With a mindset that’s set on expanding their business and looking for ways to find new customers, a lot of business owners find themselves neglecting the importance of retaining their existing ones. In many ways, keeping your current customers engaged and wanting to come back to your site is actually more beneficial when it comes to your return on investments and overall costs. In this article, we’ll be going over the best time to focus on customer retention and some strategies to help you along this process.
What Exactly is Customer Retention?
If you’re not too familiar with what customer retention is, we’re here to help! Every person that purchases from your store has some sort of customer lifetime value. As you begin to focus more on retaining these customers and nurturing your relationship with them, you’ll begin to see that providing a great customer experience can really boost the value that they bring to your business. A huge part of customer retention is associated with getting them to make repeat purchases but it’s also important to be mindful of the fact that earning a customer’s loyalty can also lead to the growth of your business as they share reviews of your products online or with their friends and family.
When Should I Focus on Customer Retention?
Every brand is different. Based on how your brand is performing, a customer retention strategy might not be the best approach for your business at the moment, and that’s okay! We’ll take a look together at a few different scenarios and explain why customer retention should or should not be an immediate priority for you. With that being said, you’ll need to do an honest evaluation of your own business to really see where you stand.
1. No Sales
If your business is just starting out, it’s likely you won’t have any sales. Everyone starts somewhere! At this point, you’ll want to allocate all of your attention towards your acquisition of new clients and focus on strategies that will help you gain your initial following.
2. A Few Sales Per Week
You’re finally getting a few sales here and there and have a large enough following to introduce some aspects of customer retention. Congratulations! Implementing email campaigns during this stage of your business would be a great strategy and can serve as a way to encourage your existing customers to look to your brand when they want to make another purchase.
3. At Least One Sale Per Day
This is a great sign that your business is really growing. When you get to this point of your e-commerce, it would be wise to begin incorporating more strategies to earn the loyalty of your customers. Some examples of this include a referral program or even a loyalty program that they could opt into. This is also when you should really consider marketing automation.
4. Over 10 Sales Per Day
Without question, you’re now a well-established brand at this point! Your attention should be split nearly 50/50 for both customer acquisition and customer retention because getting those one-time purchases from new visitors is just as important as being a brand people trust enough to purchase from again. If you find yourself receiving much more than 10 sales every day, this would be a good time to evaluate if you’d want to invest much more towards retention and focus on nurturing the relationship that you have with the followers you’ve worked so hard to find.
Strategies to Boost Customer Retention
Now let’s take a look at some tips that you would be able to implement in your current strategies to make the most of your existing customers.
1. Customer Service Tools
A large part of maintaining good relationships with your customers is being able to address issues and concerns that they may have. If you’re a relatively small business, you might not have too many people on your team to allocate towards answering the inquiries of your customers. Take a look at whether your brand is at the point where customer support is no longer sustainable. If you find this to be the case, having a customer service tool to help out with this is much more affordable than hiring someone else to manage this area.
2. Make Everything Convenient
When your product or services are easily accessible to your customers, they’re much more likely to return to you since it’s convenient for them. Whether it’s an app that lets them order and pay from their phone or a method that lets them get in contact with you, think of innovative ways that really cater to what your customers want.
3. Communicate With Your Customers
Take the time to really speak with your customers and listen to what they have to say. Though this may seem like a huge time commitment, this doesn’t mean you literally have to talk to them! For example, implement an occasional survey in your email marketing campaign that asks open-ended questions for customers who want to voice their opinions. You can even provide a bonus for those who respond to show your customers that you really value their input.
4. Create a Customer Loyalty Program
The ultimate goal of a customer loyalty program is to encourage customers to purchase more often to receive rewards to use towards your business. Not only do you benefit as a business owner, but your customers also benefit each time they go through with a purchase. Your rewards should be easy enough to achieve so that they are able to see how easy it is to obtain whatever it is that you’re offering.
5. Give Your Customers Delightful Surprises
We wouldn’t recommend doing this extremely often, but throwing in a discount now and then or even providing customers with a low value gift card just for being members would help to nurture your relationship with them. It could be in the form of a thank you or even in the form of letting them get a sneak peek or free sample of one of your new products! The possibilities are endless; however, the reason we wouldn’t recommend doing this often is because you wouldn’t want your customers to develop the mentality that if they wait long enough, they’ll just receive something for free. This is a powerful strategy for cultivating strong relations but use it wisely!
As you can see, there’s so much that can be done to aid the retention of your customers. We hope you’ll be able to take these few strategies and adapt them to fit your business needs and achieve your goals! Just remember that as long as you’re keeping the needs of your customers in mind, you’re on the right track.