Most business leaders and founders who are asked about their company goals mostly go with growth. And in most cases, the factor of growth is related to acquiring new customers.
Having more customers is the key performance indicator for many businesses. Even as per experts, it is only with customers you get to grow and accelerate your business in terms of service volume, brand value, revenue, and net worth.
But, the fact remains, attracting more customers to your business and adding them continuously doesn’t come easy at all. It takes objective-driven plans, a well-appointed servicing framework, focused efforts, and strategic engagement aligned with the right approach.
This also requires well-directed efforts going with the right plan to identify, qualify, and nurture leads to convert them into your customers. And that goes through a lot of experimental learning, incessant trials, and guided efforts, which take time to happen.
So, what’s going to save your day here? The best practice to follow here is to focus on retaining the already acquired customer base.
This is about reaching out to customers who have already dealt with your business and are more receptive towards what you have to say.
Your brand may have built a strong rapport with some of them and there are a few who have invested trust in your business to buy your words as they are.
These customers are high-value low-effort assets to your business that you should be capitalizing on to achieve your long-term growth goals any day over acquiring new customers.
Here are the six action prototypes to boost customer retention rate in nearly any kind of business model or industry type. Have a look!
1. Different Pricing for Returning Customers
A customer revisiting your website is there with high intent of making a purchase. They have more interest in what you have to offer over a new visitor as they have prior service experience with you. Here you should aim at keeping them glued with your brand and turning them into your loyal customer.
Plan, and if possible, automate your customer programs. Offer your repeat customers loyalty discounts and extend added benefits and special discounts for buying with you again. This will get them to buy with you on a repeat mode and get you a higher chance to retain them as your regular customers.
2. Go for Cross-selling and Up-selling
To be able to keep your customers with you, you need to smartly push products and services that they might be interested in. As you already have the details about the purchase and the shopping behavior they have shown over time, it makes sense to suggest them on buying more with you.
You can do this the best by applying cross-selling and up-selling strategies. Simply put, when you are selling a notebook, you can pitch a pen to your buyer as a cross-selling item. In case of upselling, you can suggest your customer buy the one with better quality pages. These strategies not just get you to sell more but make your customers look up to you for more and that increases the chances of retention.
3. Build a Customer Loyalty Program
This comes as one of the most effective instruments to keep your customers with you for long. By building a customer loyalty program you build a system to incentivize your regular customers who are active on your site and get you regular business. This way you get to make them feel acknowledged and encourage them to be there and be loyal to the business.
Loyalty rewards can be anything from a privilege service access to a special discount code. It could be just a note of mention in the form of a thanking email. You may define program eligibility based on the criteria of service engagement or the amount of purchase. This may be built on a loyalty point system that the users may avail of as a part of a loyalty scheme. Implementing these practices in your customer management program framework can get you great results with customer retention.
4. Personalize your Buyer’s Journey
Personalizing how you respond to each user’s unique requirement enhances the customer experience. With this, your service gets more user-friendly and contextual which adds to customer’s delight.
You have a lot of options to personalize your buyer’s journey. You may do this simply by collecting their details on forms and emailing or notifying them using their names. Or you may maintain a personal connection by sending them birthday and anniversary greetings.
On your website, you may implement chat systems to attend and assist users personally. Taking a step further, you may take it to the programming front and integrate analytics to track, record, evaluate, and analyze user browsing behavior and buying patterns on your website. Based on this you may implement suggestive navigation, predictive intelligence, and machine learning to get your users accurate and closest results and responses with the service, besides making it a completely effortless experience for them.
5. Go for Recurring Subscription
You should make all the attempts to keep your existing users stick to your offer on a recurring basis. This applies the most when a user has already subscribed for your services. Allow your subscribed users all the ease and convenience to re-opt for your service offering them flexible plans and incremental benefits on programs and offers tied with the subscription.
While you do this, make your users feel attended and served by asking them for their experience with the subscribed services. Take their feedback and ask them to rate your service and suggest an improvement. This will add to their satisfaction and they will be able to perceive more value and you will have more chances of retaining them with the business.
6. Meet your Customers where They Are
When you know who your customer is, what their buyer’s persona is, which set of demography they belong to, and how they are placed in the digital captivity, you know where to find and connect with them out of your service platform.
So, if you know your customer belongs to the group of learned professionals who are mostly busy finding new online business opportunities, you should look for them on professional networks like LinkedIn.
Here, you should keep your communication aligned with the theme of the platform and the environment that surrounds it. This way you will be able to meet your users socially in their bandwidth and zone of communication. This will help them relate with you better and you will be able to keep them connected with you for longer.
Take help with social media marketing agency to get your need sorted with reaching out to the right audiences.
Final Words:
There are more ideas that can be implemented to retain users, but these six practices stand out and cover the most of the ground to get you success with customer retention, no matter which operational domain or business niche it is.
Owning and implementing these practices in your business you can build in a system that gets you to claim a higher customer retention rate any given day. Just get them working for you the way your business needs and you will see results coming in.