Do you have a customer retention strategy in place to keep them coming back to you?
If you don’t, you NEED to give this a read. You could be missing out on sales you never knew existed.
According to Semrush, the probability of selling to a existing customer is between 60-70%, compared to selling to a new customer which is between 5-20%. Up to 85% of companies agree that retention is important to their business.
So why would you spend all the time, money and effort getting your customer to purchase, only to let them go cold after one sale?
So many people miss this trick, yet it is the secret to success for any business.
And if you don’t keep your customers’ attention, your competitors surely will…
What does ‘retention’ mean?
When we think of marketing, most people think of lead generation: converting strangers into customers through various outreach techniques/adverts.
But the trap most businesses fall into is ONLY thinking about lead generation. And whilst this is important, it takes a lot of effort, planning and can be bloody expensive with little payoff.
Your marketing strategy should NEVER stop at the customer’s first purchase.
You should be paying attention to the people who you already know are interested in your product.
Retention is the process of keeping in touch with customers who have already purchased from you, through consistent nurturing until they are ready to repurchase again and again.
It is all about getting multiple sales from one customer. This may seem difficult, but these are the most valuable types of sales for your business.
Therefore it is essential to have a good retention strategy in place so you don’t lose those customers you’ve invested so much time and money in.
The benefits of customer retention:
- Increases your sales/profit
- It’s easier and cheaper to sell to existing customers
- Helps grow your business at scale by building a reliable customer base
- Can resurrect leads you thought were long dead – Sometimes a reminder is all it takes to bring someone back to your site
- Nurture leads long-term
- Promotes multiple sales from one buyer
- Increases your marketing return on investment
- More valuable than lead generation for growing businesses
- Reward your customers for staying loyal to you
- Build better relationships with your customers
- Turns causal buyers into brand advocates & lifetime buyers
- Can be implemented automatically getting you more sales with less work
How can customer retention be done automatically?
Making proper use of marketing automation software is the secret to a truly profitable retention strategy.
Individual, personalised customer journeys can be triggered at a specific time or when a customer performs a certain action, saving you the task of keeping track and responding manually.
The best automation software can be integrated with your existing website, other marketing tools and your customer database to provide a central hub for all your retention activity and marketing data.
Some of the most popular communication channels for retaining customers include:
- SMS
- Social media – using paid ads to display targeted content
- Website personalisation – personalise visits for existing customers to fit what you want them to do next
Automated customer journeys can be as long or as short as they need to be, and should aim to constantly move them through the appropriate steps to repurchase from you.
If you’ve got questions about using automation and want to learn more, don’t hesitate to send us an email or a message on Whatsapp with any questions you may have.
Or you can jump ahead and book a call to chat with us here.
What I think you’ll care more about are…
The results it can bring
If you’d like to see examples of how a great retention strategy can help your business grow, look no further than our clients.
Here are just a few examples of the results they’ve achieved through building a retention strategy with us:
LYMA
First LYMA redefined the supplement industry. Then they did the same for skin care with the launch of their revolutionary Laser.
They came to us to help engineer their customer journeys, with a particular focus on customer retention for both subscription and non-subscription products.
We partnered with them to build custom automated journeys based on different segments of their audience. Since we started, a combination of automated acquisition and retention strategies have helped the business grow more than tenfold.
If you’d like to learn about this case study in more detail, download our PDF explaining the full story.
Silven
Silven is a recruitment consultancy, specialising in food and drink manufacturing.
They are a classic example of a business that was smart enough to know they could do things better by automating a lot of their manual processes. They came to us to help get their time back and improve their processes.
With the right automation tools and strategy, we gave them this and then some.
Not only did we achieve their original goal of automating key parts of their marketing process, we also helped them gain an impressive NPS score of 92 (According to Clearly Rated, global NPS standards dictate a score of over 50% to be considered “excellent” and over 70% is considered “world class”).
A high NPS score was crucial to Silven for retaining and improving their services through customer feedback.
We created automations that focused on deepening Silven’s connection with the clients and candidates who scored them highly, and helped resolve issues brought to light by those whose feedback was less positive.
I already have a customer retention strategy. How can it be improved?
If your business has been successful up to this point, you probably already have some sort of retention strategy in place.
But things can always be improved, especially with retention, as there’s always new data and tactics you can test for better targeting and personalisation.
It can be hard to recommend how to improve your customer retention strategy without knowing your business, but here are a few general ways to do this that you may not have tried:
- Offer effective/fast customer support to delight them when they’re struggling
- Continue to personalise your retention strategy for individual customer segments – the more personalised a message is, the more likely it is to grab the attention/resonate a customer
- Promote the emotional values your brand and your customers share – this helps build an empathetic relationship with your customers which is usually much stronger than a transactional one, especially if you want to maximise customer loyalty and brand advocacy for your business
Next steps to success
If you’re interested in creating an effective retention strategy, you can either:
1) Try to implement it yourself
First, create a plan by:
- Getting clear on what you want from a retention strategy and setting goals.
- Reviewing your products and seeing what you can suggest to each customer as a next purchase – what do you want to promote to them?
- Analysing your audience and deciding what messages they’d want to receive at each stage of their journey with you. Think long-term and aim to always have some form of consistent messaging for your customers.
- Considering timing – when is the best time to send each message? How long should you wait before sending another?
- Asking yourself: can I automate this process? It will save you a lot of time, money and stress in the future if you automate as much as possible.
- Over time, segmenting your audience and creating different retention strategies based on your customers’ unique behaviours and interests. This helps create more personalised and effective marketing and therefore more sales.
Then explore what software will best support your strategy and how best to implement it.
Or you could save yourself the faff and…
2) Hire an expert to help do all this for you.
Creating a great, automated retention strategy is one of the things we do best at Airbase.
We have the knowledge and tools to plan, implement and maintain a personalised strategy for you to grow your business and reach your goals.
If you’d like to create the winning retention strategy you deserve, find out more about how we do it here.
Or if you’re keen to get started…
