Top Strategies to Improve Customer Retention

Attracting customers is one of the most important parts of running a successful business, especially when you’re first starting. While it’s true that you need a plan to increase brand awareness and drive new business, you will also need strategies to improve customer retention over time. Keeping loyal customers coming back is often the key to building sustainable revenue, and existing customers who offer repeat business can also serve as vital marketing assets through word-of-mouth advertising.

If you’re struggling to find ways to drive repeat customers, below are some strategies to improve customer retention that encourage customers to keep coming back:

Do the Math First

Before you can formulate customer retention strategies, you need to crunch some numbers. For example, take a look at your net promoter scores or the scores derived from customers surveyed about how likely they are to recommend your products and services to others.

You can also calculate your customer retention rate by subtracting new customers for a given period from your total customer base and then dividing this number by your existing customers.

The point of looking at these metrics is to determine the extent of the challenge. If you find that you need to greatly increase customer retention efforts, this can affect which strategies will be most effective. If you find that the problem isn’t so large, your customer retention strategies can be adjusted accordingly.

Talk With Your Employees

It’s also important to note that numbers don’t tell the whole story. While metrics provide important data to work off of, you should also take the time to talk with your employees. Your “boots on the ground” will be able to provide insight that metrics alone may not be able to offer.

For example, your metrics may not be able to explain that customers often cite long wait times for phone support as a reason why they haven’t made another purchase. Your employees who work directly with customers may be able to offer this information, thereby allowing you to incorporate it into your customer retention strategies.

Give Customers a Reason to Keep Coming Back

At the heart of every customer retention strategy should be an incentive. You need to give customers a reason to keep coming back. While your products and services can offer some incentive on their own, quality products and excellent service may not be enough to retain customers in a competitive marketplace.

To provide meaningful incentives, think about what’s important to your customers. You also need to consider the cost-effectiveness of incentives to balance things out. If a customer’s net promoter score or lifetime value is low, it doesn’t make sense to give away the farm to retain that customer. The entire point of customer retention is to drive repeat business, but if that repeat business doesn’t cover or exceed the cost of the incentive, it may not make sense to offer that incentive.

Create a Customer Loyalty Program

Although customer loyalty programs are some of the most common ways to earn repeat business, no discussion about customer retention would be complete without mentioning them. A customer loyalty program is a program that offers incentives to loyal customers.

In many cases, these programs are set up to offer increasing rewards to customers who spend more time or money with a business. Essentially, the longer customers have been with a brand, the better their rewards become. The reward program itself is an incentive, but the exponential sweetening of the pot provides additional incentives to remain loyal and spend more.

When drafting a customer loyalty program, try to include benefits that can’t be obtained otherwise. For example, offer exclusive access to products, services, or perks. If a customer can simply buy a benefit, it isn’t really an incentive. By including exclusive rewards in your loyalty program, customers experience the joy of earning the reward and receiving something that they can’t get otherwise.

Stay in Touch

Like it or not, there’s a lot of competition for your customers’ attention out there. Even though your brand is everything to you, it’s likely just another company to your customers. The good news is that you can change this perception by staying in touch with your customers to remind them about your brand. Although absence makes the heart grow fonder in movies and romance novels, you don’t want absence to be a part of your relationship with your customers.

Thankfully, the Internet provides many ways to keep your brand top-of-mind for your customer base. Email newsletters allow you to send out regular updates about products, services, company news, community events, and more, and you can also use SMS texts to send notifications. Offering a regular newsletter or text to your customers gives your company the chance to stay fresh and current, and this is vital when there are so many other companies out there vying for consumer spending.

Keep Customers Engaged With Social Media

You can also use social media channels to retain customers through regular engagement. Social media platforms like Facebook and TikTok offer real-time engagement opportunities through which you can build stronger customer relationships using text, images, video, audio, and interaction. This can result in repeat business because you can remind customers why they fell in love with your brand in the first place.

As an added benefit, social sharing of valuable, helpful, insightful, or entertaining content can get your products and services in front of new customers. People are more likely to look into your products and services as a result of content shared by family and friends. It’s like a built-in vote of confidence that new customers can trust right off the bat!

Offer Better Training and Customer Support

Your employees are the lifeblood of your company, and for many business owners, employee interactions with customers can make or break customer relationships. Even if you have amazing employees who already strongly focus on customer satisfaction, there will always be ways to improve.

You’re encouraged to review your current training materials to see if they still align with your goals and the current state of your industry. Remember that customer expectations change over time due to trends in various industries, the economy, and competition in the marketplace. If you’re using training materials from a decade ago, your brand may not be providing the level of support customers demand.

When you ensure your employees are properly trained, they can better address customer needs. This equates to stronger customer relationships, a more solid bottom line, and the chance to form lasting relationships with customers. Also, as with the other tips mentioned above, providing excellent customer service can encourage word-of-mouth marketing opportunities among your existing customers to attract new customers.

Personalize the Experience Where Possible

When you greet a friend or family member, you probably feel more comfortable with that person than a stranger. This is because you’ve built bonds in a personal way over time, and your affinity for the friend or family member is stronger than the affinity you would feel for a stranger.

The bonds that humans build with one another help to foster trust and the aforementioned affinity. Although your brand is not a person, it does have the ability to build these same bonds by developing personal relationships with customers.

Personalization can mean everything from addressing email newsletters using each recipient’s first name to developing custom products for individual customers. Personalizing the experience of working with your brand can be a way to build lasting bonds with customers and help them develop an affinity for your company. This affinity is what will keep your brand front and center when a customer needs the products or services your company sells.

Focus on Branding to Support Personalization Efforts

You can also personalize the experience of working with your company through branding. Branding is a somewhat abstract concept that involves developing ideological pillars that are incorporated into everything your company does, along with physical manifestations of your company's essence.

For example, if you run a pallet manufacturing company, you may decide that offering on-time service is one of the things you want your brand to be known for. To incorporate this into your branding, you can highlight your company’s punctuality in all marketing materials and create a slogan like, “We deliver on time, so you can deliver on time.”

You could also incorporate art into your logo that signifies fast movement. Add motion lines to your logo or any company graphics, and choose images that match the theme of fast, on-time delivery into your marketing collateral. These small additions add to your overall branding and help customers associate your company with fast, on-time delivery.

By supporting branding, you give customers something to connect with. A competitor may simply state that they offer pallet manufacturing, but your business demonstrates and emphasizes speedy delivery in all that it does. Customers come to associate fast delivery with your company and service, and they’re more likely to contact your business when they need fast service.

Work With a Marketing Partner

It can feel overwhelming to run your business and keep up with customer retention efforts. Planning effective strategies to improve customer retention is time-consuming, and trying to handle everything yourself can be challenging, even in the best of times.

Many business owners find it valuable to partner with digital marketing professionals instead of trying to go it alone. A digital marketing agency can analyze your business and customer base to identify opportunities for retention. An agency partner can also handle the technical tasks involved in setting up things like SEO for your brand’s website and social media campaigns using engaging content.

Contact E-Marking Associates for Personalized Digital Marketing Solutions

If you’re ready to engage customers like never before, contact E-Marketing Associates. We offer social media management software, personalized customer retention strategies, and more to give you an edge over the competition.