Customer Retention Strategies That You Need To Adopt

What is Customer Retention?

Customer retention is the process of keeping existing customers engaged in your business. The goal is to make them continue buying products or services from you.

It enables you to extract more value from your existing customer base that you worked so hard to acquire in the first place.
You should look for building your brand off of this foundation by providing customer satisfaction so that they stay with you as revenue-generating users for a long time and maximize profits while giving value to the industry.

Why a Customer Retention Strategy is Important

It is an accepted fact that it’s cheaper to keep an existing customer than to acquire new ones. It can cost up to 5 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing customer.

Your customers have already bought from you so they trust you and this increases the chances for them to buy from you again.

Customer retention saves money on marketing by getting free word-of-mouth advertising. Happy customers are more likely to tell their friends and family about your business.

Loyal consumers turn out to be a good resource to get valuable feedback. They know the areas where your business lacks and this should be the cue for you to listen and improve, which helps you in the long run.

Strategies that work

1. Embed your product into their workflow

You need to create habits among your users and get them hooked to your product. This can be done by supporting multiple platforms and operating systems so as to give users complete accessibility for them to carry over their workflow to different devices of their choice.

Promote your apps, plugins, extensions, or any other services that you provide along with your product via in-product messages or emails.

All of this contributes to creating a complete finished product that provides a good customer experience for users to find value in and keep coming back to it.

2. Create an onboarding program

Having a company representative that gives product demos to new users is a good technique to create a positive first impression on the users and help them understand the product better. After all, people get discouraged from using something that they don’t understand.

Personalize the demo programs according to the customer needs. Try to understand their use case scenarios and give them solutions accordingly.

Onboarding reduces the time and effort required for the customer to master the product and creates a better experience

3. Customer Loyalty Program

We all love surprises. It can motivate customers to keep using your product. You need to identify returning customers and give them incentives for putting in time into using your product.

Giving some form of reward to customers who use your service more often than others is a good idea. Think of it as frequent flyer miles in an airline, the more you use a particular airline the more benefits you get.

Rewards can be anything from discounts and coupons to point-based insider programs and early-bird sales. Choose what suits you best.

4. Creating a feedback system

This is a good way to interact with your customers and hearing what they truly feel about your product. Collect customer reviews either through listing websites or through your own website.

Create and distribute surveys about the product among your customers. These surveys draw valid client interaction and help you execute an enhanced targeting strategy.

Analyze trends in user behavior from the surveys. This can prove to be vital information to make the right adjustments to your product.

5. Company Newsletter

Newsletters are a good way to engage with inactive customers and maintain a relationship with them. This should be focused on educating your customers with content that appeals to them and provides them value.

Emails have the highest conversion rate out of any other channel. Make sure to send periodic educational newsletters that aren’t too promotional, rather more personalized to the customers. This makes your brand more approachable and trustworthy.

You can use email automation services which is a simple and cost-effective way to retain customers.

6. Posting blogs regularly

You need to create content so that customers stay hooked to your website and trust you as a brand as a source of reliable information. Quality content reduces the bounce rate and builds interest in users.

You can aggregate content from other reliable sources to get ideas for your own content. This is a good option to keep track of trending content in your industry as well as beat the occasional writer’s block.

Using a content aggregator is an efficient way to source content from a variety of channels to get reliable information for you to act on. This gives you a boost in pushing out blogs more frequently and consistently.

7. Keep up with competitors and outrank them

You need to attract customers by providing them with the value that no other brand provides, or at least be on par with top brands. To accomplish that, you must keep track of your competitors and analyze what they are doing right.

Keep an eye out for opportunities and monitor industries to keep up with trends. Follow thought leaders in your vertical and gain knowledge from the content that they share. The goal is to incorporate the best practices that you come across into your own business.

Use analytics to evaluate your efforts and adopt what works best for you. This involves capitalizing on what brings in the most customers versus changing certain aspects that don’t get as much engagement.

Conclusion

It does not matter if you run a small business or a Fortune 500 company, customer retention should be the number one priority. People who have already purchased products or services from you are the best assets.

These strategies won’t yield overnight results but is certainly much cost-effective than continuously trying to acquire new customers.

If you put time and effort into it, your revenues are bound to shoot up. Experimenting with different strategies is the key until you find what works best for you.