Most businesses exert all their effort in acquiring new customers. Who wouldn’t? It’s the best feeling. It’s also rewarding when you convince someone to try your products or services for the first time. It takes a lot of faith on the customer’s part. They have to truly believe that your product or service is going to solve their problems and satisfy them. It gives you a sense of accomplishment to know that people believe you and answer to your marketing calls.
What most businesses forget is that all of this hard work and effort is completely worthless if you can’t keep those customers and get them to become repeat consumers. The average client spends more on your products or services the third time as compared to their first time. Retaining your customers is far more important than making new ones. The more repeat customers you get, the more capital and resources you will have to target new customers.
Repeat customers give you word of mouth marketing. They are the ones that truly believe in your product and come to you in their hour of need instead of going somewhere else. Customer retention is a very tricky business and if you are not approaching this process with various strategies to keep your customers happy, you might end up with fewer customers than you started out with. Here are some ways that you can easily navigate the customer retention problem and ensure their loyalty and trust in you.
1. ONBOARDING
Are your products easy to use? Can your customers find out how to utilize them on their own? We are sure that they can. But the question is should you assume that they can do that? Not at all.
Onboarding means providing your customers with personalized training and coaching that is based on their individual needs. This is a customer retention strategy that can work wonders for your brand. This way you can help your customers deal with their pain points, the ones that they are there for in the first place. They will get to see your exceptional customer support, which will be an added benefit that they will remember when they come back for a repeat purchase. Instead of handing them a pamphlet or sending them an email, they will interact with actual humans in real-time and will be able to ask questions and satisfy their curiosity. If you offer this human touch at the beginning of your relationship, this will be the basis of your long term relationship and you will reap the rewards later on. It will show your customers just how much you care about them and what you are willing to do for them.
2. FEEDBACK
Almost every business knows about this strategy, but few are willing to use it to their benefit. Most of the businesses are afraid that asking for feedback will open a portal to all sorts of negative comments and criticism that the brand will not be able to handle. Even if that were the case, the advantages of asking for feedback are more than the disadvantages of a few negative remarks.
There might be a huge difference between what you think about your products and what your customers think about it. If you ask for regular feedback, you can tap into your customers’ mindsets and find out what they want from your products. You can find out what to improve, what to add, and what to remove from your products in order to give your customers exactly what they want.
Before getting feedback, you are partial, if not completely, in the dark and working on assumptions. Once the feedback starts rolling in, you can drive insights from the data and tweak your products according to your target audience’s needs and wants.
An additional benefit is that when your customers see that you are giving so much importance to their words and feedback, they will become more loyal. They will put their trust in you and your brand and provide you with authentic and original feedback so that you can cater to their needs in a better and faster way. You can also share that honest and truthful feedback just like on the best affordable web design agency so that other customers, new or old, can read them and find out more about you.
3. REWARDS PROGRAM
Another great way of keeping your customers engaged and coming back for more is to offer some reward for their loyalty and continued business. There are various ways that you can do that. You can offer them a discount, you can send them relevant promotions or VIP treatment based on their information. You can also reward existing customers for any new customers that they bring in through referrals. This way, not only will you be keeping your existing customers happy, but you will also be gaining new customers. Other ways of retaining customers are offering them something special on their birthdays or any other special event, special discounts and packages on holidays, and so much more.
Other ideas could be a yearly gift for the holidays, a special promo offer for birthdays or other milestones the customers may be experiencing. Making it personal will give it an added touch that will let them know you care about them as a person, outside of the business relationship.
SUMMING IT UP
Although acquiring new customers is important for a business, equally important is that you keep your existing customers and have them coming back for more. The above strategies will ensure that your relationship with your customers gets stronger over time and their brand loyalty increases.
