Attracting new customers to your brand is important, but are you paying attention to the customers you already have? If not, you’ll likely see a downward slope in your customer retention rate. This is the percentage of customers your business has maintained and kept over a period of time. Increasing your retention rate can increase your profits anywhere from 25 to 95 percent, one of many reasons it’s crucial to your overall marketing strategy.
While many brands focus on making as many new customers as possible, too many forget about their repeat business. Did you know it’s five to 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one? Companies that put more emphasis on attracting new business surely don’t understand how valuable their current customers are for their growth.
Improving your retention rate means keeping existing customers happy, but how do you go about this? Let’s look at three ways your brand can improve its customer retention and build a loyal customer base.
1. Create a loyalty program
Your repeat customers keep your business afloat and appreciate your products and services, so why not bounce that appreciation right back? You can do this by creating a customer loyalty program that offers them exclusive discounts, uses a reward system, and gives them first dibs on your latest content.
Start the journey of gaining your customers’ trust by incorporating social proof into your marketing strategy. This is anything that adds credibility to your business, such as reviews, ratings, testimonials, influencer campaigns, and more.
FitBit uses social proof from well-known companies to show new visitors that their technology is customer-approved:
Then, you need to find out which customers bring your business the most value, but how do you do this? Use software like MonsterInsights to generate a customer lifetime value report, which gives you an estimate on how much revenue your customers will generate for your brand during their lifetime.
From here, you can segment your email list with this group of customers and add them to your loyalty program. When you see where potential customers were about to purchase and then exited, it helps you understand why that happened so you can refine your strategy for the future.
2. Use gated content
Have you considered using gated content to pique your customers’ interests? Gated content isn’t the answer to all your customer retention problems, but it lets you see who’s genuinely passionate about accessing your content. A recent case study saw a company’s email list gain 7500 subscribers in a month using locked content.
Gated content requires action from your visitors for them to gain access to your content. They might have to enter their email address, provide a phone number, or pay a fee to unlock access, for example.
The New York Times is known for using gated content to build its subscriber list and generate sales:
You could use lead magnets like whitepapers, checklists, and ebooks to collect emails. Or, you can take it a step further by creating a membership site using MemberPress, which lets you create different membership levels, accept payments, and sell digital downloads.
Creating a landing page or website specifically for locked content helps you segment your email list, drive sales, and engage your audience more effectively.
3. Improve the customer experience
You might have the best products in your industry, but if you’re providing a poor customer experience (CX), it doesn’t matter. People care about the brands they choose to do business with, and if they don’t match their standards, you’ll see a decrease in retention.
Start by revamping your customer service efforts. How easy is it for customers to get in touch with your brand? Does your brand show that it cares about them as individuals instead of numbers? Is your company quick to respond to inquiries and provide solutions? If not, it’s time to consider live chat.
Live chat offers speedy solutions, engages online visitors, and collects user feedback. An in-house team of representatives is useful, but they can’t be there for your audience around the clock. This is one of many reasons why outsourcing customer service is so handy.
Outsourcing your brand’s customer service comes with several benefits:
- Improving customer engagement
- Expanding coverage
- Gathering research-backed data about your audience
- Saving money
The bottom line
Your customers are the most crucial part of your conversion strategy. Without them, you wouldn’t generate sales, drive traffic to your website, or grow your business. If you don’t pay attention to existing customers and put all your efforts towards acquiring new ones, you’re missing out on increased revenue and conversions. How will you improve your customer retention and keep existing customers happy?