The ultimate goal of any business is to retain its customers. Whether offline or online, making sure your customers are satisfied is a critical objective for long-term success. While customer retention sounds simple enough, the ecommerce world has brought in lots of competition.
Before diving into the five best practices of customer retention, it is important that you understand what it exactly means for your business. Customer retention rate is the measurement upon which a business is able to maintain the lifespan of the existing customer over some given period. Whether your business has a successful retention rate, or not, there are some areas that every business can always improve on.
Number 1: Respond and Engage Your Customers
Many businesses today, including law firms like http://www.eskewlaw.com/, have several communication channels at their disposal. The plain old telephone, Facebook, Twitter and email are some of the most common, but communication channels are always increasing all the time. One way to improve your customer retention rate is by adopting a policy where none of your customers’ engagement is ignored; and a response is sent back in as short a time as possible.
If you do not have a community manager monitoring all your social media channels, then this responsibility falls under the Marketing and PR departments in your business. An effective omni-channel communication strategy goes miles ahead in ensuring that you address all your customers’ queries through social media. Make use of these tools to dramatically improve customer engagement strategies and reach more fans as well as existing customers.
Number 2: Create Smart Customer Retention Techniques
Before implementing new ideas on improving customer retention, always take a thorough look at your data and see what types of customers you are retaining, and learn from that. When you have a clear definition of your customer, you can create an improved customer retention strategy that gives you the opportunity to work smarter – not harder.
Number 3: Use Content Marketing
In many cases, people are usually biased towards products and services they have already used in the past. When it comes to choosing between different products or services, people are more likely to choose those they have heard about from their acquaintances or have come across while browsing the Internet. By sprucing up your content marketing strategies, you not only get a wider audience, but you remain at the top of the mind of your existing clients – who now become easier to retain.
Number 4: Give Your Loyal Customers Special Perks
People love it when they feel that they are a special part of some exclusive club. Part of this psychological game includes job titles, fraternities and invite-only services; and something you should consider implementing in your business. Setting up an exclusive VIP club does require money and time, but the rewards will help you differentiate yourself from your competitors , if done well, bringing in great ROI while increasing your customer’s loyalty.
Number 5: Go the Extra Mile for Your Customer
In order to remain remarkable in today’s business world, with all the distractions around, you have to stand out. The easiest way to stand out as a business owner is by going that extra mile whenever you can. Just make it a mantra within your business that every one of your employees is required to adopt and work towards.
The five techniques covered above are just a few of the many different things you can implement to encourage customer retention. If you feel overwhelmed, pick just one strategy on the list and spend a week perfecting it. This will give you the necessary momentum to start building your retention plan with the tips above as your base plan.
