How often do you check out a brand after using its product once? Do you randomly check them or are there certain characteristics of the brand that make you visit them again?
As a business owner, it becomes essential that your brand is able to retain customers. Herein, customer retention strategies become essential. Let’s understand customer retention and various types of customer retention strategy!
Customer retention is when a company or product retains its customers over some specified period. Good customer retention means customers of a brand continue buying its products or availing of its services. For most industries, the average 8-week retention is below 20%. For products in the media or finance industry, an 8-week retention rate of over 25% is considered
You should also pay attention to Customer Rate, which is the percentage of users who return to
buy products/avail services of a brand regularly. For most industries, the average 8-week retention is below 20%. For products in the media or finance industry, an 8-week retention rate of over 25% is considered ideal. For the SaaS and e-commerce industries, over 35% retention is considered ideal.
As you see, businesses prefer to retain customers for various reasons. Benefits of Customer retention include:
• Cheaper strategy than customer acquisition
• Builds brand trust and customer loyalty
• Engaged customers are keener to provide feedback
• Engaged customers are more forgiving of any mistakes
• Easier to enable customers to review your other products
• Customer retention strategy is very useful if you want to increase your brand engagement and loyalty. Wondering how to retain customers? Don’t worry, we are here to help you out!
Any company must live up to its promises while delivering its services. Any inconsistency between what was promised and what is being delivered can hamper the brand impression. A customer invests a lot of time and energy in making his/her decision about a particular service. Hence, there should be no gaps between the communicated benefits and the final product or experience.
The traditional ways of making purchases and the modern ways of web-based commerce surely have one thing in common, i.e., the perspective of the customers. They are highly influenced by the way the business interacts with them – traditionally through its personnel. However, as the world moves increasingly digital, content becomes a primary way to connect with consumers. Personalized content, tailored to our customer’s unique preferences can create a positive experience on our platform, by increasing their loyalty to our brand.
The user interface of a brand platform plays a major role in user retention. If the user is encountering difficulty in going through the platform and is getting the same service on some other website much more smoothly, s/he would surely make a switch. Here, a smartly planned design can also lead to enhanced retention. For example, the addition of a chatbot function to the website helps the users in getting their issues resolved instantly. Ergo, a positive web experience is a major pillar in customer retention.
The experience we offer to our customers is later going to take the shape of verbal evidence regarding our brand. Simple steps like offering an immediate response, providing delivery updates, living up to the said promises, solving customers’ grievances, taking feedback about the services, etc. can go a long way in building delight and loyalty.
Social media algorithms favor those accounts which interact regularly with their followers. It is imperative to engage with our current and former customers. Even if a customer has bought something from our platform, they don’t need to contact us for their future purchases. To encourage this we need to re-engage with him/her and persuade him/her to explore our platform for other services too.
They say a minor increment in the customer loyalty program can result in a major increase in profits per customer. Crafting an efficient customer loyalty program so that the customers can enjoy significant returns ensures retaining customers for a longer time.
92% of customers read reviews on different platforms before making their final purchase. This figure highlights the importance of customer feedback and dictates how important it is for us to ask our consumers for their valuable feedback. Positive feedback will help in creating a fine influence on others and negative feedback will help us evolve. In either case, the benefit is ours!
Customers form our extended family and it’s always great to share our success with them. Making them a part of our success story will enhance our relationship with them. Sometimes, sharing the accomplishments of one customer with all the other customers also gives rise to some new bonds.
Collecting consumer data helps us in understanding their overall behavior. It gives us detailed insights into why a customer is exhibiting loyalty and why others aren’t. Tracking their usage lets us know what attracted them to make a purchase and what services didn’t impress them enough. These analytics help us in understanding the overall picture as to what conduct is helping us and what activities are inhibiting our growth.
Business success relies upon multiple purchases from a particular set of customers. That’s why we need to remind them of our services in different ways regularly. The two most preferred means for this purpose are SMS and Emails. People lay their hands on these two modes of communication quite often and that’s why they become the most popular routes for our marketing.
In the end, we would like to state that although it is quite mandatory for us to attract new customers, on the other hand, customer retention also exhibits a major role in the smooth functioning of our businesses.
• Curate an inviting bio, image captions, and a proper username or profile image so that the consumers know that your brand is authentic.
• Post content consistently.
• Schedule Instagram posts in advance.
• Collaborate with relevant influencers to promote your brand/product.
• Pick out fake Instagram followers.
• Post content around the interests of your followers.
• Try out different filters, captions, and more to see what works best with your audience.
• Get the conversation started and keep it going.
• Find popular hashtags.
Here are a few effective ways of ensuring repeat visitors:
• Through newsletters or emails, you can create brand/product awareness, introduce them to new product/service launches, can promote your blog posts with links to your website.
• Focus on building a user-friendly website. Users will more often than not come back to your website if they have had a hassle-free, positive experience during the first visit.
• If you establish your website or blog as an authority in your industry, visitors will come directly to your site when they are looking for something specific.
• Social media platforms like Facebook, Google, and Instagram are great for promoting your content and attracting more visitors to your site.
• Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. This will make Google happy and help your website to rank well. Mobile-friendly content is more shareable.
Social media algorithms favor those accounts which interact regularly with their followers. The same is the case with Instagram. It is imperative to engage with existing and new followers. Even if a customer has bought something from your platform, it’s not guaranteed that he/she will turn to you for future purchases. To ensure this, you need to re-engage with him/her and persuade him/her to explore your other offerings as well.
Suhail Bajaj is the CEO of BrightBrain Marketing Technologies LLP that has now grown into a full-fledged digital marketing agency with 55+ employees and clients from 7+ countries – all under his supervision. Graduated with an MBA from the esteemed Cass Business School, he brilliantly puts his learnings into practice, helping brands meet their business goals and succeed in a digital-first world.
