Do you know, how your business will survive the immense industry competition?
Are you paying attention to holding existing customers?
What will you prefer, new customer acquisition or existing customer retention?
Ask these important questions to yourself before you blame customers or competition for your losses. The problem behind an organization’s loss and failure is the lack of customer retention strategies and not competition’s tactics.
Walt Disney said, “Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.”
The line says it all. You must focus not only on retaining your existing customers but also on offering services and excellent customer experiences that will bring new customers to you. If the customer comes first, the customer will last.
Moreover, one of the prominent goals of every business must be customer retention if their vision is to be in the race for a longer span.
Let’s learn more about customer retention and its strategies to increase business profits.
Do you know, what is customer retention and why is it important for your business?
Customer retention is nothing but a way to measure customer loyalty and find if your brand is doing well enough to hold back your existing customers or not.
You can unearth it quite easily by observing if the customers are preferring to purchase your products repeatedly, which implies that you’ve somehow succeeded in retaining such customers. Organizations spend time and money on customer retention strategies to reduce customer churn rates because it is less expensive to retain customers than to attract new customers.
The customers who have bought once from your brand, may or may not return to you. But if a customer is buying a second time from you, they might come to you again and again because they’ve crossed all the hindrances like trust factor, payment issues, quality concerns, etc. This is good news for you that you deterred a customer from defecting to your competition.
Increased customer retention also reduces the cart abandonment rate. So, it is anyways beneficial for an organization to keep focusing on customer retention.
Some effective customer retention strategies
1. Earn customer trust and aim for long-term relationships
To gain customers’ trust you need to really work hard by offering them quality products and satisfactory services throughout the customer journey stages. If they trust you, they stay longer with you. This customer retention strategy never fails.
Provide transparency on shipping and payment methods, don’t shock customers with hidden charges. Moreover, impeccable customer service must be available on multiple channels and most importantly, listen to your customers carefully.
2. A sturdy customer loyalty program can be the cherry on the top
Create a robust customer loyalty program to retain them. There should be some rewarding programs that encourage customers to visit your store again and force them to buy.
In addition, consider creating tiered programs based on customer loyalty. The customer who spends more will get more benefits. And give personalized offers to every customer according to their previous purchase history.
3. Use customer data
It is one of the effective customer retention strategies. You can collect customer data without always asking them. Just keep a tab on their transaction histories, customer support interactions, customer loyalty program data, and any other data source if you have. Additionally, you can use these pieces of information to know their choices and preferences and retain the customers.
4. Marketing automation is helpful
These days marketing automation techniques have made customer retention easier. They use machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to track customer behaviour and also assist you in finding which customer has lapsed. Marketing automation techniques automatically re-engage such customers with relevant and personalized messages and offers. ML and AI have brought revolutionary changes in customer retention strategies.
5. Estimate the customer lifetime value
Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the measurement of the net profit attributed to your brand’s upcoming interactions with a customer. If you understand customer lifetime value and focus on it, then you can aim for long-term profits by paying attention to maintaining customer relationships.
You can calculate CLV by subtracting the amount you spend on acquiring and retaining a customer from the amount of revenue that a customer produces.
6. Offer personalized content to each customer
The data you collect from analytics reports and other distinct sources is helpful in creating personalized offers, emails, and messages for each customer. It creates a connection between you and your customers.
Moreover, there is a mass offer which is the same for everybody. No changes, no customization, and one offer is applicable to each customer. This is not a personalized category, yet you can send such offers to get connected.
Based on some specific criteria, you can segment your customers into different groups. Then generate a particular offer for this group and everyone in this segment will receive that offer. It is a bit personalized way of reaching customers, but not giving special attention to every single customer’s interests when creating the offers.
Then there are personalized offers that are based on customers’ preferences and purchase history. Each customer gets unique offers and rewards. It is the best customer retention strategy.
And one more type of offer exists, which is completely based on machine learning, called the dynamic offer. It has several permutations and combinations to reap more profits. For instance, you can ask a customer to buy products from two or more categories of a specific amount and then they will get x percentage of the discount.
7. Surprise delights
Modern customers are hard to engage. Therefore marketers keep on discovering innovative ideas to engage customers and increase sales. Surprise delights are one of the many customer retention strategies that attract customers and successfully grab them.
It incorporates games and quizzes to engage customers and retain them. The gamification leverages customer data to improve the ROI.
Retain loyal customers for the sake of successful business!
The above-mentioned customer retention strategies are all you need to retain your most loyal customers. Yes, this is a fact that one size doesn’t fit all, so you cannot use all of the strategies for your business. Smartly choose the most suitable ones to increase customer satisfaction and customer engagement. And hence improve customer retention.
It takes months to find a customer and huge efforts behind that one conversion but only a mistake causes the loss of that customer. So, be careful and don’t overlook customer retention. It is the single most critical facet of a successful organization.
Speak to our experts about deploying Customer surveys to help you improve customer retention and grow your business.
