Increasing the retention of existing customers is always more profitable than acquiring new ones, which is why it is essential to focus on strategies to increase retention instead of only focusing on various marketing strategies to attract customers.
And it is so regardless of the type of business you have or the reason why your customers abandon you.
All businesses need to focus on attracting new customers to help grow revenue, but they also need to pay close attention to keeping existing customers, including newly acquired customers.
The last thing you want is to add new customers to your customer base and have them end up as one-time customers because you didn’t do anything to prevent them from leaving.
Here we present 15 strategies that you should use to minimize the loss of customers or, what is the same, to increase customer retention and loyalty.
Strategies To Increase Customer Retention
#1: Analyse The Different Types Of Customers
Understanding the different customer segments that make up your customer database is very important. It is convenient that you separate them into segments such as loyal or faithful customers, low-performing customers, and non-active customers, among others.
Once you have your customers segmented into different groups, you can dig even deeper to understand their needs by industry or business type. This will allow you to tailor the offers so that they find them irresistible.
It will also provide your sales and customer service representatives with concrete data and examples they can use to explain how your products and services can meet the needs of that industry and individual customers.
#2: Measure Service Performance
This is a key strategy because you need to make sure that customers receive the level and quality of service that they are supposed to.
Additionally, this helps ensure that everyone in the company is informed about the degree to which those objectives are (or are not) being met.
This means not only measuring hard numbers but also measuring customer perceptions of service quality.
This is certainly difficult and you cannot satisfy every customer every time, but it is in the pursuit of excellence that we see improvement in customer perceptions.
#3: Follow Through On Commitments, Both Implicit And Explicit
There are a number of things that clients can forget and forgive. But what they will always remember, and will make them look for another company to meet their needs, is a company that does not keep its promises. You always have to be very clear about what you will do and when you will do it.
Then make sure you do it in a timely manner. To finish you have to contact the client for the closing and thank them for their business.
#4: Encourage Customer Participation
Customer involvement often means nothing more than getting customers to order more work. This creates financial savings that they usually share with customers and provides an incentive to maintain the relationship.
If a relationship is comfortable for customers, inertia usually remains.
But if a client makes a bigger investment with you, the relationship is usually secure for a considerable period of time.
Psychologically, customers are often highly motivated to participate in the customer service process and typically identify closely with providers in “associate” arrangements. This tends to increase the likelihood of customer retention.
#5: Create A Disaster Recovery Plan
Why is having a disaster recovery plan important for customer retention? The answer is simple. The more the delivery period is extended, the more money it costs you and the more frustrated your customers feel, because they cannot use the contracted product or service.
Customers want a reliable product and/or service, and they want to be able to contact you whenever they need help. If you can’t provide them, they’ll look for it elsewhere.
#6: Try To Have Fast Response Times
One of the most important aspects of customer retention is to offer a quick and satisfactory solution to routine claims, complaints, and requests. Customers want to be served quickly and solve problems in a timely manner. Clients are more likely to remember how you handle an issue than the issue itself.
#7: Offer A Service With Unique Features
Why invest in offering unique features? My answer is in two words: competitive advantage. If you offer products and services that your competitors don’t, your customers have nowhere else to go to get what they need.
You have to work to become a “one-stop shop” by adding new products and services when demand demands it and improving your existing products and services at the same time.
#8: Train Customer Service Staff
Agents who have been trained in capturing customer feedback can spot customers who are dissatisfied or considering buying from competitors and can pass that information back to the company.
They must also be trained to pass on competitive information so that your marketing department can take appropriate action.
Training them in basic customer retention techniques gives them the tools they need to keep customers. This is achieved by properly addressing complaints, turning dissatisfied customers into satisfied and loyal ones, and educating customers about the value of your products and services.
Training customer service personnel so that they are familiar with the systems, policies, and procedures and giving them a deep understanding of the product and service prepares them to handle customer calls professionally and proactively, in a manner that ensures customer satisfaction.
#9: Automate The Bottom End, Customise The Top End
This strategy is key to customer retention, as it allows you to automate the routine tasks that sales, customer service, and marketing perform every day, thus freeing up valuable time that can be used to call customers.
#10: Know Your Customers
Know the client’s business. Be a consultant and ask your clients questions. This will allow you to guide your customers to buy what they really need, not what they think they want.
#11: Track Lost Business And Cancelled Orders
Keep track of the loss of income and immediately try to figure out how to reverse the cancellations. Don’t be afraid to ask customers why they canceled an order or why they take all their business elsewhere.
By gaining this invaluable information, you will be able to identify the steps necessary to recover lost business and/or avoid this same mistake in the future.
#12: Offer Customers Incentives To Keep Doing Business With You
Price is always a concern for people when buying a certain product or service. What you don’t want to do is get into a price war with your competition. Implement a pricing strategy in which you are neither the cheapest nor the most expensive.
At the same time, don’t offer discounts to every customer just for the sake of offering discounts. Well, this way you are actually training your customers to look for discounts before placing an order.
Act more scientifically. It puts predictive models to work in order to make the right offer to the right customer at the right time. One offer does not fit all customers.
#13: Develop Personal Relationships
One simple thing to consider is assigning an individual person to certain accounts and empowering this person to build a relationship with each customer. Here it is necessary to implement activities for customer loyalty.
#14: Advertise To Keep Customers As Well As Acquire New Ones
Remind customers of all product and/or service features or applications that enhance utility and satisfaction.
#15: Follow Up With New Clients
This is a golden strategy that all companies should strive to achieve, but it is especially important for an e-commerce company.
Following up with new customers provides a human touch in an impersonal transaction, thus creating the foundation for a loyal relationship.
It’s not always possible to track every new customer, but you can set a value in dollars or any currency and track all new customers who spend more than that amount. This is very easy to implement online.
Conclusions
Keeping existing customers is always more profitable than acquiring new ones. To put it another way, getting a new customer costs up to 7 times more than keeping an existing one.
But also, keeping regular customers helps us predict the workflow and possible revenue, while it becomes easier to serve them due to the greater knowledge that we are acquiring over time.
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