Customer Retention Strategies
Successful business owners use time tested marketing tactics to attract new customers. However, gaining fresh business doesn’t carry much weight if it doesn’t lead to future purchases.
Creating a solid business foundation involves utilizing customer retention strategies that nurture a loyal customer base. To accomplish this, design a customer retention plan that encourages relationship building with current and freshly captured customers.
Plan to Cultivate Good Customer Relations
Retaining customers is all about gaining their trust and staying top of mind. When your customer retention plan (CRP) is focused on these factors, your loyal customer base will experience exponential growth.
Use the following customer retention strategies to create a CRP that works.
Build Trust with Your Customers
We’ve all been burned by deceptive marketing and dishonest business practices. This is why you should never assume customers believe that your products and services are as wonderful as your advertising claims. You must work to gain their trust by upholding your values and being consistent and reliable.
A perfect way to establish trust quickly is by replying to customer feedback and reviews. When customers see that you’re taking the time to read and respond to comments (and criticisms), they’re impressed that you’re truly interested in the experiences people are having with the products and services you provide.
Give Customers the V.I.P. Treatment
When you’re preparing to send out a mass email campaign or newsletter, have each correspondence address the receiver by their first name. Doing so will not only increase the chances of them opening the email, but they will appreciate the fact that a business is recognizing them as an individual instead of making them feel like a number. You’ve now initiated a lifelong and rewarding relationship with a customer because you’ve made them feel special and important.
Maintain a Customer Communication Chart
Managing customer engagements is a great way for your business to stay top of mind and prevent customers from falling through the cracks. Creating a customer communication chart can help in this regard because it keeps track of all your customer communications and prompts you to contact the customers you haven’t touched base with in a while.
All you need to do is enter the customer’s data, then set up reminders that will automatically give you a nudge when it’s time to send customers a greeting, a company update, product information, or an invitation to special sales that are only open to your V.I.P. customers!
Prevent Subscription Terminations
Customer engagement is the heart and soul of customer retention. When customers are reading your newsletters, emails, and social media posts, it means you’re doing an amazing job of presenting material that interests them, so they’re not likely no unsubscribe from your correspondence lists.
However, when a customer no longer wants to be on your mailing list, it helps to have a failsafe incentive in place to convince them not to click the unsubscribe button. Some of the most successful motivations include discount offers and free gifts.
Should the customer want to unsubscribe because they feel overwhelmed with the amount of notices they’re receiving from you, keeping them on your mailing list can be as simple as offering them control about what they receive and the frequency in which it’s received.
Create a Community
When people have a shared interest, they enjoy having a place they can connect with each other.
Forming a community where your customers can communicate and learn from each other is a seamless way of keeping them engaged. Q&A forums are the most common, but you can create other ones, too, depending on the products and services you offer. Communities also help free up your time because customers can look to each other for answers instead of expecting you to solve every problem.
You can’t go wrong creating a community for your customers. After all, when customers connect with one another, they can influence prospects to get on board and even convince current customers to not jump ship.
Launch a Loyalty Rewards Program
It’s exciting when a new customer makes a purchase! While seeing this brightens the day of every business owner, it’s important to keep the sun shining on your company by turning all new patrons into loyal customers. Establishing a loyalty program spreads the joy around because it’s a brilliant way to entice every customer to keep coming back for more!
Raise the Bar by Knowing Your CRR
A business’ customer retention rate (CRR) reveals how long a customer remains a customer.
Calculating your CRR is a great way to gauge the well-being of your business and discover if your customer retention plan is working as intended.
Calculate your CRR using these variables:
- Total Number of Customers at the End of the Period (week, month, or quarter)
- New Customers Acquired during this Period
- Number of Customers at the Start of this Period
Once you have figured out the number of customers for each period, subtract (b) from (a), then divide the answer by (c). Multiply the final answer by 100 to discover the customer retention rate.
The formula looks like this: (a – b) ÷ c = d x 100 = CRR
Customer Retention Strategies are the Glue that Binds Your Customer Base
Attracting new customers is always an important part of marketing, but your business isn’t going to survive if you don’t have repeat buyers. Once you’ve perfected customer acquisition, you need to use marketing strategies that increase your customer retention rate.
With so much competition in the virtual marketplace, it’s vitally important to nurture the relationship you have with your customers. You can accomplish this by incorporating some of the customer retention strategies discussed above to create an effective CRP. The end result will have your customers feeling special as they realize how valuable they are to the success of your business.
Productive marketing involves both customer acquisition and customer retention. Therefore, acquiring new customers is only half the battle. If you aren’t able to retain them, your business will begin to struggle and eventually fail. Smart business owners and marketers prevent this degradation by testing the water with a few customer retention strategies, then calculating the CRR to see which ones work best for their business. After some time has passed, they notice that the foundation of their customer base is stronger than ever.
If you’re ready to design a results-driven customer retention plan, Higgins Marketing Group can help. Contact us for a pressure-free chat about how we can solidify your customer base and promote its growth by improving your business’ customer relations and CRR with customer retention strategies that work because they’re tailored to your business!
Not sure yet? Check out our work and let us know when you’re ready.