10 Customer Retention Strategies to Keep Your Clients Happy
Increasing Your Customer Retention Rate
You may have heard that customer acquisition is more expensive than customer retention. While both are important to your business, boosting your customer retention rate offers more long-term value.
Retention keeps existing customers happy and ensures new customers stay involved.
When customer retention strategies are enforced as a part of a larger plan, they help deliver excellent customer experiences, maximizing engagement while reducing your churn rate.
A robust customer retention plan can even help build a dedicated and loyal customer base when empowered by accurate intelligence.
Here are the strategies that we’ll be covering in this article:
Streamline the customer experience
Offer superb customer engagement
Keep response times low
Offer a customer loyalty program
Listen to customer feedback
Know your customer’s journey
Provide excellent content marketing
Track your customer retention metrics
Be proactive about improving your customer retention
Grow a community to deep customer relationships
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1. Streamline the Customer Experience
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When developing this part of your retention strategy, consider improving the touchpoints that define the customer experience.
Touchpoints refer to when and how your customer base interacts with your brand. Identify your key touchpoints, then refine them to be simple, reliable, and as human-feeling as possible.
Eliminating pain points will help deliver a more authentic experience. Furthermore, 68% of customers will spend more money if a brand has good customer service.
To encourage repeat customers, set an excellent example of your services from the outset. With an attractive and easily navigable website, enticing catalogs, fast checkouts, and a dependable customer support system, you can do this.
2. Offer Superb Customer Engagement
Strong customer engagement turns passive customers into active participants.
For example, customers should be notified of important company changes. Milestones, price changes, inventory availability, and new product delays can affect their experiences.
Being direct, transparent, and informative about such events will build trust and encourage customers to stay invested in your brand. You can also start a dialogue to address their expectations, gather feedback, and provide one-on-one services.
Engagement is also crucial during onboarding as first-time customers often need support. By having help services readily available, you can create a great first experience for them.
3. Keep Response Times Low
Help guides and information packets go a long way, but they’re not always enough. Returning customers will also need personal assistance. By prioritizing communication in your workflow, you can efficiently reduce response times and follow-up with queries.
Use live chat, co-browsing, and video chat tools to address customer concerns. These tools can help you surpass customer expectations with fast solutions and personalized encounters.
You should also make sure your support team is ready to address customer needs. Leverage past customer data to better anticipate problems and route customers to team members with the right expertise.
4. Offer a Customer Loyalty Program
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An effective customer retention program should include a loyalty program. When done well, loyalty programs help consumers feel important and appreciated.
A great loyalty program can help you identify brand ambassadors and provide a great customer experience.
To build the right plan, study the activity of your best customers. Your future loyalty program may offer exclusive benefits and fun incentives such as:
Referral discounts
Redeemable points
Special rewards from repeat purchases
Community titles and badges
Unique customization options
To help keep customers engaged, schedule automated reminders and scale your reward system based on levels of engagement.
5. Listen to Customer Feedback
Businesses need customer feedback to grow. Without it, you’ll lack insight into your customers' wants and needs, including where and how you can better satisfy them.
Consider using a survey to gather feedback. Surveys are an inexpensive market research method that is easy to distribute and respond to.
You may also use a CRM platform to track the flow of feedback. CRM supports customer support and sales teams by managing communication through a centralized platform.
With CRM, you can:
Assign queries to team members
Categorize and prioritize issues
Consolidate results
Make plans of action
Automate responses
CRM can also help you identify high-value clients and flag recurring issues, such as technical errors or lost packages.
6. Know Your Customer’s Journey
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The customer journey refers to how your customers interact with your brand. It’s usually visualized as a timeline or map. This journey offers a wealth of data that you can use to adjust your customer retention program for better engagement rates.
In addition to identifying touchpoints (which we discussed earlier), analyze data from past conversations, customer complaints, reviews, and testimonials. These interactions can pinpoint operational and communication issues as well as new opportunities.
The customer journey directly affects customer relationships. You can unearth new value in these relationships and retain consumers by mapping out their journey and exploring how it contributes to the customer lifecycle.
7. Provide Excellent Content Marketing
Creating content is a great way to routinely engage your customer base. One place to kickstart your content marketing strategy is on social media.
According to a study by GWI, 54% of users research products on social media. To educate and generate interest in your services, start by building a rapport with customers.
Comment, share, and reply to posts and encourage new customers to follow you. Your brand can develop a unique personality that sets you apart from competitors by interacting with customers directly.
You can also use social media to direct customers to your website. Here, you can provide other content, such as blog articles, workshops, and webinars, that will enrich their customer experiences and provide helpful information.
8. Track Your Customer Retention Metrics
Effective customer retention strategies make use of data. As you develop your retention strategies, learn to calculate data and track helpful metrics.
Retention metrics you should keep your eye on include:
Customer retention rate: This is your most important metric. Use it to track the number of customers you keep over a period of time.
Customer churn: Knowing how many customers you’re losing will provide insight into those who choose to stay. It is also known as your customer attrition rate.
Repeat customer rate: This number covers the consumers making repeat purchases.
Customer lifetime value (CLV): This rate refers to the revenue generated from customers across their lifecycle.
9. Be Proactive About Improving Your Customer Retention
The more customer data you gain, the more insight you’ll have into customer expectations and needs. Use this information to readdress your retention tactics regularly.
As you do so, examine what’s working and what’s not. For example, how are your strategies affecting your customers’ collective experiences? How is it impacting them individually?
As you improve your methodology, use your new insights to build a complete customer profile and refine your sales process. Since customer retention is affected by other sales and marketing operations, improving relevant functions can benefit your retention strategies.
10. Grow a Community to Deepen Customer Relationships
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Another way you can add value to your customer's experiences is by developing a community.
Community means different things to different companies. Generally, digital communities offer a friendly space for customers to share helpful information and connect.
There are several ways you can cultivate a community, including:
Opening discussion boards and forums on your website
Holding events with live-audience participation
Getting your current customers involved in advocacy
Hosting contests, raffles, and Q&As
If you decide to launch a community, be sure to moderate it. A communal space where participants feel safe and engaged can help promote brand loyalty and motivate word-of-mouth marketing.
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Join Owler’s Community for Access to Competitive Data on Over 15 Million Companies
Customer retention is vital to any business. It is less exhaustive than customer acquisition, but it helps create loyal customers, reduce churn, and increase lifetime value.
That said, retention is one piece of a grand puzzle. To effectively retain customers, you need to create a business that genuinely understands its audience. Your customers will feel less like a number on a page and more like a valued member of your team.
Owler Max helps you build stronger customer relationships by providing accurate, competitive intelligence on your industry. With Owler, you can stay informed, leverage exclusive company data, and connect with your customers more meaningfully, thanks to timely news updates.
Refine your retention strategies today and keep your team informed with Owler Max’s exclusive pricing.