In the modern age, remaining competitive is no easy matter. Consumers are continually bombarded by creative ads attempting to persuade them to jump on board to another business or service, and it may just succeed without a good customer retention strategy. The key to the success of a company is ensuring that it can keep people coming back over and over again. Businesses expand by attracting new customers, but by keeping their current ones satisfied, they prosper. To support existing clients, firms and companies need to put in an effort. It may be even more necessary to do so than to obtain new ones. Improving customer retention is the most vital part of growing a sustainable business.
According to Harvard Business School, increasing customer retention rates by 5% will improve a company’s profit between 25% to 95%. Customer retention is something which if you want your organization to survive in the long run; you would like to spend a lot of time on. You’ve hit the jackpot if you get customer lifetime loyalty.
Many say the most challenging part of running a company or Business is acquiring new customers. However, this is not entirely true; keeping customers is far more critical than getting them. By nurturing your existing customer base, you’ll expand your customer base. Strong reviews from your satisfied customers will inspire new customers.
Do you want to build a loyal customer, client base? Read on to find how? In this blog, we’ll be answering, How to improve customer retention, including:
- What is customer retention, and how to calculate it?
- Why is customer retention necessary for your Business?
- Benefits of customer retention.
- Top 10 proven strategies to improve customer retention.
So, let’s start. Shall we?
What is Customer Retention?
The method of converting one-time purchasers into repeat customers is customer retention. The term “Retention” is derived from the word “Retain”. So the purpose of customer retention is retaining your current customers. The objectives and strategies of customer retention vary by sector, a business that sells elevated software would have different plans for customer retention that an eCommerce shop has. Customer retention is the set of practices used by an organization to increase the number of repeat clients and generate more profit for each current client.
Many individuals are confused by both the term Customer Retention and Customer Loyalty. Don’t worry; we’ll explain the difference.
Customer Retention
Customer Loyalty
- In simple words, customer retention means that a customer buys from you, but they don’t have a deep preference for your brand and can move to another one.
In simple words, customer loyalty means that a customer loves your company, and they will vigorously select your product over another one if given the option.
Why is Customer Retention necessary for Business?
Even though attracting new customers is more costly than maintaining existing customers, there are several other reasons why retaining customers is significant.
- Better revenue – Taking good care and retaining customers over time would also have a beneficial effect on the bottom line. Data shows that increasing customer retention by 5% will boost revenue in-between 25 to 95%.
- Returning clients are 50% more likely than a new buyer to buy from you, and they prefer to spend about 33% extra. So holding the clients is not only less costly, but it’s also more lucrative in the long run.
- Retained clients and customers could also significantly reduce the cost of your marketing. Sure, satisfied customers are customers who return, but they also talk about you to their relatives and friends. Word of mouth marketing generates more sales, which is five times greater more so than paid ads.
- The faith you get from your satisfied customers will generate more sales, reduce the cost of ads, and save your huge amount of money.
Moving on, let’s discuss the benefits of having good customer retention:
Benefits of Customer Retention
A right retention approach can create numerous advantages for your company and Business. Let’s take a look at those that are most relevant.
- Brand reputation will be improved.
- Via word of mouth ads from your loyal clients and customers. It builds brand recognition and credibility.
- It gives you the chance to develop a positive relationship with your clients.
- It helps you to recognize and correct defects by seeking input and listening to the needs of customers.
- Loyal clients are more likely to try new products or to play with them. According to the reports, six times more possible.
- If they feel loyal and committed to you, your customers are more likely to forgive errors, Which means less of those disgruntled customers who fly off-the-handle.
- Helps to boost your numbers.
- Helps you to gather conclusive data.
As of now, we’ve discussed everything about customer retention. Moving on, let’s discuss the main section that is “how to improve customer retention?” however, it’s evident and clear that you should stop being complacent with the clients and customers you have. You will be able to properly communicate with clients and keep them satisfied by using the best retention techniques.
Here are some helpful techniques and strategies that will help you to achieve the objectives of customer retention. So have a look.
Top 8 Strategies to Improve Customer Retention
1. Use CRM Software:
Custom Salesforce CRM solutions can help your businesses to overcome their business problems and increase productivity. Software for CRM (customer relationship management), encourages and allows customer satisfaction by allowing you to track customer activity over time. It will tell you regarding their purchase habits, the use of goods and when they avoid purchasing from you.
To understand what their issues are, you can also monitor customer service experiences. These primary consumer behaviour variables can serve as alert signs that you can use to maximize customer retention. You will be able to pinpoint critical points that they’ve been no longer buying from you because you have a good understanding of the behaviour patterns of your customers. This offers a consistent direction for customer retention strategies. If you are on the right track, you will even be able to evaluate. You have to use your statistics and data to understand when customers are at a time of dropping and connect with them to bring them back.
In several ways, CRM helps customer retention:
- It plots the client’s journey.
- It allows for personalization.
- It offers a centralized customer knowledge database.
- Information like transaction history, reviews, and returns can be kept.
- It records the experiences of clients with your support staff.
- It displays real-time data.
2. Develop customer loyalty programs
You reward the clients who regularly buy from you by establishing a customer loyalty program. This offers them an opportunity to keep shopping with you. It also reveals to them that the organization pays attention to. Your CRM framework will help you to recognize your Business’s top customers. This makes you understand which clients you need to prioritize. For multiple customer categories, you can build specialized loyalty plans and reward your top clients with some of the most advantages.
Gamifying your loyalty program is another way of making clients feel more invested in your company. For airline companies that add miles to the account of a passenger, you also see this. With stars, badges and other forms of recognition, you could award users. As customers reach various levels, it’s also necessary to offer unique discounts as well as other benefits. Customer loyalty programs will inspire your clients and customers to buy from your brand. This keeps the levels of customer satisfaction high.
3. Engage with them on Social Media
Engaging with consumers on the social media sites of your company will significantly enhance your customer retention. Customers want to hear that you care for them, and they want to be remembered. Customers prefer different ways of engaging with businesses than a customer service line’s usual call. To get the details they need, they would not call telephone support numbers or email; they rely on social media for replies. There will be some social media for almost anyone with a smartphone, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
Since all these channels are in their hands with many continually updating their social accounts, there is a greater likelihood that they’ll use social media to enter your Business. Your clients may not be utilizing social media for inquiries in some instances, but for compliments, grievances, or even to have such a discussion. Being proactive and attentive to your social media followers in a timely way encourages prospects and customers to know that you care for them. It promotes a good customer service experience while others see you reacting quickly and also in a loving manner to your customers on social media. This will boost customer satisfaction and help you learn so much about your customers, encouraging your customers to have a more personal experience
4. Create an online community
Businesses and buyers are brought closer together by an online brand culture. Using membership site tools for your WordPress website is a simple way to construct an online brand community. On Facebook and LinkedIn, you can also build groups that promote conversations.
In WordPress itself, a remarkable instance of the influence of community development can be seen. Its production can be credited to the far-reaching and supportive WordPress culture, in part. By organizing activities, several of the ways it engages users. An effective way to engage your customers and improve customer retention is to create an online community.
- An online community comes with many benefits like:
- It provides a room for exclusively discussing your brand, products and industry.
- Users will ask questions and respond to queries from other members.
- To gain engagement, you can share activities, competitions, and plenty of other content.
- This promotes UGC “User Generated Content”.
- This strengthens brand loyalty.
5. Advantage Email Marketing
You are in a place to bombard with the emails until you have the detail which tells you where and when your clients and customers are quitting. The most potent online technique for building conversions is email marketing. To send target emails to declining clients, combine email marketing with CRM. You can give discounts, free trial, and many other perks on discarded goods.
Use email marketing to catch up with clients who ask for help. Ask for inputs from clients and customers, ask them to leave comments online and gather information. Having an email marketing system in place helps you to respond to them quickly. You can create templates that when activated, automatically submit content; it also allows the content to be customized.
6. Do Customer Surveys
To gain a more in-depth insight into what is working, and what is not, give your clients a quick online survey to finish. On every topic, you’ll never satisfy every client, but surveys will help you find trends that you’ve missed. To encourage the customer to convey their views more fully where possible, a good survey ought to have a combination of multiple-choice questions and free text response fields. Plan a strategy that will be every six months or once a year for when you are planning on sending out a survey.
7. Host webinars to engage clients and customers
Hosting live webinars is yet another way to improve your marketing strategies and get your customers more involved. Webinars are indeed an excellent way to expand sales online and help your intended audience know more about your brand. You will inform them of your existing or forthcoming products and services, and address your vision for the future and ambitions for the Business.
To learn what your Business can do best, what your clients want to see more of and develop your Business overall via feedback, it is also essential to have a question and answer segment. There’s something personal about a real person speaking directly from the customer in real-time and answering questions. It engages your clients and makes them sound like you are listening. You will boost customer retention rates by hosting an event or live webinar.
8. Enhance your customer support
Excellent client service makes a difference to the success of your company. To maximize your customer service, reap the benefits of artificial intelligence tools like chatbots. It will reduce the amount of time taken to resolve specific issues by using chatbots for trivial queries. There is no need for human interaction for information like monitoring notifications, distribution data, reservations, and more.
Chatbots save time whenever users need data that can be retrieved from a database. The staff of your live customer service will concentrate on urgent problems, paying attention to issues which concern. You’ll offer support more quickly, saving time and money. A chatbot strategy will enhance your customer service and affect the decision of a customer to remain with your company. This leads to increased loyalty and higher retention rates.
Read More: Top Reasons To Choose Salesforce For Improving Customer Retention
Final words
It is much more challenging to gain new customers for your company or Business than to keep current ones locked in with brand loyalty. In this blog, we have taken a look at the strategies you need to take if you want to keep your current customers updated with repeated purchases. Usually, if the product and service are below average, all this will not work. If that is indeed the case, you will get a good rating with no discount or special deal, not even the most fantastic customer service rep in the world can help you keep a customer who considers your product terrible.
So focus on product and service, implement the best software developed by the best software development company to streamline your services. Were you looking for professionals to get started? Contact Matellio; our experts were happy to help you.
To know more about us, visit www.matellio.com.
