While many of us have immediate fears and problems to solve with the coronavirus, the majority of us will need to figure out how to run our business post-pandemic.
Things may get back to "normal" but it won't be the normal we had before.
Government policies will be different.
Markets will be different.
Most of all, customers will be different.
We don't have the answers yet as to how things will change, but it's pretty much guaranteed that there will be change.
You can try to anticipate the changes and plan for them but it'll just be educated guesses that this point. Useful, but there might be a better option.
An alternative would be to figure out how you can make your business more agile and adaptable. The faster you can accept a change and adapt your business to it, the greater your chances are of out-pacing your competitors in the months and years ahead.
There's no right way to do this as it'll depend on your specific circumstances, but you can start looking for them now.
Start by looking at things you "always" or "never" do and asking yourself why?
Could those change into "sometimes" or "often"?
Especially take a hard look at your marketing and any customer touch points like shipping, customer service, and returns. Given how customer behavior will shift, those touch points going to be places that are going to help or harm the most.
If you want a concrete place to start, look at how you communicate with customers after their first purchase and how they behave for 90 days after that purchase. Ideally you have an entire campaign dedicated to transitioning new customers into your marketing and into repeat, loyal customers. You can use Repeat Customer Insights' Latency report to see how you're performing at that critical time, both now and in the past.
Eric Davis
Refine your automated marketing campaigns with better timing
When building any automated marketing campaign that sends messages over time, you need to know how long the campaign should be and how long to delay the messages. The Customer Purchase Latency metrics calculated by Repeat Customer Insights can help you figure out that timing.