Top 7 customer retention strategies for Small & medium Business
What is Customer Retention (definition of customer retention?
Customer retention is defined as the process of engaging new and existing customers to continue buying products or services from your business. It’s different from customer acquisition or lead generation because you’ve already converted the customer at least once.
Customer retention strategies are the collection of activities a business uses to increase the number of repeat customers and increase each existing customer’s profitability.
Customer retention strategies enable you to both provide and extract more value from your existing customer base. You want to ensure the customers you worked so hard to acquire stay with you, have excellent customer experience, and continue to get value from your products.
Lifetime value means how much revenue does a single customer generates over their lifetime? If you just sounded to him one time, if they send no referrals and never buy from you again, that’s not as exciting. Right is somebody that’s going to purchase from you into the future continually.
Top 7 customer retention strategies
Set up and use Customer Relationship Management.
Regardless of if you are trying to reach new customers or retain existing customers, customer relationship management software is invaluable for your business.
If you’re not currently using a CRM, you definitely should look into it. CRM means customer relationship management, and it is about investing in the relationships of your customers, to grow them into a long-term happy customer, and retain those customers, right?
Well, if you really do it right, CRM could also stand for customer revenue multiplier.
If you really use it to its fullest extent and so you can do much stuff in a CRM, you can keep notes about them.
You can keep reminders in there to reach back out to them at critical points in the process where it might make sense for them to buy from you again.
You can put email automation in place to automatically communicate to your customers for you via email, maybe on holidays for promotions, depending on your type of business and industry.
You have these key trigger points through the customer’s lifetime, right where it makes sense to maybe buy from you again or to upgrade, or to buy additional products and services and those sorts of things.
So, suppose you use Customer Relationship Management properly. In that case, you can automate a lot of that and increase your customers’ lifetime value.
Leverage Email
Email Marketing is a great way to keep in touch with your customers. If your email campaign is set up correctly, it makes it really easy for them to contact you.
Think about an automated campaign that makes sense for your customers. When are you going to want to send them an email?
Sometimes it could just be a thank you for being a great customer. Sometimes it could just be a say, Hey, merry Christmas, you know.
Think of those sorts of things; send them birthday emails. Show them some love through email.
Think of this in advance. What is an automated journey that makes sense for your customers? What times of the year should you email them, and what should you email them?
Sometimes it’s just tips adding value, given them educational content, Right? You’re not asking for a sale. You’re just providing value.
The more value you provide, the more the customer has a good feeling about you and wants to spend more money with you.
Provide Great Customer Service.
Customer service is just so huge, you know, so many small businesses focus on customer acquisition. They throw him over the fence, and then they don’t spend much time on customer service.
It’s vital to focus on that, because if you provide excellent customer service, people will stay with you longer, and they’re going to refer their friends. It’s beneficial to your business.
So have a culture that invests and customer service and taking care of the customer.
It’s invaluable to your long-term success because it is cheaper to retain existing customers than to find new ones. Ideally, with good customer service, you will have a right mix of both.
Offer Incentive Programs or Win Back Programs for Your Customers.
Offering existing customers an incentive to return always helps. This kind of program keeps customers coming back so they can earn the incentive.
Please give them a reason to come back. Have an incentive program put in place when you lose a customer, provide an incentive for them to stay. Or maybe you did lose a customer, provide an incentive for them to come back. Or perhaps you have a business that sells to customers and a one-time basis.
You don’t have recurring types of customers. Have incentives for them to come purchase from you again, right.
Additional products and services, Maybe the initial product has a lifetime expectancy. Have a reminder to reach back out at that point in time to get another sale from them.
Incentive programs are a really great way to provide good retention of your existing customers, but also to get your customers lifetime value to increase over time.
Have A Lost Leader.
What a loss leader means is it’s basically something that you’re willing to lose a little bit of money on for the potential of gain.
Your VIP clients may not make you the most money right away. However, over the lifetime of the relationship, they can prove to be very valuable. Please communicate with your current clients in a personal way to show them they are part of your core community
And so, an example of that is maybe a year after somebody is your customer. You send him a gift card to say, Hey, thank you. Here’s a $5 gift card to Starbucks.
Now that’s a loss leader, does that cost you $5, right?
But the thing is, is the value that brings to them just the goodwill that they feel from you that’s generated from that will probably either a Get them to come back to you at some point in the future, which you’re probably going to make a lot more in five bucks.
Or refer a friend, which is also going to generate a lot more revenue than five bucks. So it’s a risk that you’re taking, which is why they call it a lost leader. However, often it’s like a line in the water that actually catches a fish, and you end up seeing a really strong return.
Ask For Feedback And Then To Actually, Listen
The thing here is your existing customers air the best folks to ask for feedback because they’ve experienced your whole process. They’ve experienced your product in your service.
Probably worked with your team. So, they’re gonna have much great feedback that they can provide to you. That’s going to help you get better.
But the thing is, you have to ask for it. Then you have to actually listen to it right and make adjustments to improve if you ask for feedback. However, you don’t actually do anything with it.
It’s not going to help you improve your business and improve client retention and tips.
Stay on A First Name Basis
It’s to stay on a first-name basis with your customers, especially your V I. P customers, right? Want to have a relationship with them. Get to know them instead of looking at your customers. Is just a massive bucket of people actually see their individual names and faces, right?
This is going to get you excited about actually helping add impact on value into them in their lives. Get to know them, and by doing so, you’re going to learn many things, and you’re going to have that fuel that drives you to Wanna really grow relationships with other customers, which all that ends up doing is improving your overall customer experience.
And if you have unbelievable customer experience, people will stay longer. They’re going to refer their friends, and you’re going to see an increase in customer lifetime value.