That is where customer relationships are similar to relationships in normal life. The start is with recognizing who is the right customer, building and strengthening the relationship to avoid attrition.
Strong companies have numerous tips and tricks and strategies up their sleeves for retaining as many customers, as possible. If you thought customer acquisition was difficult, customer retention is even more difficult. It requires having clear marketing goals, planning, data collection, and analysis. For boosting revenues, it is important that your customers keep coming back to you and become your lifetime buyers.
Customer retention meaning is retaining your customers and having loyal customers for as long as possible, and to be able to achieve that you must have clear marketing targets, impeccable customer service, and listening to the needs of your customers is very important. If you want to be spending less money on customer retention, you have to listen to them, assess answers from clients, conduct surveys and polls, analyze data and improve your services.
No company is a one-off, selling one product at a time and then gone, to keep your customers coming back to you, when there are so many options available, you must deliver the best, and not compromise on quality.
As the focus has now shifted more to the success of the business, we would like to delve into why customer retention is so important, especially for online businesses. We are often asked by marketing executives of different kinds of company, what is the best customer retention strategy for an online company; the number one strategy would be to set a target of how many customers you want in a particular time frame. Once you set a goal, you’d keep working towards it, one step at a time.
Along with having a marketing team, you should have a customer retention team, why? Because, they will work on those strategies one by one, and will focus entirely on this goal of keeping the customers.
Online businesses always seek different ways and strategies to be able to retain customers, as long-term customers mean, more revenue. If you are unable to keep any customers for longer that means there is something wrong with your services or your product is flawed, this will also help you improve your product with the help of the feedback gathered from dissatisfied customers. The number of repeat customers is crucial for any online business, more customers also mean more reviews for your business, and happier customers refer their friends and family, and colleagues, too.
Companies now spend so much time and energy on gaining repeat customers, customer retention and satisfaction defines the success of a business. Facebook now has 2.7 Billion active monthly users, and its revenue has boosted even 30percent in the last 3 months of 2018, it has a huge number of loyal, dedicated users, who aren’t going anywhere in the next years.
Facebook and Snapchat are few of the examples of successful online businesses, despite having several data breaches in 2018, Facebook was able to retain its market share and gain even more. This is because the ability to connect with family and friends and easily searching events and places to go nearby, is important to common people, every time you want to visit someplace, Facebook reviews are taken, very seriously.
Snapchat was a unique interface model, targeting the younger lot globally, it thrived on the techniques that other social media platforms weren’t doing at the time. In 2018, the app has 186 million daily active users. Instagram is another success story, and marketing on Instagram and Snapchat for any company is very important. These businesses have retained customers due to very strong and clever marketing objectives and customer retention strategy.
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If your company is slightly gaining traction and you are having sporadic sales, and not as much sales as you would have liked, you need to implement some customer retention tactics and strategies and come up with new and improved strategies.
One of the ways to go about is to engage with your existing customers, by engaging we don’t mean you need to make cold-calls, by engaging we mean, you need to conduct surveys or polls, or send targeted emails to your customers, and inform them of new services, improvements, features, promotions and sales.
Whatever company you are in, you need to be spending less on customer retention as compared to customer acquisition. You are 50 percent more likely to gain profit from an existing customer than trying to woo a new customer. When you focus hard on existing customers, you are focusing on creating brand ambassadors, happy customers will bring in more customers for your brand.
Using a customer retention calculator or formula, you can analyze how many existing customers have made a purchase in the given time frame. Below are a few strategies we swear by for customer retention.
When activating your retention programs to drive growth with your company, you should be aware of and avoid the following mistakes:
With setting up retention strategies, there is more than the retention rate as performance indicators. Check your customer with these KPI:
Now it is clear that customer experience has to be the number 1 priority for customer retention, to be able to increase customer retention rate, have dedicated and passionate employees, who are willing to provide exceptional customer services. Companies like Uber provide exceptional customer service, it’s business model has thrived on customer retention and due to great experiences, marketing through the word of mouth.
People do connect and remember when they receive exceptional customer service, likewise, people never forget a horrible customer service experience. Responding to customer feedback is very important, replying positively even to negative answers matters, a lot.
Enhancing customer experience also involves the effort people have to put in while making a purchase, if your company has a complicated website or order placing system, consumers would be easily annoyed. Customers should be able to register their issues easily, if they are going from one representative to others, they would clearly be frustrated.
Our stats show that 89 percent of customers don’t like waiting longer for the registration of their complaints.
The ease of placing orders, the ease of registering reactions of customer loyalty all should be taken into account. Have a look, how simple and easy it is to place an order on Amazon.
Now you have mastered the game of customer satisfaction, you need to monitor it and measure it, remember there are no hard and fast rules to follow, every company is different, but most businesses are customer-centric, especially B2C. By 2020, more and more businesses are shifting to artificial intelligence technology for customer service and retention, the best part of having AI technology is supplying a customer service 24/7 that doesn’t rely on current “mood” of the customer service provider. It will have answers to all their questions, while still maintaining a human touch.
The younger generation and the millennials give customer experience the highest priority; 72% say making a call to a customer rep rarely solves their issues. Calculating repeat customers, purchase frequency, the value of the orders, over a given period of time lets you calculate customer retention and satisfaction.
As a growth marketing expert and customer developer, I experience every day how important a customer-centric corporate culture is.
In combination with agile testing and optimization processes, you will bring your growth fully on course.
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