REAN

This article is about the marketing term, REAN.

REAN is a marketing acronym that was first coined by Xavier Blanc in 2006 while working for a Finnish digital marketing agency . It is a simple yet powerful framework to plan ahead and/or analyze the often complex sequence of inter-related, multichannel, marketing activities that are needed to build & nurture a customer relationship. It stands for:

• R - Reach: the set of activities needed to raise prospects' attention for your brand, product or service
• E - Engage: the gradual, typically multi-channel, often recursive set of activities needed to engage the prospects you just won
• A - Activate: the activities needed for your prospects to take, eventually, the actions you wanted them to take
• N - Nurture: the activities needed to nurture the customer relationship you just managed to create

In large organizations, such activities are often performed in a very compartmentalized & fragmented way, leading to very substantial losses in both marketing effectiveness and cost efficiency. REAN is a useful tool to help fix such situations (finding broken links, duplications, message misalignment, etc.) or to plan ahead and align the activities of the different parts of a given organization.

New Developments

This framework was developed further for the specific purpose of web-analytics by Steve Jackson :

• R - Reach: measures the methods you use to attract traffic to your website or online presence and measures how people find your brand, product or service.
• E - Engage: measures the click depth and time spent interacting with your online creative elements and processes.
• A - Activate: is a measure of the effectiveness of visitors that have taken an action on your website, preferably one that you had pre-defined and wanted them to take.
• N - Nurture: measures the effectiveness of the way you actively encourage your activated visitors to come back and consume more of your website content.

In September 2008 NOKIA showed their methodology at the Stockholm eMetrics summit .

They called it AECR, Acquire, Engage, Convert and Retain which is based on very similar principles.

References

• Steve Jackson (April 2009). The Cult Of Analytics : Driving online marketing strategies using web analytics. Elsevier/Butterworth & Heinemann. ISBN 13: 978-1-85617-611-8. 
• Steve Jackson, the author of Cult of Analytics and CEO of Quru : http://www.quru.fi/ : Contact directly to get 1/3rd of the book for free including the full REAN description.
• Steve Jackson, Blackbeaks Blog….All things Analytics at BlackBeak