marketing campaigns. It enables the system to draw conclusions based on historical data and perform activities accordingly. With a clear business goal in mind, AI continually studies the patterns and provides a holistic view of the lifetime value of your users, thus identifying your most valuable customers. Not only that, it monitors the behavior of existing high-CLV customers to optimize campaigns for potential prospects. It simplifies the process of targeting valuable prospects by using past data to find and engage similar profiles of people who are likely to respond to your message. It even optimizes your outbound marketing campaigns to reach out to the right users with the most relevant message at the optimal time for maximum profit. Read the entire article on the AppVirality blog. Profiles and Blogs The rest of my articles can be found on my Medium blog. Here’s the link! Here’s the link to my Twitter profile. Here’s my LinkedIn profile. Let’s have a chat!