Do you want to improve the retention rate of your website? If so, you’re not alone. Business owners and marketers around the globe struggle with keeping customers invested in their brand after their initial purchase.

You’ll face many roadblocks on your path to mastering customer retention. However, if you can keep people coming back to your website, you’ll see a big boost in sales and overall traffic.

Today we want to look at several actionable tips you can use to better understand what you need to do to keep customers engaged.

Let’s start by showing you how to calculate your customer churn. Afterward, we will explore multiple steps you can take today to improve your overall customer retention rate.

Calculating Your Customer Churn Rate

Customer churn goes hand in hand with your retention rate. While retention represents the number of people repeatedly using your product and service, churn represents the folks that were once customers but stopped buying from your online store and engaging with your content.

Whether you operate a SaaS business or a typical eCommerce store, you can determine your churn rate. Marketers and business owners can find their churn rate by taking a specific time frame and dividing the number of people who unsubscribed by the total number of customers. Then, multiply that result by 100 to get your churn rate.

So if you have a total of 5000 customers, but 100 people unsubscribed, your churn rate works out to 2 percent. Why? Because 100 divided by 5000 equals .02, and .02 times 100 equals 2.

When you’re calculating these two figures, you must view this information within the same time frame. For example, if you want to learn about your customer retention rate by tracking churn, make sure you’re using data from the same timestamp of 1 month, 3 months, and so on.

Looking at your figures from the same time will ensure that you’re making smart, thoughtful marketing decisions in the future.

Go Through Your Signup Process

Now that you understand how to calculate your churn, it’s time to start talking about ways to improve your retention rate. You can avoid making common mistakes by going through the customer journey on your own.

Create a brand new account and start experimenting with your website from the perspective of a customer. Look for opportunities to improve on your checkout page and website as a whole.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you go through the checkout process and notice that your payment page is on the long side. Ideally, you want customers to flow through the checkout instead of feeling like they are filling in responses on an endless payment page.

You can solve this problem by creating a multi-step form to improve flow and design. The truth is, this is one problem you would never think about unless you were viewing your website as a casual visitor.

As you improve upon details in your signup and checkout process, you’ll notice that your retention rate will improve. Users are likely to make multiple purchases if the company makes the first interaction quick and easy.

Re-Engage Stagnant Customers

Next, let’s talk about how to re-engage customers that have already invested in your product or service, but lost interest. There’s plenty of ways to get people excited about your company again.

For starters, you could create a loyalty program that rewards customers for repeat purchases with your brand. Some of your favorite food chains like McDonald’s and Starbucks use loyalty programs to keep people coming back for their rewards.

The kind of loyalty program you create will depend on your product, the size of your audience, and your budget. Typically, you want to give rewards to customers for spending money on your site. Many businesses use a point system where customers earn cashback as points for their next purchase. This encourages people to return and buy more so they can use their loyalty points.

You can also offer additional rewards for referrals and reviews. Asking customers to leave their honest feedback on your website for bonus points can help you build rapport with your existing audience while building social proof for new customers. Research shows that by simply adding reviews to your product pages, you can increase conversions by a whopping 270%.

Online contests are another great way to re-engage inactive customers. There’s a good chance that your customers follow you on social media, so when you share an online giveaway, they will see an opportunity to win a prize. Engagement is about building a relationship over a long time, if you can continually create small, engaging experiences for your customers, they will keep coming back to your website.

It’s worth noting that you’ll also benefit from additional exposure and engagement from new customers when you create a contest for your business.

Segment Your Audience

Personalization plays a significant role in how consumers interact with businesses. The technological advancements over the last decade allow us to communicate with our existing customers and subscribers like never before. Due to these advances, customers expect brands to focus on building personalized experiences.

One of the best ways to improve your personalization marketing strategy is through segmentation. Dividing your audience based on their personal preferences, pain points, and goals can help you deliver targeted marketing that meets their individual needs.

Imagine if you were a customer for a website, and they occasionally sent you letters that addressed a pain point that you were having at that exact moment. Do you think you would open the message? The short answer is that yes, it’s more likely that you would open that message.

You can segment your audience by creating feedback forms, tracking behavior on-site, and monitoring email and social media engagement. Once you’ve divided your list, you can start thinking about ways to market to each group.

Relevant marketing means more people will open your emails, which leads to repeat purchases and an improved customer retention rate.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are plenty of ways you can take steps to improve your customer retention rate. Every business is a little bit different, so feel free to experiment with one or all of these tricks to keep customers invested in your brand.