Effective Strategies for Boosting Customer Retention

Leads. Customer. Sales.

These are the 3 most important goals of every business.

If you want to build a thriving business, you need to take care of your biggest assets – Customers.

Sadly, most businesses are obsessed with lead generation – but careless when it comes to customer retention. How sad?

Of course, acquiring new leads is great, but retaining existing customers should be your primary focus. Because, several studies found that 68% of sales comes from existing customers?

Don’t rely on customers who stumble on your website, places an order, and leaves immediately – without the thought of ever coming back.

You can’t underestimate the power of a loyal customer base. According to Brandongaille, 12 – 15% of consumers who are loyal to a single retailer, but they represent 55 – 70% of sales.

Trust me, retaining your customers is a key aspect of your business. Without a doubt, converting leads to customers is a hard process – but your efforts can pay off if you focus on the ultimate goal – retention.

Considering that loyal customers will always come back for your products and services, obviously, they’re your best business asset.

When GrooveHQ increased customer retention by 5%, this led to a 95% increase in profits.

If you’re unable to retain your customers; in other words, you churn and burn – you’ll be losing a lot of money.

Data from Marketing Wizdom found that about 20% of customers are lost by an average business annually, due to lack of cordial relationship.

If you lose a customer, you’ve wasted 7x the resources used in converting them. You shouldn’t allow that happen to your business.

To help curtail this problem of losing customers, I want to show you the 17 customer retention strategies that work.

Let’s get started with a “surprise.”

1. Offer customer service “surprises”

I always look forward to great surprises at my birthday.

But I’m not alone. We all love surprises.

When it comes to nurturing your customers, think of a valuable offer that you can offer them – without their knowledge.

Surprises come suddenly. They’re not planned. Surprise packages or offers don’t have to cost you a fortune.

In fact, Jawbone sends a handwritten note to its customers. Customers love it, because it shows how much the brand values them, since they could take out time to write to every customer manually. To me, that’s a big sacrifice.

If you want your customers to stay put and trust your brand, then you should get beyond the normal service or product that you offer.

Surprises motivate customers. It can come in the form of appreciation. And appreciation is a strong motivating factor for hard work. In other words, when you appreciate people, they feel excited about their work.

Psychologically, scientists say that surprise is good for the brain. It also brings pleasure. It’s the spice of life. Don’t wait until your customers make a request. Step out and surprise them.

Reciprocate good gestures. Surprising your customers will inspire them to leave honest feedback about your product, and brand. Trust me, this is priceless.

Surprising offers make your customers feel like they’re part of something bigger.

Offer your customers free gifts and discounts when they aren’t expecting it. This will definitely change the lens through which they see your business.

If you need more ideas, Gregory Ciotti recently published a post on the 6 Creative Ways to Surprise and Delight your Customers.

2. Set customer expectations

Give your customers something to look forward to.

Customer service has gone beyond attending to inquiries and complaints, you also need to meet their expectations – even when you didn’t get their feedback.

But, it’s hard to satisfy someone you barely know. So, get to know your customers intimately. Understand what they desire most, and use these pointers to set expectations.

As you set and meet customer expectations, you’re empowering them. According to the Harvard Business Review, “customers want to be empowered, not controlled. You have to act with empathy.”

One of the ways to set and meet customer expectations is to be honest when making a promise.

This is where most SEO agencies fail flat. Majority of them make unrealistic promises to website owners. They promise to rank their websites in Google #1 fast.

If you’re into search engine optimization and you work with clients, don’t ever guarantee any first page result.

If you don’t achieve top rankings within the stipulated time you promised your client, do you know what just happened?

You’ve failed as a brand.

Here’s what I advise my clients: “Don’t over promise if you know that you can’t deliver.”

As marketing consultant, Roy Hollister Williams puts it, “the first step in exceeding your customers’ expectations is to know those expectations.”

For instance, be conscious of what you promise in your response time and keep to it. If you promise to deliver product 30 minutes after order, just do that.

Better yet, you can deliver in 25 minutes time. You must not go below expectations.

Promise what you can do. Set expectations that you can meet. In the event that you’re not able to meet expectations, apologize and compensate your customers. Compensation is not enough.

If a customer is expecting a high quality product and service, but gets a crappy product – regret will follow. They’ll begin to regret purchasing the product in the first place with their hard earned money.

Realising that your customer’s satisfaction is key to sustaining them will help you build a sustainable business.

Once customers are badly treated, they live with it for ages. And they’ll find it difficult to forget negative experiences and undelivered promises.

3. Build trust through relationships

Successful businesses are built on trust. When two people are involved in a business, if there is no trust, the business dies.

And there are only two persons in your business:

You and the customer.

Seeing how important trust is to your business, you’ve to consciously make attempts to promote trust. As you initiate relationship with new and existing customers, you give them the opportunity to trust you.

Ideally, when you’re looking to build trust, use the customer behavior data to deliver enormous value in your product. That way, they will continually nod and accept your recommendations.

According to a new report by EY and Forbes Insights, “marketers should use data to build trust with customers.”

The moment customers discover that you’re not trustworthy, they will switch to your competitors. Nothing scares customers away like bad experience. Worse, they’ll spread the negative news with others.

The commitment of your customers will be firm when trust increases.

A survey conducted by Concerto Marketing Group stated that 83% of customers will r

Aspect	Manual Engagement	Automated Engagement
Speed	Slower	Faster
Communication Strength	Strong	Stronger
Task Management	Challenging without automation	Efficient with automation

Do you promise to send useful email newsletters to your customers twice a week, as well as SMS to new customers, tell me: how can you handle all the task without automation?

You can select from the 15 best marketing automation software, if you’re ready to take your customer relationship management to a new level.

When your processes are standardized, it will give you the opportunity to deliver on the promises that you made to customers.

Through automation, you can manage your customer contacts, drip feed education emails, schedule promotional emails, text messages, and event notifications.

Communication Frequency	Profit Increase
More than 10x a year	300% more profit
Lost contact	No significant profit increase

Side note: Customers’ interests could be neglected, but with frequent communication calendar tool, the processes are programmed and automated to send messages.

8. Overdeliver on your promise

Because a promise is a debt.

It’s dangerous promising what you can’t deliver.

According to statistics from Business.com, when a customer is dissatisfied, he will likely tell 20 more persons about her negative experience with the brand.

To avoid hurting your customers, the rule of business hasn’t changed: “Under promise and over deliver.”

When you follow this formula, you’re exceeding customer expectation. After all, you’re going beyond what you promised.

That’s a great opportunity for you, too.

Only a fraction of people have succeeded in exceeding expectations. Sadly, 25% of businesses don’t even meet the expectations as shown in the chart below:

You know that promises raise expectations. When customers are expectant, they’re at a delicate stage – because a step could make or mar your brand. Become sensitive to your promises – and dare to exceed them.

A recent study by Manuela Vieth revealed that unkept promises provoke revenge against the organization that failed to honor them.

As the saying goes, “Don’t wake the lions in customers.”

Customers can be aggressive when disappointed. If you  promise to deliver a product in 20 minutes, be there at 15 minutes or 5 minutes before the time. As simple as this is, you’ll have succeeded in satisfying your customer.

9. Measure customer lifetime value

Do you see your customers as one of your biggest assets? Well, if you don’t know, they’re your biggest asset.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is one of such important key performance indicators that show you the worth of your customers over a period of time.

For example, if you sell online courses and charge a monthly fee, you’re not really concerned about new customers, but the lifetime value of each customers who purchases from you today.

It takes a lot of resources to get a customer. As a business person, you’ll like to know the value each of your customers is bringing to your business. It’s called customer’s equity.

Some of your customers have added more value than others. Some will always come around to buy. This repeated buyers are your VIP customers.

These are the same group of customers who will refer others to your business through word of mouth.

The value you place on your customers help you predict revenue and determine your budget for providing engaging content at all times.

You can use the Customerlifetimevalue.co to estimate how much a customer is worth to your business.

For more information on Customer Lifetime Value, see the resources below:

• How To Calculate Lifetime Value
• How To Calculate & Increase Customer Lifetime Value

10. Learn from customer complaints

Hey, you need to run away from customers who complain, right?

Wrong.

On the contrary, you should run to them. This group of customers who complain (to you or to others) are your greatest marketing asset.

It’s through complaints that you get to know the defects in your products and services. Complaints reveal what you should improve in your business and what to ignore.

It’s in the place of customer complaints that you know what your customers care about, and what they expect from your products and services.

Here’s what you need to know:

A customer who complains is willing to stay. Some customers disappear without leaving a comment. This is not good for your business.

If you resolve the complaints in their favor, 70% of complaining customers will do business with you again.

Therefore, give attention to your complaining customers. They’re still interested in your business.

11. Train your customers with educational emails

Sending email newsletters is still the #1 customer retention strategy that works.

With the right application, email newsletter can help you train your customers – especially when you’re 85% focused on educating them with branded content.

According to Nielsen Norman Group, “Newsletters are great for growing or maintaining relationships, even during times when people aren’t actively making purchasing decisions.

Attending to new customers and email subscribers after the initial contact is vital. With an educational newsletter that you send out periodically, they’ll trust you more – and feel excited purchasing from you.

After all, “teaching sells,” says Brian Clark

Email marketing has over the years been a major way of increasing customer conversion. But the question still remains: “what type of emails are you sending to them?”

Sending educational email is a smart method of educating your customers – and giving them good reasons to consider buying from you – and not your competitors.

If they can get valuable content from you at the earlier stages, they probably will like to remain with you.

Dare to train your new customers with educational emails. Show them step-by-step, how to use your product, the benefits, and behind-the-scenes video or pictures. And nurture existing customers with loyalty programs.

12. Use live webinars to educate and inspire customers

GoToMeeting.com and several other software have grown to become strong brands in the digital marketing space, because of the key roles they play.

They help you host your webinar from start to finish.

Webinars are powerful lead generation and customer retention strategy. It’s the best strategy to revive a dying business online.

“Based on a survey we conducted with our clients, between 20% and 40% of webinar attendees turned into qualified leads.” (source)

Webinars create impact. Successful brands online started out with webinars.

In fact, authority sites such as KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg, HubSpot, LeadPages, Unbounce, Copybloggers and so on grew into multi-million dollar digital marketing businesses through webinars.

Brand	Growth Strategy
KISSmetrics	Webinars
Crazy Egg	Webinars
HubSpot	Webinars
LeadPages	Webinars
Unbounce	Webinars
Copybloggers	Webinars

A webinar can help a business achieve all the organizational goals of content marketing. Yes, webinars are that powerful!

Engaging your customers in a webinar gives them the avenue to learn more about your products/services.

And not just that, they’re also allowed to ask questions and present their challenges for every attendee to see.

In the course of discussion, they can make suggestions that will definitely redirect your focus – in the right direction.

Use webinars in your business to build trust with customers.

You can actually host an event for your customers, with a bid to answer their questions in a personal manner.

It also shows that you really know what you’re talking about, when you can give a voice to your answers.

Sometimes, blog posts, articles, ebooks, and other written content limits the customer from getting to know you at a personal level. That’s why you need to consider hosting a webinar.

After the live webinar, you can further take advantage of video sharing sites, by posting the recorded webinar on YouTube, Vimeo, on your blog – in order to reach more potential customers.When it comes to customer service, you can’t afford to be lukewarm. You’re either all out to help you customer, or your business will suck.

According to Eitan Fogel in an interview with BusinessInsider.com, “I don’t know of a single person who doesn’t like the sound of their own name. Personalization has long been a critical component of customer relationship management and customer service.”

Truly, personalization is the key that you need to trounce the competition.

It doesn’t matter how sophisticated the tools that your competitors are using, if you can get personal with your customers, you’ll be able to communicate clearly to and meet their needs.

For example, Banks and other financial institutions are currently using this technique.

The value of personalization is enormous. Banks want to know their customers well – that’s the reason for the endless forms you’ll have to fill whenever you need to get things done at the Bank.

Personalization Method	Application
Emails	Personalize your emails to engage customers at each stage of the funnel.
Live Chat	Use personalization in live chat to make interactions more engaging.
Customer Service Emails	Incorporate personalization to enhance customer service communications.
FAQ Pages	Personalize FAQ pages to address specific customer needs.

But personalization shouldn’t be done on emails alone. Even in live chat, customer service emails, or FAQ pages, you can tour the personality route – just to make your customer happy.

Take a look at the Customer Intelligence Engine, at the right side of the chart, you’ll see various channels through which you engage with your customers. Make sure that personalization is an integral part of it.

It feels good to be seated in a restaurant, a waiter comes by and calls you by your name, plus “what can we offer you,” with a smile.

I’m sure you’ll reply, “my usual.”

Few minutes after, he serves your “usual.”

That’s how customer relationship should be done. Did you know that by looking at your customer’s purchase history, you can actually personalize their experience better?

Absolutely.

According to Capgemini, more than 60% of customers finds it interesting when they are presented with their purchase history. This lets them know that the merchant or brand is trustworthy.

Unfortunately, most marketers are aware of the benefits of personalization in customer retention, but just a few of them practice it.

Learn to personalize without borders. Doing it online is pretty easy and common, but you should take it offline, especially if you’ve a local business.

Here’s a case study excerpt from Everengage:

“One example of this is when a Zappos customer had traveled to Las Vegas and forgotten to pack the shoes she had bought from Zappos. She went back on the site to buy them again but couldn’t find the same ones because they no longer had it. So the customer support team actually found the shoes at a local mall, purchased them, and personally delivered it to her at her hotel room, for free. Guess which company she recommends when her friends ask her where they can buy shoes.”