I’m Ticked Off!

Now, I realize the majority of people reading my blog are not first-year fundraisers or first-year marketers, but I'm going to go back to the basics and talk about the difference between acquiring a new customer and renewing a customer.

Let's pretend for a minute that we are not nonprofit marketers or fundraisers. In fact, let's pretend ... magically ... that we are, um, er (glancing around my house), marketers at Proctor & Gamble and we are in charge of the Tide product line. We have our marching orders from the top. Our product line must operate at a specific margin. Just pulling a number out of the air (of course, now I'm really curious and will be Googling this after I write this blog), let's say our bottom-line, year-end margin target for our product line is 62 percent.

When we make our marketing plan for the year, we have to look across marketing and advertising strategies that keep our current customer base committed to using Tide. But, we also know that continuing to build brand awareness and talking about why Tide is better than another brand is critical. In fact, many of those efforts are actually positioned to grow the customer base of Tide product buyers. And, of course, like any good marketer, we've got to run the ROI on all of our efforts to make sure we meet or beat that bottom-line margin goal. Right?

Now, we all learned in business school that it costs more to get a new customer than to keep a current customer — but we have to do both. Every brand has to strive to grow its customer base at the same time it achieves greater loyalty from the current customer base. And, the final element of our dream world of being the product-line lead for Tide is that when we look at the details of our marketing plans, we realize that the bottom line is what matters for us to reach our company goal and the expectations set by our boss(es).