What Is Customer Retention? 5 Proven Ways to Keep Customers
Did you know that it’s cheaper to get current customers to make
a repeat purchase than it is to try and find new customers to do business with
you?
Many businesses do a great job of initially attracting customers and making sales. However, they often neglect their current customers versus finding ways to retain them. If you want to be a successful business, you have to create and keep a customer.
What Is Customer Retention?
Customer retention is the strategies businesses can use to increase the number of repeat customers. It enables you to provide and continue receiving more value from your existing customer base. When a customer first purchases from you, that’s only the beginning. You want them to continue getting value from your services or products.
Companies that focus on building relationships with their current customers will see new referrals coming through and repeat business. Returning customers also tend to spend more money than first-time customers. And right now is the perfect time to build a strategy around customer retention.
Here are 5 proven ways to build loyalty and retain more customers for your business.
Start a Customer Loyalty Program
Loyalty programs, sometimes referred to as customer retention programs, are an excellent way to help increase the frequency at which customers purchase from your business. Why? Because they motivate customers to buy more often so they earn valuable rewards.
Your customers will get more value each time they do business with you, and you’ll benefit as a result of their repeat business.
Send Customers Engaging Emails
Email marketing is one of the most important tools businesses should be taking advantage of. If purchasing frequency is what drive customer retention, sending engaging emails to your customers is the best way to keep in touch with them.
Communicating with customers via email gives you the opportunity to build relationships with your customers both before and after their initial purchase. Ultimately, you want to be adding value to their experience with your business.
The best part? Email converts.
Set Customer Expectations
If you don’t set expectations early on in the customer relationship, they won’t know what to expect from your business. On the other hand, when you strategically and thoughtfully set expectations (and live up to them), you’ll build trust with your customers.
Ask for Feedback
Set up a customer survey to ask for feedback from your customers. Retaining customers with feedback is crucial because it gives you insight into how well your business is performing in contrast to customer expectation. You should be treating every positive and negative comment as valuable information so that you can always be improving your business.
Simply put, treat every complaint as a gift because it will provide valuable information for areas your business may be missing the mark.
This kind of data-driven feedback will allow you to make executive decisions and take action before you lose too many customers.
Build Your Online Presence
Want to build better relationships with your customers? You’ll want to build an online presence. That means not only launching a professionally made website, but also getting set up on major social media sites, such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Much of your target audience is likely active on one of all of these platforms already.
Begin building relationships with customers by providing valuable, educational content and engaging with people who comment and leave feedback.
Want to grow your business? You’re going to need to know how to retain customers.
You customer base right now is the best asset your business has. They already know your brand, your services/products, and they (hopefully) appreciate doing business with you. Start focusing on improving the experience you’re offering these customers as opposed to always trying to find new ones and you’ll soon reap the benefits.
