It’s safe to say that you aim to grow your business’ profitability. It’s also obvious that you ne customers if you want to see business growth in years to come. What’s not so obvious is the importance of marketing to current customers just as much. If not more than, prospective customers. Strategies and tips to improve .
We know that keeping existing customers happy is important. But do we build the best customer retention strategies into our annual marketing plans?
Repeat sales are the lifeline to any B2B and manufacturing business. These customers have deeper relationships with your team. Help you acquire new customers through referrals and testimonials and they protect your bottom line. You can’t become complacent and assume that once your team closes the sale, the new customer is going to be with you for a long time.
Discussing customer retention
With a country-focus email list, targeting the right audience will drive better engagement and ensure business growth. One needs to understand local preferences, laws, and culture in order to send relevant and personalized country email list messages. A location-based segmentation of a list will greatly allow for better targeting with higher open rates, better conversions, and improv customer loyalty across diversified markets.
The best marketing strategies for your current customer means that we ne to provide thorough answers to these basic questions.
- What does customer retention mean?
- What does customer acquisition mean and why is it different?
- How can you improve customer retention?
Let’s explore these concepts and share proven customer retention strategies so you can improve business performance.
What is customer retention
Simply put, customer retention is keeping customers around for the long haul. However, though it is a simple concept, there is a lot that goes into it. Even though customer retention is a measurable activity, it really is more of a process of engaging your existing customers to continue purchasing your solutions and using them to support your customer acquisition strategies.
The difference between customer
Most businesspeople understand the differences between customer acquisition and customer retention. They understand the challenges of acquiring new customers, the pain of losing existing customers and the frustrations associat with having limit resources and striking a balance between these two concepts. Calculating the customer lifetime value and tracking it over time will help you decide how to balance acquisition and retention.
Typically, in marketing, people tend to focus on customer acquisition rather than customer retention. That’s because customer acquisition is familiar and sometimes less challenging to spend money on. It’s easy to become complacent and not focus on the customers you already have – thinking they are secur and assuming they will be with you for a long time.
The truth is, if a customer leaves and you don’t take the time to understand why they are not being loyal to your business, you won’t ever fix the wound causing your customer retention to ble. Once you fix your customer retention strategies, you will be able to acquire customers and keep them longer more effectively. The best customer retention strategies help you create lasting relationships with customers, keeping them loyal to you and converting them into brand ambassadors.
When it comes to the worlds of customer acquisition and customer retention, it’s less about one or the other and more about what balance and combination is right for YOUR business right now. You will always ne both, but customer retention is set apart because, over time, it can be a powerful source of acquiring customers and can give you the strongest return on investment.
Why is customer retention important
We mention that customer retention is a core goal to a business’ long-term success. The main reasons include:
- It’s typically less expensive to retain existing customers than acquiring new ones because of the sales and marketing costs involv. In fact, retaining customers is approximately five to 25 times less expensive than securing a new one. Customer acquisition usually involves a significant portion of business resources to reach and engage prospects through a variety of marketing channels. On the other hand, the process of customer retention is usually limit to ongoing customer service and satisfaction tactics – such as relationship building and problem solving.
- Loyal customers tend to be repeat customers, meaning they are valuable to your bottom line. Typically, the more loyal customers you have, the better your profit margins.
- Once you have acquir customers, it’s easier to upsell or cross-sell your solutions because your contacts already have an existing relationship with your team and are familiar with your business.
- And, finally, satisfi and loyal customers can lead to new customers when they refer you to others in their network.
Now that we see the importance of customer retention to businesses, how can you improve your customer retention metrics sault data through marketing in ways that will grow your business?
How to increase customer retention
Before we drill down into the specific customer retention strategies that will build your business, we want to highlight the two main ideas that all these tactics will leverage:
- You have defin your ideal target audience and know the best customer for your business. As much as we all want to sell our solutions to everyone, there is a very narrow audience for each business bas on your unique value proposition and solution offering.
- You are willing to create and leverage customer feback as part of the process to improve customer retention metrics. The result will be deeper customer relationships, more trust between you and your customers and ruc customer turnover (also known as “churn”).
Eight strategies to improve customer retention
Qualitative and quantitative data should be the foundation for all marketing decisions – especially for decisions regarding your customer retention strategies. By focusing on quantitative research, and then building on that data through o que são cookies e porque são necessários qualitative research, you will have a thorough understanding of your customer’s overall loyalty to your company.
Once you have collect the data from your surveys, you can review your customer list and organize them into three different categories to customize and prioritize communications to each.
Customers are sort into the following categories bas on their loyalty to you, their net promoter score that is attain from their survey results and their potential risk of leaving you for your competition.
Promoters: These customers are loyal, enthusiastic and passionate about your overall business, products and support team. They will go out of their way to promote your brand and refer you to others and they have a direct impact on your profitability.
Consistently follow up with all your customers
Passivists: These customers aren’t enthusiastic about anything and, at the same time, aren’t upset either. They aren’t promoting your work, but they aren’t jumping ship or leaving bad reviews.
Detractors: These customers are not happy with your business. Their experiences are negative and they are at the highest risk for leaving and spreading negative reviews, detracting from your profitability. People that are upset are twice as likely to tell others about your business than promoters.
It’s easy to focus time on your company promoters. They are fun and encouraging. You may think, “save the sinking ship and fix the detractors,” but don’t overlook the impact of your passive customers.
These customers are indifferent about what you do. They likely don’t see how their partnership with you is any different from what they could get elsewhere. They don’t see you as an add value to their line of work. Making them just as susceptible to competitor bids as detractors.
The trick with this strategy is to strike the right balance. Timing and prioritization with your marketing communications and internal “fixes” in ways that move customers toward being your promoters, while maintaining happy promoters.
Close the loop and make internal improvements
One of the best ways to improve customer retention is to make internal improvements. When you have your survey data analyz and your customers sort. You will be able to see the flaws in your operations and prioritize improvements. You will want to act on your to-do list quickly and effectively.
Part of this strategy means acting upon the survey responses, so customers know you are taking their answers seriously and addressing their pain points. At the end of the day, people respond to surveys because they care enough to help you improve. You can’t wait to act on their efforts. You ne to act quickly. A shows that B2B companies that close the loop on customer surveys through communication and improvement will increase retention rates by 8.5%. Furthermore, businesses that solve pain points within their negative feback convert 23% of those customers into promoters.
Focus on the customer onboarding process
Sometimes it’s easy to forget that a customer’s journey goes beyond the point of sale. It continues into an onboarding process. Onboarding offers a first impression of what the customer can expect to experience from your internal teams – customer service. Engineering or technical support and account management. For B2B or manufacturing companies, it should be standard practice to have a formal onboarding process.
This process should ucate and familiarize customers about all the solutions within your organization and their key team members. Various onboarding materials can include video tutorials, welcome e-mails, ucational guides, phone calls or meetings with their team, templates, etc. You can earn bonus points with new customers. When you take the opportunity to personalize the onboarding process – setting a high standard of care.
Build a community for your industry and customers
Building a community might seem very B2C or “consumer focus” but a community within. Your industry can be critically important to customer retention. They serve as a platform for customers and thought leaders to interact and provide a support by sharing valuable knowlge.
These communities are a source of free and valuable content for anyone that is part of it. It’s a great place to engage with existing customers in a less formal setting.
while also staying top-of-mind among potential customers. When the community is host and brand by you. You can push your products and services to a greater audience without a hard sell. Add pressure on your sales team.
