As a business owner, there are numerous things for you to administer. You have to work blood and sweat to attract customers via marketing strategies, social media, and brand strategies. However, retaining customers requires a lot of investment, time, and energy. Therefore, you must develop the best customer retention strategies to ensure that you win their trust. It is no big deal to attract new customers when you don’t have any guarantee that they will return to your website or not. Positive feedback is one of the ways which indicates their trust.
Retention of customers is crucial for any online business. If you want to improve your customer’s feedback related to your website, you must consider the entirety of the customer experience. You must think like a customer and see how they visualize your brand. In this article, we will go through the definition and the most powerful retention strategies to improve the online sales of a particular business.
What is Customer Retention Strategy?
Before we look into the importance and the strategies, it is important to know what customer retention strategies are. They are defined as the ability of a company to convert existing customers into potential buyers, increase wealth creation, and stop them from going to a competitor's website. You will know what we mean if you can convert your customers into repeat customers.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
The retention strategies give you an overview of the state of your products and services and whether your existing customers are satisfied with them. You must not confuse this term with "customer acquisition" or "lead generation". The difference between these two cases is that retention strategies prioritize those customers who have already acquired your services or purchased a product from your online store. You can successfully retain your customers through these strategies by giving them a high-quality customer experience.
Importance of Customer Retention
1. Return on Investment (ROI)
The day you understand what is customer retention, you will also understand the factor of ROI associated with it. One of the most critical aspects of customer retention strategies is an investment. You don't need to flex your financial muscles for advertisements, marketing, and sales outreach. If your customers have already purchased eCommerce products from your store, they will put trust in your website again. If we talk about the new customers, they will take more time to show their faith in your services.
ROI measures the efficiency of your business by drawing a comparison between your capital expenditure and the returns you receive in the long run. Retention of customers is a long-term process, and if you are successful in it by even single figures, your ROI will increase substantially. Many entrepreneurs believe that you can successfully run your business based on your strategies to retain your respective customers.
2. Customer Loyalty
When you implement your customer retention strategies, it is important to note that keeping existing customers is much easier and cheaper than acquiring and understanding the demands of first-time customers. Many surveys worldwide have shown that it is much more expensive to acquire new customers than to satisfy the existing customers.
Customer loyalty is a massive advantage for any online business. Once you see an increase in the number of retained customers on your website, you wouldn’t need to worry about many things you would have otherwise. Customer loyalty goes hand-in-hand with the retention of customers. However, make sure that you don’t confuse both of these terms. Customer loyalty improves your online business in the following ways:
- It successfully gets you new customers via word of mouth (WOM)
- It preserves your time and effort in worrying about a potential bankruptcy
- You can easily gain access to the customer base after introducing a new product in the market
Best Strategies for Customer Retention
1. Customer Service Tools
If you have a small business, you may also have a limited support team alongside you. However, as the number of customers increases on your website, the demand for customer service may increase, requiring you to expand your support team. As it is difficult to hire individuals, many businesses rely on innovative technological advancements in customer retention strategies.
Image taken from Strikingly
Many businesses worldwide look for online features when they believe that their customer support isn’t enough to meet the demands of their customer base. For example, some business websites prefer customer recordings and ticket creation so they can create an outstanding customer experience. Strikingly is another wonderful example in the world of customer service. We provide our visitors with live chat support to directly interact with the website owner.
2. Communicate with Customers
No matter what your customer retention program is, it is important to collaborate with your customers consistently. For example, R&G Technologies is an IT-based organization that has created long-term relationships with its clients. If we look at their customer retention strategies, the biggest takeaway is the satisfaction surveys. These surveys enable R&G Technologies to understand what works best in their company and what doesn’t.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
By asking the right kind of questions, you will allow your company to evolve to considerable heights. When you are in eCommerce, do not disregard the importance of one-to-one conversation. Strikingly is the best website builder for connecting all dots related to retention strategies. When you build a professional website on Strikingly, we enable you to incorporate contact forms, custom forms, and much more.
3. Stay Relevant on Social Media
Just like is the case with most business ideas, social media marketing is an important part of your customer retention strategies. When we talk about an online presence, it isn’t just about staying active on your website. Social media platforms also have a huge role to play in this regard. When you incorporate an online store into your business website, you have to attract as many customers as possible. For this reason, social media marketing is here to keep up your visitors’ numbers.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
Social media has become extremely popular in the last decade across all niches, and eCommerce is also one of those categories. If you don’t have plans related to social media, you will lose several followers and your credibility. By having social media platforms, you will increase your customers and have the opportunity to interact with them consistently. Strikingly enables you to add social media platforms in the form of icons. If you look at the established websites on Strikingly, you will see social media icons on the last page of the website.
4. Benchmarking
When you implement your customer retention strategies, you must know your playing field. If you want to ensure that your niche idea stands out from the rest of the competitors, you must be aware of their strategies. It is almost like a game of chess in which you anticipate every move that the opposition makes. If you go through the daily trends of the industry, it will tell you more about the ways of increasing the retention rate.
Benchmarking is a strategy that helps users understand all the details related to their competitors. It helps them to understand the strengths and weaknesses of their competitors. Benchmarking enables you to identify the gaps left by the customers and makes you think about the strategies through which you can fill those respective gaps. This will be good news for your retention rate because the lesser customers go to them, the more likely they are to come to your website.
5. Produce Good Content
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website.
Good website content has a massive influence on your online presence. Therefore, when you implement your customer retention strategies, ensure that you keep producing valuable content that your customers enjoy. It is not just about the number of lines that you write. You can also include images and videos to make your content more attractive. You can also include a blog section on your business website.
Conclusion
If you want to know how to retain customers easily, you must go through the strategies we have provided above. Most importantly, you must rely on an effective website builder, such as Strikingly, to create a professional website for yourself and your business. By creating a website on Strikingly, you will be able to display your products and services quickly, which would give value to your customer retention strategies. We ensure that our users build mobile-friendly and responsive websites with an adequate website editor and interface.
Strikingly is a free website builder that provides you with a complete package of tools related to the designing and development of your website. The most beautiful thing is that website developers can create websites on our platform without writing a single line of code. You don’t need top-class degrees from the top-ranked universities to confirm your eligibility on Strikingly. All you need is a creative brain, and make sure that it does the talking for you. So, create your business website today and generate positive feedback from your customers.
