Customer Retention Strategies: 12 Ways to Retain and Increase Your Customer Base

By October 2, 2023 FinTech No Comments

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  • Organizations can use customer data to create an experience that feels tailored to the individual.
  • There are two strategies I’ve used over my 30 years in business to keep clients.
  • And if companies are inevitably political, then we want to be deliberate about the things we stand for.”
  • Studies show that efforts to retain customers are more profitable and less expensive than when companies solely focus on bringing in new customers.
  • We’ll look at how customer retention impacts a business, why it’s essential, and the strategies that can help create loyal customers.

If your brand is more friendly than this, you can still put some fire behind your story and create a rally effect. We’ve taken a look at several B2C examples, but what about the B2B world? R&G Technologies is an Australian customer retention solutions IT support firm that has developed strong, long-term relationships with its clients. For every pair of shoes that are purchased, it gives a pair to people in need, thus far donating over 60 million pairs of new shoes.

​​Purchase frequency rate

Automating the feedback process helps it become a consistent and informative part of your business practices. Whether through surveys or customer interviews, feedback is the best way to get insight into the things that customers like and dislike about your brand. For example, you should know how the tips for SaaS customer success often lie in knowing that customers are constantly getting stuck at a certain point. You can create triggers that will automatically send them messages to walk through that issue they are facing. Thoroughly listening to customers helps you to develop empathic abilities.

While every business needs new clients, it is equally critical to improve customer retention as acquisition costs are five times more than retaining an existing customer. A good onboarding process is a key customer retention strategy that can set you up for success for years to come. It should be personalized (as much as possible), hands-on, and focus on removing as much friction as possible. And once you bring someone into your company’s ecosystem, the last thing you want to do is lose them. That’s why customer retention is an important key performance indicator (KPI) for all businesses to measure, improve, and build upon.

As a part of their client retention programs, businesses have to go beyond products and prices. What they need to do is leverage their most under-utilized assets i.e. employees base. When the employees are engaged they deliver personal customer experiences that create customer loyalty. The expectations for personalized customer service have grown as customers don’t want canned responses. Organizations can use customer data to create an experience that feels tailored to the individual. That same data can inform targeted sales and marketing communications to deliver the most interesting products and services to the customer.

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are also helpful in improving customer service. By closely examining your key performance indicators, you can determine what makes your customers happy or upset. Make your customers feel they are part of your business by taking their opinions. Implement their suggestions and acknowledge them to achieve the customer success they deserve. Keeping customers in the loop is another way to build trust while bringing consumers closer to your brand.

While it’s important to focus on customers who are at risk of churn, you shouldn’t forget about your loyal customers in the process. Classy Curlies builds trust extremely well by doing something most business owners might scratch their heads at — they show their customers how to accomplish the company’s mission on their own. Your business can take this technique one step further by giving extra care to these customers.

Use Gamification To Keep Customers Invested

Long gone are the days of watching an Adobe Illustrator tutorial to whip up a great-looking social media post. Canva offers ready-to-use templates, icons, elements, images, and fonts that just about anyone can master. As crazy as it sounds, you don’t need a product offering that can do everything — but a product offering that can do a handful of things extremely well. If you decide to purchase one brand over the other, you’re committing to the scents that come with it.

Sending educational email is a smart method of educating your customers – and giving them good reasons to consider buying from you – and not your competitors. According to Nielsen Norman Group, “Newsletters are great for growing or maintaining relationships, even during times when people aren’t actively making purchasing decisions. When you follow this formula, you’re exceeding customer expectation.

Getting a retainer is one thing, but you want people to keep that retainer for months to come. When a company implements a new onboarding system, they see its retention rate increase. In fact, retaining – and growing – your existing customers is cheaper, more profitable, and generally easier than generating new business. Both customer reviews and testimonials are powerful tools to retain your customers.

Act on customer feedback

R&G focuses heavily on asking the right questions in order to gain insights it can execute on. This information is used to make better business decisions and retain customers. It’s vital to any business to both listen and connect with your customers. You can learn from firsthand accounts of what is going right or wrong in your strategy. One of their most innovative customer retention moves is the Mobile Order & Pay feature within the app. Thanks to the feature, customers can order their coffee before they even arrive at the shop.

customer retention strategies

But according to research from Dixon, Toman, and DeLisi published in The Effortless Experience, the true driver of customer retention and loyalty is the ease of getting a problem solved. Not only does this build momentum for upcoming releases, but it also helps promote new features that existing customers might otherwise miss. If they sense any inconsistency between your brand’s messaging and its actions, they’ll be quick to recognize the ingenuity. Instead, it’s important to get involved with your customers beyond product and services. As we mentioned above, your most loyal customers are also your most valuable ones. Not just because of the money they spend, but also for the information they provide.

Managing customer retention is an incredibly important part of growing a sustainable business. According to research from Harvard Business School, increasing customer retention rates by only 5% increases a company’s profits by 25-95%. The brick-and-mortar store sells inexpensive products which is common among businesses with high customer retention rates.

Offer support on the right platforms.

That way, they will continually nod and accept your recommendations. To help curtail this problem of losing customers, I want to show you the 17 customer retention strategies that work. While there are several ways to employ a subscription service, the key is to make the offer worth the price of admission — even if it’s just a weekly newsletter in the customer’s inbox. The customer gains access to exclusive content, deals or services, and the organization can gather customer data that informs business and strategy decisions. You can track this metric along with CSAT and NPS to better understand the situation and plan your customer retention strategies accordingly. The existing customer growth rate refers to the growth in revenue from the existing customers.

customer retention strategies

They also sent the customer a bouquet and a note offering their condolences. Customer experience comprises all the touchpoints with your business starting from website navigation, customer service interaction to the final purchase. If a customer doesn’t feel appreciated, all it takes is one mistake or a “better opportunity” with a competitor for them to churn. It’s important that you don’t take your loyal customers for granted. When you are building your customer feedback program with Delighted, you can choose to send out NPS surveys via email, link, in-app, or kiosk.

Use gamification and referral programs.

A customer retention program is an amalgamation of several types of tactics. Use this template to store and analyze qualitative and quantitative feedback to better understand and reduce your churn rate — and increase retention. Leverage AI in customer service to improve your customer and employee experiences.

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