No business can grow without using effective customer loyalty strategies. These are the five steps that you should follow if you want to improve your customer retention.
Read more: The Ultimate Customer Retention Strategies
1. Understand your demographics
Who makes up your demographics? Where do they congregate? How do they speak? Why do they work with your business and not your competitors? How do they view your brand? What do they think you could do better?
These are just a few of the questions that you need to know the answers to in order to build an effective customer retention strategy. Without them, you may not know who is leaving your business, where they are going instead and, most importantly, why.
2. Deploy with a focus on experience
Conventional wisdom dictates that a customer satisfied with their purchase is a loyal customer (though some research claims this might not always be the case). But even the most well-designed products and services can fall flat if you don't have the other requisite parts that combine into a single, excellent and consistent customer experience. It isn't just the content of the offer, but its delivery as well.
It isn't just the content of the offer, but its delivery as well.
Consider Zappos, a US-based e-commerce site specialising in shoes. However, what you may know them better for is their incredible focus on the customer experience. Their customer service team, for example, goes to enormous lengths to give their callers precisely what they need, even if it isn't directly to do with the Zappos product. This is a perfect example of providing an experience, rather than just a product or a service. The same could be applied to your website, your sales processes, your events and your social media presence. Aim for an experience, and you will retain the customers that are most important to your business.
3. Obtain and utilise the right analytics
If monitoring your demographics is a high-level check, your customer surveys allow you to more intimately know the thoughts and behaviour of the people you are aiming to impress. Regularly monitoring customer feedback is an excellent way of measuring your customer loyalty levels and ensuring you address any issues.
Your customer surveys allow you to more intimately know the thoughts and behaviour of the people you are aiming to impress.
For example, you can use a short survey at the end of sales or customer service calls. When a customer leaves your business, you could conduct a short exit survey. These intelligent surveys will help you boost your customer retention throughout the lifecycle of your customers, allowing you to gather authentic feedback about a customer's experience. In some cases, this is even an opportunity to bring them back to the top of the sales funnel, but make no mistake: the true value to your customer retention strategy is the qualitative data you gather.
Read more: The customer retention playbook
4. Be proactive
The customer experience doesn't start at the transaction, nor does it end there. Loyalty is earned in those times when you aren't providing a service or a product, but rather when you surprise your customers with a well-timed piece of information or a proactive fix for an issue they might not even know they had. For example, an internet provider might reach out to their customers and let them know that they are currently paying for a service that is additional to their needs as a household. Followed up with advice on how to adjust their plan (or offering to adjust it for them), is an excellent way to show your customers that their happiness doesn't end after money has changed hands.
You might be surprised by how open your customers are to this idea. One study from inContact, a US-based call centre solutions company, found that the vast majority of people are open to the idea of being proactively contacted by a business to discuss recent orders, suspicious activity on their account or setting appointments and reminders. Reaching out and letting your customers know you are proactively handling potential issues before they become serious problems is an easy way to prove your worth to them and, ideally, retain their loyalty too.
5. Connect through social channels
As of January 2024, 62.3 per cent of the world's population (5.04 billion people) use social media. Every minute of the day, 66 thousand photos and videos are shared on Instagram, 625 million videos are watched on TikTok, 2.1 million people are active on Facebook, and 3.47 million YouTube videos are watched.1 Moreover, since the pandemic, social media, eCommerce, and online video consumption has risen by over 30 per cent.
These are just a few of the incredible numbers that have redefined social media into a powerful marketing platform. But don't be fooled; if you treat it as just another marketing channel, you will not get these great results. Use it, instead, as an opportunity to prove your worth to current and budding customers, ensuring you spread your brand presence and develop a more intimate connection with your clients. Entire marketing campaigns have been built around a solid social media presence; the same results can be created for customer retention too.
If you want to learn more about customer retention strategies, check out our free customer retention ebook.
1. Marino, S. 'What Happens in an Internet Minute', LocalIQ, December 4, 2023, localiq.com.
