Make Customers Come Back - Winning Customer Retention Strategies
Customer retention is an important but often neglected part of the business equation. Too many companies focus on acquiring new customers, with not enough attention to retaining their current clientele. It's estimated that a company could see anywhere from a 5-25% increase in earnings by focusing on customer retention and retention marketing strategies. In this article, we'll present 12 powerful customer retention tips to help you make your customers come back for more!
##Awareness of Customer Value
The first step in building a strong foundation for long-term customer retention is recognizing the value that individual customers bring to your company. Customer retention professionals know that when companies define their "customer value proposition", they can better understand how to market and promote their products and services.
Once you've defined your customer value, it's time to identify the needs of those customers and look for ways to meet those needs.
##Personalization
Personalization is a key part of customer retention strategies. Targeting your marketing efforts towards individual customers is one way to ensure that your messages appeal specifically to each person who receives them. It's also important to tailor your company's products and services around the needs of individual customers, because once you do this it becomes easier for customers to see the value of staying with you in the long term.
Remember that it might not be as simple as repackaging your company's products or services a few times until they're "customized just for you". Providing a unique experience to each customer will make them more likely to return and keep you as their primary provider.
##Product Upgrades
Reinforce customers' loyalty by offering them new products and services in exchange for their continued patronage. After all, if they really wanted another option, they'd have left you already! Offer new products and services based on customer feedback, market research, trends in product performance, or other factors you can identify. If you truly believe there's a place within your current product line for an upgrade, don't hesitate to offer it.
Product or service upgrades are a great way to keep customers loyal to you. Those who've previously purchased your products or services will feel a strong sense of loyalty after receiving an upgrade, while those interested in purchasing your product but on the fence may be swayed into buying once they've seen your most recent upgrade.
##Customer Communication
One of the key reasons customers leave a company is because of poor communication from customer service representatives. Today's consumers expect prompt, accurate responses from the companies they do business with, especially when it comes to their satisfaction. This means that you must continuously improve your customer communication strategies so that customers always feel that they're being heard and dealt with fairly.
Pick up the phone and listen to customer complaints or compliments. If you're using a ticketing system, respond to customer tickets in a timely manner. If you use e-mail as your main form of customer communication, make sure that everyone who has access to your customer e-mail account is trained in responding appropriately.
Finally, focus on being proactive instead of reactive when it comes to customer communication. While there are sometimes emergencies that require the instant attention of your company's leaders, most problems faced by customers can be handled with simple responses from front-line customer service representatives.
##Measuring Customer Loyalty
One of the best ways to improve your customer retention strategies is by measuring customer loyalty. If you don't know how loyal your customers are, how will you know where to improve? If a certain percentage of your customers are leaving for other companies, that could mean that there's room for improvement in your customer retention strategies.
It's important to measure both the "success" and "failure" of customer loyalty efforts, because both can provide valuable insights into where and how you can improve your customer retention efforts.
##Promotion and Marketing
One of the most powerful ways to make customers come back is to promote your company's products and services. Yes, this sounds obvious, but you should always be promoting your brand, whether that's directly by advertising on web sites, via social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, or through word of mouth from happy customers.
The promotion of your company can take many forms: it could be part of a multi-channel approach, such as providing individualized discounts for specific products when customers purchase them online; it could involve special offers or contests; or it could mean making the experience of purchasing one of your products or services even more memorable by using promotional tools like coupons.
Whatever the promotion of your company, make it memorable and focus-driven. The last thing you want to do is spend a lot of money and time promoting your product or service and having customers forget about it the second they've purchased it.
##Continuous Customer Communications
One key element of customer retention strategies is to continually communicate with customers in ways that are meaningful to them. This communication can take many forms, but almost all of them should involve attention-getting methods like email newsletters, direct mail campaigns, or even short video messages that highlight special promotions or new products and services.
Conclusion
It's easy to focus on just the product or service side of customer retention strategies, but you'll achieve much greater success if you also consider your company's other customers. In the end, it all comes down to providing excellent customer service and support for each individual customer.
If you follow these suggestions, it only takes a few simple steps to ensure that your customers stay loyal and come back for more. After all, there's no need to reinvent the wheel when something works!
Related Posts:
How To Run An Effective Customer Service Strategy For Your Business [Infographic] – We host a wide variety of different types of businesses in our multi-site network and that means a wide variety of needs for different types...