Customer Retention Strategies : Part 3
8 Simple Customer Retention Strategies + Examples
Customer Retention Strategies– Start with great customer service
This should always be a top priority for big and small businesses. Customer satisfaction is a result of excellent customer service and a satisfying experience. You have a fair chance of optimizing and setting positive customer retention standards if you provide a good experience that is consistent and reliable.
The consumer experience encompasses each interaction a business has with a customer. This includes, but is not limited to, website browsing, customer service interactions, and final purchases.
Positive customer experience is critical to growth.
You can improve your customer retention strategies by doing the following:
Enhance customer satisfaction – A positive encounter with your business leaves a lasting impression, encouraging consumers to stick with your business.
Turn first-time consumers into repeat customers – As customers get consistent support, they are pleased with the outcome and grow brand loyalty.
Increase consumer loyalty – Happy customers have a higher lifetime value and naturally become the biggest brand ambassadors.
Businesses that establish emotional bonds with their customers are the ones that stick. In terms of revenue, companies that use emotional connections outperform their rivals by 85%.
Trader Joe’s is a company known to have great customer service. Why else would Trader Joe’s have such a huge cult following? They always put their employees and customers first!
Team members receive outstanding incentives and promotional opportunities, and consumers profit from the company’s private-label strategy.
Customer Retention Strategies– Be an advocate!
According to a survey conducted by the Corporate Executive Board, mutual beliefs were cited as the primary explanation for 64% of customers who said they had a relationship with a company.
The majority of consumers favor brands and businesses that are similar to them in any way. Implicit egotism is the term for this unconscious bias.
When your business doesn’t stand for anything, customers will be more likely to dismiss you. If you want loyal clients, you must establish genuine relationships with them by connecting with them through shared beliefs.
What do you want your business to be known for? It would be easier to attract consumers who share your ideals if you connect with them and make them a part of your brand.
Check our blog about brand activism here!
TOMS’ whole corporate model is focused on making the planet a happier and better place.
The brand offers a “One for One” policy. This means they give out a pair of new shoes to people in need for every pair of shoes bought, and have donated over 60 million pairs of new shoes to date. As you can see, they’re also releasing a new unity collection that supports the LGBTQ+ community.
We as consumers are now more concerned about the altruistic and environmental consequences of our purchasing patterns. We are placing an increasing emphasis on doing good.
Pay attention to what people care about and place the brand behind it.
Customer Retention Strategies– Gather reviews and feedback from your clients
It’s hard to improve what you don’t know, and that goes for business too. It’s important to know how your customers feel about your business so that you make changes accordingly. You’ll need a system in place to collect customer reviews for your own review and to share with the rest of the company. A consumer feedback loop is useful in this situation. It’s a method for gathering, reviewing, and disseminating consumer feedback and surveys.
Gathering feedback and diagnosing potential discontent is a good place to start while trying to figure out what needs to be improved with the overall user experience.
Customer reviews can be obtained in a variety of ways. Customers can be asked to engage in user testing, surveys, and focus groups. If you use a couple of these approaches on a regular basis, you should be able to get plenty of useful consumer input.
Once you’ve collected feedback, examine the data for patterns in consumer behaviour and other aspects that will help you improve the user experience. Then, pass this knowledge along to the teams or employees who would benefit most from the information.
“I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better.”
– Elon Musk
For example, product feedback can be circulated to engineers and production departments so that defects in the product’s design can be addressed. Your company can effectively counter feedback and enhance the consumer service by using this method to gather and post customer reviews.
Customers love and appreciate it when you ask for their feedback. It shows that you care about them and are willing to make their experience even better.
If you take a look at the example above, you can see how Skillshare often emails their users asking for reviews or to answer a simple survey to improve their services further. This small thing improves the customer service experience and tells your customers that you care.
Customer Retention Strategies– Maintain communication with your customers/clients
Even if your clients aren’t reaching out to you to give comments or feedback, you can still communicate with them on a regular basis. Consider using a communication schedule to keep track of client interactions and identify up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.
A communication calendar records your consumer communication and interaction. It informs you when a customer last contacted you and notifies you when current consumers haven’t connected with your brand in a while. This makes it simple to roll out exclusive deals and proactive customer care features that eliminate roadblocks before consumers are even aware they exist. For example, if a customer’s subscription is about to expire you can send them an email reminding them that they need to update their membership.
Netflix does a great job of this by consistently emailing their users with updates such as new movies.
A business newsletter, just like Netflix’s, is a convenient and cost-effective means of retaining clients. You may use email automation to deliver alerts or discounts to all of your customers at once. You can send the email using an RSS feed on a set frequency so you don’t have to keep sending emails manually.
Check out Sunnies Studios stunning email newsletter. It’s sleek, simple, and effective.
Customer Retention Strategies– Educate your customers
“Proactively providing information about how to eliminate problems or get something out of your product” increases the likelihood of repurchase or recommendation by 32%.
It’s critical to have tools that make learning how to use the product or service simple for new consumers.
There are a variety of methods for teaching new consumers how to use the product:
Provide in-product onboarding with advice and guides to assist consumers with getting starting.
Send a sequence of lifecycle emails to consumers. This will walk them through the steps of learning how to use your product/service.
Customer service, sales, or an onboarding expert may have one-on-one training sessions.
Create an online academy of training tools for new customers who want a self-service experience.
Create a group of product professionals that consumers can contact for help.
Here’s an example in the form of a blog. Figma often updates their blogs with mini tutorials and new feature introductions to educate their users. They also have a YouTube channel with tons of tutorials.
Build a customer loyalty program
Customers should be rewarded for their continuing loyalty with a customer loyalty program. It’s a simple thing to add to your customer retention strategy; the more customers shop and engage with your business, the more rewards they’ll receive. This makes consumers feel like they’re getting more than just the product or service out of the experience. Your loyal consumers spend far more than the majority of your client base, so it’s important to keep them satisfied.
The trick to designing successful loyalty programs is to understand why people use them and what keeps them coming back. Fortunately, there is a wealth of information available on consumer loyalty programs. Do your research to ensure that your program is set up properly for a successful start.
Give your most devoted consumers a head start
The Endowed Progress Effect study by Joseph Nunes and Xavier Dreze shows that the most challenging part of developing an effective loyalty program is motivating customers to participate in the first place.
Let your dream clients feel like VIPs.
People like becoming VIP members, according to additional analysis by Dr. Nunes on retention services. However, this only applies if people are aware that there are others who aren’t part of the VIP club. Nunes saw a significant uptick in gold or VIP members’ attendance as soon as he introduced a silver class, which he attributes to human nature.
Assign optimistic labels to your clients.
People are more likely to partake in anything if they are branded with a positive trait, according to Stanford University research on voting habits.
Starbucks is one brand that’s known to give great rewards/loyalty programs to their customers, and they’ve clearly reaped the benefits.
Personalize!
The opportunity to have a unique, customized experience for the consumer is critical to a brand’s success. 79% percent of consumers are willing to share valuable knowledge about themselves in return for contextualized experiences in which they are easily recognized and understood.
A great way to learn more about consumers is having them create personal accounts. Personal accounts customize the consumer experience while also encouraging the consumer to continue to buy from you. Another easy way to incorporate a sense of personalization is through the use of product reviews focused on consumer behavior.
Most of Spotify’s services leverage on personalization, and its users love it! Creating an account or using the service already informs Spotify of the kind of music you like, what songs you might want to listen to, and more. This customized and convenient experience makes users want to keep coming back.
Thank your customers
Saying thank you to your customers goes a long way toward creating a personable and unforgettable brand. Thank you notes are a basic but successful consumer retention tactic that separates faceless websites from well-known brands.
Chewy is a brand that thanks their customers with handwritten notes. Their customers often share these notes in posts online- it’s obvious that customers appreciate these efforts!
Reduce your churn rate & increase customer retention
There’s always going to be a variety of customer retention strategies available, but there are no shortcuts. The customer retention strategies discussed above should ideally provide you with some new perspectives on retention. Understanding why customers leave is the first step in preventing customer churn.
Once you have that down, you’re ready to create a customer retention strategy to help your business succeed!
