Perhaps the most important thing for a business owner is to focus on how to retain customers. It is a lot more challenging than gaining new customers but has high value for a business in the long run. This applies mainly if your business is relatively new and currently building your brand name. You might want to take good care of anyone who purchases from your store, as you need to create a foundation of loyal customers to thrive.
Customer retention is an art that every business owner should master soon after entering the business world because retaining your customers will make all your efforts long-lasting.
You might also think that maybe it is not that important to consider how to retain customers. If you do everything else correctly, there will be no need for customer retention strategies as your product or service will automatically retain customers. However, this is a huge misconception in the business world, and this assumption is one of the main reasons businesses fail.
Today, we will discuss solid reasons why it is essential to retain customers and how to go about customer retention in today’s day and age.
3 Reasons Why Customer Retention is Important
Before letting you know how to retain your customers, we want to be sure you are aware of why we emphasize the need to retain customers. This way, you will be more willing to absorb the information we provide, later on,
1. Return On Investment (ROI)
One of the most basic yet essential measures of the success of a business is the ROI. It is basically a metric to measure the efficiency of your business by comparing your initial investment or capital expenditure to the returns you receive in the long run. Customer retention is all about the long run. If you successfully retain customers by even just 5%, your ROI will increase by over 50% and can rise to 90%. According to these values, if you know you can retain customers, you can comfortably run your entire business based on this.
2. Cost-Cutting
Once you have already worked on your customer retaining strategies, you will have customers for life. You will not have to spend on it time and again, making it a one-time cost. You can then redirect the sources you would otherwise be using to market your product or service to a more extensive base of customers onto something else. This increases profitability for your business and lessens the risks of going into a loss.
3. Customer Loyalty
Customer loyalty is a multifaceted advantage for any business. Once you gain loyal customers, you do not have to worry about many things any more than you would otherwise. Customer loyalty is quite synonymous with customer retention. Some ways by which customer loyalty helps boost your business are as follows.
- Get you new customers by word of mouth (WOM)
- Saves you time and effort on worrying about potential bankruptcy
- Easy access to a customer base even if you introduce a new product
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7 Ways to Retain Customers
Now that you are well aware of why it is so important to focus on customer retention, we can discuss how you can work on strategies to retain customers. Keep reading ahead to find out!
1. Customer Feedback
Contrary to popular belief, you must have a channel that helps you receive customer feedback on your products and services, no matter how old your business is. People usually make the mistake of thinking that only new businesses and new products need to be tweaked with the help of customer feedback. However, the trends and tastes of everyone change every single day. If you want to retain customers over a long period, you need to incorporate a customer feedback channel into your business model.
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2. Advertise Your Competitive Advantage
Suppose you are already a business owner or just know the basics of running a business. In that case, you must know how big of a role your competitive advantage plays in getting your customers and generating higher profit margins than your competitors. You may not be aware that the same competitive advantage can be incorporated into your marketing campaigns as part of your customer retention strategies. This means that you reinforce time and again why you are better than the rest so that people subconsciously become fixated on your brand.
3. Loyalty Rewards
If your prices are relatively similar to those of competitors, then what will put you on top for customers is little deals every now and then and rewards for coming back to you again and again. Make sure to focus on such frequent campaigns to retain customers. Also, if your business is new and unique, resulting in no competition and very few customers, do the same to retain customers, and it should work like a charm.
Customer reward programs are also a great way to turn your customers into ambassadors. When you reward your customers for highlighting and promoting your products within their circle of friends, they are encouraged to spread the word even more about your brand.
4. Prime Quality Customer Service
As a business owner, one thing that you should know and remember is that good customer service always goes a long way. Mostly surpassing the prices and qualities of your products and services. Ensure that in case of any problems the customer has with whatever they purchase, they are already aware of contacting you. Furthermore, when they do, there is an entire well-trained team dedicated to ensuring that a solution to their problem is found in a convenient and timely manner. This will undoubtedly work wonders for retaining your customers.
The best way to offer customer service to retain customers is to build a live chat feature on your brand website. If your customers can contact you through chat, they will get instant responses to their queries, which creates a very fulfilling or satisfying experience. If there are delays or time gaps in your customer service, your customers will likely get annoyed and switch to any of your competitors’ products.
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5. Regular Interaction With Customers
Make sure to keep reminding your customers that you are still here and how awesome you are. Also, keep conveying to them how much they should need you. But be careful and do not overdo it so that customers do not get annoyed, resulting in intentional avoidance of your brand.
One fabulous way of maintaining contact with your customers is to send them an email newsletter every month. In the newsletter, you can announce any new product launches, sales or discount offers, or interesting brand updates to entice your customers to revisit your store. Newsletters are an effective way of maintaining your brand awareness without being too pushy in your marketing strategy to retain customers.
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6. Personalization and Customization
Since you will already be focusing on customer feedback to retain customers, make sure to put it to use completely. What that means is that not only use this information to fix and tweak what you are already offering but market your future products in ways to suit the customers more. Also whenever possible and within budget, offer customized products and product lines in accordance with the current tastes of your customers.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
7. Use Automation Techniques
Sometimes, it gets overwhelming to focus on all parts of the business and give them all the attention they deserve, especially when you are the business owner. So, this customer retention technique reduces your load a little while also getting the work done. To increase interaction, make sure customer service is not neglected, and still know your customers’ stance on your brand, use automation to keep tabs on your customers. Put in place some questionnaires, advertisements, and surveys that can be sent to them at a predefined time, without you having to put in any effort.
Final Remarks
Suppose you want to take full benefit of the ways to retain customers as described above. In that case, you need a professional website that not only showcases your products and services but also keeps pulling in your customers to it regularly.
Our users at Strikingly can build such professional and responsive websites with ease with the help of our user-friendly editor and interface. Strikingly is a platform full of tools to help you design and develop a website on your own. We provide ready-to-use templates and a drag-and-drop interface to add and update your content.
Here on Strikingly, you can quickly send newsletters to your subscribers, and enable live chat on your website to allow your visitors to get in touch with you instantly. These are just two of our wonderful features mentioned in this post above. But we also have numerous other features to impress you, which you can get familiar with by first registering for your free account with us.
