Customers who come and go aren’t the best. Furthermore, if customers do not come in the future, the store traffic is useless. Have you heard it? Finding new customers is more challenging than retaining existing customers to make them visit your store repeatedly.
Undoubtedly, maintaining consistent customer engagement and retention is a daunting job. Several tips and tactics, on the other hand, can be used to keep customers happy and encourage them to visit your shop or website regularly.
Pitching the target audience, driving leads, and turning them into potential clients are all part of operating an online venture. However, increasing revenue and company ROI is unthinkable unless customers buy from you regularly.
So, before we get into the tips and tricks for enhancing customer retention, let’s talk about what exactly it is and how it is essential in sales growth.
Customer Retention Explained
Customer retention refers to the practices that a company undertakes to improve repeat customer potential and ROI. Several strategies to retain customers help in establishing an efficient customer base. You’d also want customers to stick with you in the long term, so you can have the best possible user experience and continue to add value to your goods and services.
The most popular belief among businesses all over the world is that delivering a great service or product would automatically drive traffic. While it may be a tried and true method in certain situations, the fact is that it is a short-term approach.
In simple terms, customer acquisition is the process of finding customers, while customer retention is about maintaining customer relationships and maximizing business revenue.
What is causing customers to leave?
Customers stop buying from a brand for different and individual reasons, but they tend to fall under a few related sections.
3 important areas that push customers away.
- Improper Treatment – Topping the list are shoppers who feel poorly treated by companies and would prefer to stay loyal if they had a more satisfying customer experience. Inefficient service automation, such as limited access to customer support, is also causing customers to feel irritated and annoyed.
- Even though the price is the biggest factor that impacts churn, customers are willing to stay if they are treated reasonably. When another company assures a better experience at a lower price point, it’s a swift win for competitors to gain new customers.
- Human Service. Whenever a customer has a dilemma they want to talk with a real person. Seeking for answers on a website or communicating with a bot chat fail to address the different needs of a customer and result in not feeling attended to and offered solutions that don’t resolve their issue.
The most common deadfall for businesses around the globe is that they believe that if they have a good product or service, then customer retention will follow generally.
And, while this might be the case in some situations, the hard truth is that it’s only a short-term approach. An even harder truth is that, sooner or later, your customers may just leave!
Now, we’ll discuss different strategies and tricks that can help achieve customer retention.
Strategies to Improve Customer Retention
Referral Marketing
Word of mouth, also known as referral marketing, is a perfect way to get some new customers as happy and loyal customers will recommend your brand or share their experience with others.
Moreover, you would not even have to invest efforts or resources to advertise your brand if your customers are satisfied. However, using the reward programs could be worthwhile. For example, you could hold a discount or gift for a customer who refers your services or goods to someone else. Hosting referral competitions and posting the winners on the website or social media might also be a good idea.
Enhance UX
Enhancing the user experience is the most important tip of all when it comes to customer retention with every digital brand. If you want to experience business expansion, you must prioritize the excellent customer experience.
- We all know that about half of the population prefers to shop using their mobile devices. Hence, making the website or app mobile-friendly is vital for retaining as many as possible customers.
- Customers are often irritated by the complicated and lengthy checkout processes. So, make sure the checkout and payment processes are as straightforward and fast as possible.
- Never force your customers to sign up when they are on your website, as they can leave right there. Instead, for a more seamless shopping and customer experience, consider enabling guest check-ins and checkouts.
Not to mention, remember offering all kinds of payment options so they can consider coming back anytime.
Smart Marketing
It’s always worth a shot to choose the best marketing approach. Knowing how to spread business awareness will easily convince customers to buy from you. Want to explore these marketing approaches? These include:
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Blogging and Content Marketing
Creating content relevant to the niche and that conveys everything about what your brand does will engage more customers. Similarly, you can use the blog section of your website to post new content about your goods or services. As informative content influences the visitors to browse your offerings and understand how your business can help them.
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Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is the perfect technique for today’s digital era. You should be active on all social media platforms, such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. It will also be beneficial to publish high-quality and relevant content in the form of videos or infographics to encourage customers to return.
Also, these social media accounts could be used to promote new products, services, updates, promotions, deals, and much more. Starting with social media, undoubtedly, could be a breeze for any business.
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Email Marketing
Simply put, sending customized emails to your present or existing buyers is part of email marketing. It may involve transactional info, rewards or discounts, or a thank you letter.
Discounts and Coupons
Every shopper likes offers and discounts. Businesses can easily monitor their customers’ purchasing preferences to provide appropriate discounts on particular goods and services.
Adding more schemes excellently to the websites, some other forms of discounts could also be offered as incentives.
- Giveaways on festivals such as New Year and Christmas
- Offer referrals discounts to the customers who spreads awareness about your company
- Stock-clearance sale and top-selling goods/services
Loyalty Programs
Giving back to consumers in the form of loyalty programs is very essential for long-term consumer retention. Incentives and loyalty points, for example, encourage consumers to shop with you again and again. Furthermore, you can make customers feel valued by:
- Surprising them with top-shopper reward or discount
- Offering them top deals and offers
- Distributing loyalty cards, codes, bonuses, or referrals
- Giving a sneak-peek of your new arrivals
- Providing giveaways or and gifts as an appreciation
Free Trials and Refund Policy
Your company’s practices must be transparent to you so that customers aren’t confused. If the thing doesn’t work in the favor of your customers with the products, ensure a money-back guarantee and refunds.
Customers would be happier and more at ease with their purchases if they are mindful of your preferences.
You can provide the trial choices for the customers. Talking about markets, consumers can’t test the products personally as per their choices. As a result, they only rely solely on the recommendations and references of loved ones.
As a result, encourage shoppers to test items before purchasing, and if they don’t like them, they can return them. Overall, this may not seem clear, but it will undoubtedly benefit consumer retention.
Personalization is the Key
Offering a customized shopping experience to the users is great to unlock the profit quest.
Here comes the need to track the customer’s buying habits and customer choices. If a consumer is linked to social media, for example, you can quickly assess their interests and shopping habits.
Furthermore, a customer queue management system may be put in place to better serve customers while still monitoring company operations. Customers may schedule appointments at their leisure instead of going in person and waiting in a long line, resulting in a reduced wait time.
You can also thrive by sending handwritten notes to customers thanking them for their interest and commitment to your company’s development.
Wrapping Up
Aside from that, enlisting ratings and feedback from customers can have a significant impact on how visitors perceive your brand. We, as consumers, prefer feedback and ratings before putting our trust in a business. If you already have an established eCommerce company, attracting a new audience isn’t the target. Instead, the best way to keep the company ROI growing is to preserve current and future customers.
Hence, focus on putting all of these tricks and tips into action to maintain service quality, improve customer shopping experiences, and effectively increase brand awareness. Hope you find this write-up beneficial. Thanks for reading!!
Also, Read – How can small business owners earn more in 2021!
Author Bio – Allen Daniel has done master’s in literature and is currently working as Content head at Qwaiting, the Best Queue Management Software. She likes to write about technology, gadget reviews, and marketing strategies.
