Learn tactics to help you boost trust to improve customer retention.
While building customer acquisition campaigns is an important part of making your business successful, there comes a point when finding new customers simply isn’t enough to drive sales. Once you’ve been operating for more than a year, it’s important that you have a customer retention plan in place as well.
Focusing on courting existing customers increases their lifetime value and helps to boost your profits. Implementing strategies to encourage customer retention means better customer experiences – and having a customer base that values your products or services and continues to do business with you in the long run.
Why Focus on Customer Retention
While it may sound counter intuitive to focus on courting existing customers just as much, if not more, than you focus on generating new ones, the numbers don’t lie. Research has shown that, on average, just 13% of new leads will buy from you, whereas you have a 60-70% chance of making a sale to an existing customer. Need more reasons to market to existing customers?
- Existing customer buy more, more often
- Marketing costs less when aimed at existing customers
- Happy customers can lead to new sales via word-of-mouth advertising
- Loyal customers provide some of the most relevant and applicable feedback for bettering your business.
How can you Increase Customer Retention?
There are four factors that have the biggest impact on customer retention: service quality, satisfaction, trust, and commitment. These are the areas that you want to focus on in order to help build sales from existing customers. Do you have staff available during office hours to help with customer service inquiries? Do your products and services meet the promises made in your advertising and on your site? Do you deliver on promises that you make to your customers? These are all good questions to ask yourself when diving into customer retention.
In order to leverage your existing customer base, try implementing at least a few of the following strategies.
Build a Customer Communication Calendar
One of the biggest mistakes companies make when it comes to customer retention is letting customers fall through the cracks after they’ve made a purchase. Avoid this by building a calendar for your team to follow-up after a purchase. These follow ups can be aimed at checking in to see if their purchase has met their expectations, sending promotional offers, or giving new updates about the company.
Send Newsletters
Email newsletters have some of the highest ROI of any digital marketing campaign, and are especially effective at retargeting past customers. They help keep your business fresh in their minds, so that, when they have a need for your products or services, they are more likely to come back to you to meet those needs.
Provide Educational Material
Ensure customers know exactly how to use your products, or what to expect of your services, by ensuring you have education material available to them. This can be in the form of emails sent after purchase, or live on a dedicated page on your website. Make sure to let customers know this information is available to them, so that they can have the best possible experience with your business.
Make it Easy to Ask for Help
Many customers become easily frustrated with businesses that don’t provide them with comprehensive customer service options. Make sure your phone number is easy to find, offer email or chat options, and ensure your team is answering all inquiries as quickly as they can.
Deliver on Your Promises
Build trust by ensuring that you are delivering on the promises you make both on your website and in your marketing content.
Own up to – and fix – Your Mistakes
About half of all customers will avoid doing business with a company after having a negative experience. Make sure you’re open to accepting that you can’t always be perfect, and work to rectify issues in a way that meets a customer’s desires. This makes customers feel heard and appreciated, and boosts the chances they’ll continue to purchase from you.
Reward Customer Loyalty
Offer special deals and discounts for returning customers. This encourages them to keep coming back to your business, ensuring more profits.
Drive Customer Retention to Boost Profits
If you’re looking for help improving your customer retention plan, we are here to help. Gulf Coast Web has decades of experience in managing digital marketing and social media for business across all industries. Our staff consists of highly-trained web design and digital marketing professionals who are both passionate about their jobs and excel at what they do. And unlike many other design agencies, we have a content writer with over 10 years of experience on-staff to handle everything from website copy to blogs to social media posts. Contact us today to book a consultation with our team. We look forward to outlining exactly how we can help you grow your business with our digital media agency services.