Customer Acquisition Research Articles

Proposed Improved Marketing Communication Strategy, To Boost Awareness and Enhance Sales of PT Leo Indonesia

With the tagline of “Connecting empty dining tables with empty stomachs,” LEO (disguised name) provides a food service platform where customers can reserve restaurant tables and get timely-based discounts through yield management. By getting customers to dine in during odd-eating hours, restaurants get to recoup its operating expenses. However, even with this seemingly win-win situation for all stakeholders, LEO has not been able to be as successful as they should be. This study aims to find out the cause of this low adoption rate, as well as the solution to further boost sales and overall performance of LEO Indonesia. Data collection is done through desk research, previous studies, a questionnaire to customers, an interview with the employee, and some limited internal data. Further in-depth analysis was conducted using 5 As Customer Path and Integrated Marketing Communication. This revealed that the root cause to LEO’s slowdown after their initial success, was the fact that they were focusing so much on customer retention and not enough on customer acquisition anymore. Having found the root cause, a strategy formulation was created using the ERRC Grid framework. These frameworks provided solutions for all the factors mentioned above, while focusing a lot more on LEO’s marketing strategy to increase brand awareness, adoption rate, and overall performance, since the service that LEO have been offering manages to fit the wants and needs of current and potential customers.

USING SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS IN THE BANKING INDUSTRY TO DRIVE BUSINESS ADVANTAGE

This paper highlights the opportunities that social media can offer banks and explores the ways that “banks can leverage this medium to enhance customer engagement” [8]. The widespread use of social media in business has redefined the way enterprises approach customer engagement and business growth strategies. With social media becoming a mainstream form of communication, people are providing detailed information about themselves, their preferred products and services, their daily activities, and other important aspects of their personality. This information has the power not only to influence their personal network, but also to help “companies understand consumer preferences and customize their product and service offerings accordingly. In a market characterized by economic” uncertainty “and increased competition, an undivided focus on customer acquisition and retention has become the primary objective of the banking and financial services industry. Banks compete to reach out to potential customers with personalized service offerings and products that cater to individual customer preferences and investment behaviors. However, acquiring information on target customers, their choices and financial preferences is a challenging task given the enormous amount of data that must be gathered, processed, analyzed and interpreted accurately to drive effective business decisions. This is where social analytics come in. Social analytics involve aggregating unstructured data from social networks and analyzing” [15] it objectively to help enterprises make effective business decisions, create better channels of communication with their customers and other key stakeholders, increase cross-selling opportunities, provide an enhanced customer experience, and offer targeted solutions. This paper explores the power of social media and how it can be used by banks “to gain an advantage over their competitors by providing” [16] improved products and services, thereby making the customer experience easy and responsive.

Search Frictions in International Goods Markets

Abstract This paper studies how frictions in the acquisition of new customers distort the allocation of activities across heterogeneous producers. We add bilateral search frictions in a Ricardian model of trade and use French firm-to-firm trade data to estimate search frictions faced by French exporters in foreign markets. Estimated coefficients display a strong degree of heterogeneity across countries and products that correlates with various proxies for information frictions. Markets with high estimated frictions are shown to display less dispersion in sales between high- and low-productivity firms, a consequence of the distortive impact of frictions. A counterfactual reduction in the level of search frictions significantly improves the efficiency of the selection process by pushing the least productive exporters out of the market while increasing export sales at the top of the productivity distribution.

Design and Evaluation of Optimal Free Trials

Free trial promotions are a commonly used customer acquisition strategy in the Software as a Service industry. We use data from a large-scale field experiment to study the effect of trial length on customer-level outcomes. We find that, on average, shorter trial lengths (surprisingly) maximize customer acquisition, retention, and profitability. Next, we examine the mechanism through which trial length affects conversions and rule out the demand cannibalization theory, find support for the consumer learning hypothesis, and show that long stretches of inactivity at the end of the trial are associated with lower conversions. We then develop a personalized targeting policy that allocates the optimal treatment to each user based on individual-level predictions of the outcome of interest (e.g., subscriptions) using a lasso model. We evaluate this policy using the inverse propensity score reward estimator and show that it leads to 6.8% improvement in subscription compared with a uniform 30-days for-all policy. It also performs well on long-term customer retention and revenues in our setting. Further analysis of this policy suggests that skilled and experienced users are more likely to benefit from longer trials, whereas beginners are more responsive to shorter trials. Finally, we show that personalized policies do not always outperform uniform policies, and we should be careful when designing and evaluating personalized policies. In our setting, personalized policies based on other methods (e.g., causal forests, random forests) perform worse than a simple uniform policy that assigns a short trial length to all users. This paper was accepted by Duncan Simester, marketing. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4507 .

Impact of Loyalty Card Programs on Customer Satisfaction and Engagement with Reference to Colombo District Supermarket Retail Industry

The super market industry in Sri Lanka is highly competitive and a drastic improvement has been observed in the last decade as consumer lifestyle is changing with greater degree of influence by Western lifestyles. Due to heavy competition in the super market industry, super markets are pushed into a situation to focus more towards customer acquisition and retaining programs in order to increase their market share. However, leading super market chains suggest that despite acquisition programs making impact, customers who have been already acquired by the organizations are switching to competitors. Hence, in order to obtain competitive advantage over competitors, super market chains ought to focus executing effective customer retaining program like loyalty program that would have a positive impact on the business performance of the organization. However, presently, super market chains have implemented loyalty programs that don’t yield expected benefits due to drawbacks in the loyalty programs which prevent customers from participating in the loyalty programs due to customer dissatisfaction on loyalty program in general. The research is essentially aimed at identifying factors that have impact on customer satisfaction on customer loyalty program to participate in super market industry. Anticipated Benefits, Privacy concerns, Variety seeking, Customer involvement and commitment are four key factors identified through literature survey that impact on customer participation to loyalty program. The shoppers of Keells, Cargills and Arpico and Laugfs were selected to represent the different loyalty card types in this research and all the Individuals in Colombo district who do their purchases at supermarkets qualify as the population for the research. The results of the study discuss the impact of customer retainment and engagement factors of loyalty card programs on customer satisfaction and the significant impact of those factors on the customer satisfaction.

Customer acquisition activities of web stores

Based on the domestic and international market trends of the last decades, it can be stated that the number and turnover of web stores, internet commerce is growing dynamically from year to year. The aim of our research is to explore the effective, proven customer acquisition methods of modern web stores. As part of this, the subject of our literature research was to explore the popular advertising platforms for web stores and their basic marketing principles and their optimal structure based on them. In our professional research, on the one hand, we explored through structured interviews what methods and communication are considered effective by the three webshops competing and selling in the different markets based on their experiences. On the other hand, we examined the shopping habits and preferences of consumers in the form of a questionnaire. The information obtained in this way can be crucial in planning the marketing strategy for any existing or new web store. We have found that one of the most important attributes in acquiring customers is reliability. From the beginning, you should strive for positive customer reviews as well as regular value creation proficiency must be demonstrated through content production, with which the business can build a committed community.

Identity Fusion and New Venture Performance: Team Average and Dispersion Effects

The present paper studies the relationship between entrepreneurial identity on new venture performance through a group level analysis. It expands on the concept of identity with a metric of identity fusion for the new venture team context and uses a longitudinal field design with repeated survey responses of multiple members in knowledge-intensive new venture teams from Sweden, Denmark, and Russia. Results from multilevel structural equation modeling (MSEM) showed that while there was significant dispersion in intensity of identity fusion among members within a new venture team, there was no direct effect between average team identity fusion and venture performance, as represented by external funding, customer acquisition status and product advancement status. The results run contrary to recent findings of a positive effect between identity fusion and firm performance and makes the case for further explorations into the consistency of the relationship between identity fusion and venture outcomes. The study is among the first to consider venture outcomes of group-level identity in entrepreneurship, highlighting the salience of identity fusion as one of several potential forms of group identity.

Improved Churn Causal Analysis Through Restrained High-Dimensional Feature Space Effects in Financial Institutions

Customer churn describes terminating a relationship with a business or reducing customer engagement over a specific period. Customer acquisition cost can be five to six times that of customer retention, hence investing in customers with churn risk is wise. Causal analysis of the churn model can predict whether a customer will churn in the foreseeable future and identify effects and possible causes for churn. In general, this study presents a conceptual framework to discover the confounding features that correlate with independent variables and are causally related to those dependent variables that impact churn. We combine different algorithms including the SMOTE, ensemble ANN, and Bayesian networks to address churn prediction problems on a massive and high-dimensional finance data that is usually generated in financial institutions due to employing interval-based features used in Customer Relationship Management systems. The effects of the curse and blessing of dimensionality assessed by utilising the Recursive Feature Elimination method to overcome the high dimension feature space problem. Moreover, a causal discovery performed to find possible interpretation methods to describe cause probabilities that lead to customer churn. Evaluation metrics on validation data confirm the random forest and our ensemble ANN model, with %86 accuracy, outperformed other approaches. Causal analysis results confirm that some independent causal variables representing the level of super guarantee contribution, account growth, and account balance amount were identified as confounding variables that cause customer churn with a high degree of belief. This article provides a real-world customer churn analysis from current status inference to future directions in local superannuation funds.

The Impact of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in the Banking Sector Using Machine Learning

echnology today is evolving at break-neck speeds offering multiple business opportunities. The creation of Machine Learning (ML) has altered a new dimension in today’s business landscape. Machine Learning tools are rapidly changing their activity and give a new pave to the marketing people that are used to make their business more trouble-free and it also makes changes which are so profound for the marketing personnel who are finding it difficult to ignore the importance of investing in and adopting AI which is an integral part of the marketing task. Nowadays the Banking and Financial Sectors are much more mature, and robust and have implemented ML in their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and marketing fields in a variety of ways. Generally, the most significant impacts on the growth of the above sector depend on in terms of customer loyalty, profitability, and Return on Investment. In recent years it has been noticed the rise of specialized software by the IT firms that have to be dedicated to developing customized solutions with different programs for CRM. It is the liberalization, Privatisation, and globalization(LPG) which make the banking sector so tough and becoming increasingly diverse. For that Customer, the acquisition is vital for a new bank, but retention is much more important and cost-effective for a recognized bank. CRM gives a new dimension to most Indian bankers who could realize the goal of their business and acquire and retain valuable customers to link them in the entire business process. There should be a Highly Integrated effort to innovate, discover, create, and satisfy customer needs differently. However, it is astonishing to mention that most of the banking and financial sector's activities are focused on customer acquisition rather than customer retention. In this study, we have focused on the impact of customer retention and service quality using our proposed Machine Learning Model.

The Digital Disruptive Intermediaries in the Tourism Industry

Nowadays, the new technologies offer new capabilities for the tourism industry. New disruptive innovations have appeared forcing the tourism companies to adjust to the new changes and challenges. Disruption in the tourism industry is currently happening and is overthrowing the status quo. Airbnb, TripAdvisor, Expedia and Booking.com are four of the most influential tourist companies. They leverage demand-side economies of scale by scaling up the customer acquisition and providing a great user experience. Their primary business requirement is the ability to respond to new, unforeseen or unpredictable business requirements and customer demands, in order the willingness to embrace disruption to be achieved. Their reorganization of the allocation of demand and supply leads to a disruption of tourist markets, particularly those that were formerly monopolised. This study examines the best practices in the business models of four digital disruptive intermediaries (DDIs) in the tourism industry through two different methods: SWOT Analysis and PESTEL Analysis.

Viral marketing strategies with dual incentives

Incentives for adopters and senders increase rates of product adoption and message forwarding respectively. In this paper, a dual incentives strategy is investigated to determine the optimized incentive combination in the new customer acquisition stage for minimizing cost and in the repeated purchase stage for maximizing long-term profit. We construct a two-stage N-intertwined model, i.e., the SANB model to describe these two processes. Because of the advantage of the N-intertwined model in expressing the individual-level state transition process, heterogeneous incentives are also investigated. Results of homogeneous incentives show a more important role of promotion incentives. While results of heterogeneous incentives show different peculiarities between adoption and promotion incentives without the constraint of the total cost. Besides, a dataset from an online food delivery service platform is applied in an empirical study to verify the influence of incentives on exposure and purchase.

PELATIHAN PERILAKU PEMBELIAN KONSUMEN DALAM PEMASARAN MEDIA SOSIAL PADA UKM

Consumer purchasing behavior is an action that is directly involved in obtaining, consuming and spending products and services through various media including online social media. The use of social media marketing is described as an application, platform, or media that can facilitate communication, collaboration, or information sharing among users in general and direct sales, customer acquisition, and customer retention. The purpose of the activity is to help business owners have a stock of knowledge about the importance of understanding consumer purchasing behavior through social media. The partner who became the place of activity was a mute craft creative product business located in Serang, Banten. Based on initial observations through online with zoom meetings, partners do not understand about social media consumer behavior, as a medium for communicating partner products to consumers without large costs. The method offered in the activity is training/socialization on basic understanding of marketing consumer behavior and the use of social media marketing. The output of PKM activities is in the form of publications to journals and IPR.

How do e-stores grow their market share?

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to identify how fashion and cosmetics e-stores compete and grow to help e-commerce managers set the corresponding marketing strategy. It describes the relevance of customer acquisition and retention to market share as the essential performance metrics.Design/methodology/approachAn empirical generalization approach where patterns in data appearing across studies are described by a mathematical or graphical method is used. To do that, the authors observed real transactional data and the effect of how e-stores benefit from new and returning customers and gain a larger market share. The authors have analysed behavioural data from nearly 124,000 e-commerce customers in two highly popular product categories (fashion and cosmetics) in the size of 10,000,000 euros in sales or more.FindingsFashion and cosmetics e-stores with more market penetration tend to have a higher market share measured both by the number of total purchases and the number of sales in euro. In other words, market penetration is a solid predictor of market share in all circumstances. Interestingly, no significant difference in loyalty has been observed in relation to market share growth except in the situation where the market partition was excluded from the product category.Research limitations/implicationsThe businesses under study derived only from one country and only two product categories were observed. Thus, there is a potential limitation in generalizing the findings to the whole e-commerce market from a geographical and category perspective. The length of the observation period may also play a role as a longer period increases the chance of repeat buying.Practical implicationsE-commerce managers can gain long-term market share growth mainly via higher market penetration (acquisition of new customers) and should avoid misleading overfocus on loyalty tactics (retention of current customers). The study also provides important benchmarks for e-commerce businesses in the fashion and cosmetic categories.Originality/valueIn the market share growth literature, only a handful of studies focus on stores and not on products. Moreover, there is a dominance of fast-moving consumer goods categories. Surprisingly, studies analysing ever-growing e-commerce markets are scarce. Thus, this research is original because it describes, using empirical data, how brands online, at the store level and within the fashion and cosmetics category, grow their market share. It is also one of the few studies that work with real business transactional data.

Operational Analysis Of Strategic Plan Based On The Perspective Of Balanced Scorecard Performance Of Hospital Employees At Royal Prima Hospital Medan

Performance appraisal using the Balanced Scorecard method measures a hospital’s performance comprehensively from both the financial and non-financial sectors. As a health service company must have a comprehensive, coherent, balanced and measurable performance appraisal system. This study aims to analyze, test, and measure the performance of the hospital by using The Balance Scorecard case study at Royal Prima Hospital Medan. According to the balanced scorecard, the research problem was how about the performance of Royal Prima Hospital Medan in the period of 2018-2020. The assessment was done from four perspectives: financial perspective, customer perspective, internal business perspective, and growth and learning perspective. The research used mixed methods, a research step by combining two types of research, qualitative and quantitative research. The data were gathered by conducting a documentary study on financial statements, medical records, and personnel records. Primary data were obtained from the interviews with the management and distributing questionnaires to customers and employees in the hospital. The results of the research showed that the performance of the financial perspective on economic ratios is not yet economical, while the efficient and effectiveness ratios are very good, the financial performance of Royal Prima Hospital Medan has been very effective and efficient from 2018 to 2020. The Hospital performance from the customer perspective in the period of 2018-2020 for the percentage of customer retention is still not good, customer acquisition is very good and customer satisfaction is quite good. The performance of internal business perspective in the period 2018-2020 was not good in which the percentage of BOR, BTO, and TOI were not in accordance with the standard of the Ministry of Health. The performance of the percentage of growth and learning at Royal Prima Hospital Medan perspective in the period of 2018 - 2020 shows a fairly good percentage.

Hunting for new customers: Assessing the drivers of effective salesperson prospecting and conversion

Researchers and practitioners acknowledge that sales prospecting plays an important role in new customer acquisition. Yet, rigorous academic research on prospecting is virtually nonexistent. In this study, we examine the salesperson’s role at the front of the sales funnel which involves prospecting for leads (prospecting efficacy; PE) and converting those prospects into customers (conversion efficacy; CE). Based on the Motivation-Opportunity-Ability framework, we test the relationships between several drivers of PE and CE via an NBD and Beta regression model. First, we discover an implicit trade-off between PE and CE, implying a ‘sweet spot’ that maximizes new customer acquisition. Also, more experienced salespeople acquire fewer new customers than those with less experience. Higher advertising support and extrinsic rewards improves CE to a greater extent for more-, versus less- experienced salespeople, which suggests that incremental increases in advertising budgets and incentive rewards are better allocated in favor of more experienced salespeople.

EFFICIENCY OF EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHMS IN SOLVING OPTIMIZATION PROBLEMS ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE FINTECH INDUSTRY

The pandemic forced companies to rebuild business processes in an accelerated mode. Now they pay more attention to web products and work with customers in the virtual space [1].The financial technology market (FinTech) is getting bigger and more diverse every day. Financial news website Market Screener reports that the global FinTech market will be worth $26.5 trillion by 2022, with a compound annual growth rate of 6%. In Europe alone, the use of FinTech increased by 72% in 2020. The competition in this market segment is also growing. In the first eleven months of 2021, more than 26,300 startups have joined the fray, more than double the number of new entrants just three years earlier [2]. As the competition for customer engagement and loyalty heats up, FinTech players need to reach out to a much larger audience optimally distributed across ever-growing geographies. Monitoring and managing business operations is becoming increasingly complex as the number of customer accounts and financial transactions continues to grow. Therefore, more solutions are needed to address the challenges associated with financial IT. Therefore, the focus should be on algorithms and methods that help FinTech companies optimize all stages of their activities, from customer acquisition to payment processing and payout forecasting. In all aspects of a business, there is little room for errors, unexpected failures, or downtime. Performance optimization is the key to success in this industry. The explosion of activity caused by all these companies generates a huge amount of Structured and Unstructured Big Financial Data about customers and payments, as well as information about the underlying business processes [3]. The deep analytics hidden in this data can help companies optimize payment approval rates, transaction costs and reduce the risk of fraud, as well as customer retention and accelerate revenue growth. The above determines the acquisition of competitive advantages not only for FinTech corporations and companies, both regionally and globally, which is especially true in times of crisis. The article comprehensively explores the following topical issues: problems, features and prospects of effective optimization tasks in modern conditions, critical issues of theory and practice of Evolutionary Computations (including financial management), the specifics of effective use of Genetic Algorithms in information systems of FinTech companies. The above trends and peculiarities of the application of Evolutionary Computations in general and Genetic Algorithms in particular should be taken into account in further research and practical projects and real projects of effective implementation and use of Data Mining and Artificial Inelligence technologies in FinTech information systems. The obtained results are relevant and applicable not only for local companies та організацій, but also for international applications in the context of global, national and regional (not only economic, but also pandemic, military, natural disaster etc) crisis phenomena.

Exploring the Effectiveness of LinkedIn as a Tool for B2B Customer Acquisition in the Asia Pacific Region

This research aims to explore the use of LinkedIn as a tool for B2B customer acquisition, in order to tap into a timely issue faced by many sales and partnerships personnel working digitally in globally dispersed sales teams. The research problem and data are based on Organization X and signifies the bottleneck in the sales process lying in not receiving an initial response from the potential clients who are contacted through LinkedIn. Hence the research objective is to identify the factors affecting this low conversion rate, and to understand LinkedIn behavioural patterns and preferences of working professionals in the Asia Pacific region. The key variables explored are message length, message subject, prior knowledge, and LinkedIn usage frequency, which have been proved to have a weak relationship with the rate of responsiveness, whereas the preference for being approached through channels other than LinkedIn, such as email and through fellow employees have been recorded to be higher. Preference has also been observed for shorter, precise messages with informative message subjects, which would lead to higher tendency of replying to B2B related messages on LinkedIn. Keywords: LinkedIn sales, B2B marketing, Customer acquisition, Digital sales

Strategic orientation's dilemma of batik retailers in Jakarta

Ambidexterity orientation that can simultaneously combine and align existing and new competitive advantage sources for small and medium enterprises can be used to determine and implement their market orientation and entrepreneurial orientation. This study explores strategic orientations that are reflected both in market orientation and entrepreneurial orientation to examine the ambidexterity of batik retailers in Jakarta, Indonesia. Research variables consist of environmental dynamics, market orientation, entrepreneurial mindset, entrepreneurial orientation, and business performance. Data analysis was performed using Structural Equation Modeling with Lisrel 10.20 and Smart PLS 3 software. Data analysis in this study was performed on survey results of 200 respondents that were sampled using snowball sampling method. At the 0.05 significance level, results showed that while batik retailers were able to develop both their market orientation and entrepreneurial orientation, only market orientation had impact on improving their business performance. Although entrepreneurial orientation that was based on innovativeness and proactiveness positively affects business performance, it has not been proven to be able to play a significant role affects business performance. Batik retailers were more oriented to the current market and competed in customer acquisition. They tended to be more passive and less proactive in dealing with future market changes.

We “like” to value the brand: a mixed-method study

PurposeFrom the perspectives of service-dominant logic and social identity theory, this study aims to assess social networking site (SNS) users’ likes as a form of social endorsement as well as its effects on like-clicking behavior, perceived brand value, customer-brand identification and purchase intention. Furthermore, the different effects of social endorsement on the perceived functional, hedonic, social and monetary brand value were investigated so as to support SNS users’ role as value cocreators.Design/methodology/approachAn online survey was administered as a pretest of customer perceptions regarding brands that are liked on SNSs. Next, an experiment was conducted to verify the effects of social endorsement. A mixed-method approach including partial least squares (PLS) and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) was adopted for the data analysis.FindingsThe results revealed that like-clicking behavior could be contagious because SNS users exposed to others’ likes were more likely to click the like button themselves. Like-clicking behavior positively influenced the perceived functional, hedonic, social and monetary value of the liked brand. Perceived brand value strengthened customer-brand identification, thereby increasing purchase intention.Originality/valueLike-based social endorsements were confirmed as a type of value cocreation behavior that benefits the endorsed brand by spreading brand awareness, and increasing customer acquisition and retention. An fsQCA approach was developed to measure the moderating effect of users’ propensity to click the like button on perceived brand value, thus contributing to the advancement of fsQCA.

Perception of Benefits and Barriers Associated with the Management Systems Integration - A Comparative Study of Slovak and Ukrainian Organizations

The article discusses the benefits and barriers associated with the implementation of integrated management systems. The results of a questionnaire survey conducted in Slovak and Ukrainian companies with implemented IMS confirm that Ukrainian and Slovak companies generally perceive the introduction of IMS positively, regardless of the length of the period (number of years) IMS is implemented. The most frequently reported benefits were (1) increased quality of products and services, (2) a competitive, and (3) customer acquisition and retention. With regard to barriers perceived, Ukrainian companies generally perceive the introduction of IMS positively, although slightly larger barriers were overcome by larger companies, the opposite was true for Slovak companies. However, the dependence of the perception of barriers in the IMS implementation on the size of the company was not statistically proven. The most frequently reported barriers were an administrative burden and a lack of tools for IMS auditing and evaluation. The study expands the empirical evidence on perceived benefits and barriers of IMS implementation and can serve managers in their effort to overcome the difficulties and take full advantage of IMS implementation.