Tips On How To Increase Customer Retention

Customers’ loyalty towards brands is one of the deciding factors for its success. One-time customers are never going to show loyalty towards the business and thus, service providers need to work on customer retention strategies. It is one of the important phenomena for a sustainable business growth. Even researches claim that a slight 5% customer retention can offer profits up to 95%.

Understanding how businesses have the chance to build customer retention programmes will benefit organisations in the long run. Thus, a business must have robust customer retention strategy to gain continuous profit. It is a better practice to retain old clients than making efforts in adding new ones. It also involves fewer expenses, which is again beneficial from the business point of view.

Before getting deeper into the client retention strategy, let’s take a look at why clients may leave a business:

  • Nearly 68% of clients leave a business because they are not happy with the services.
  • Some find competitor’s services more appealing

Both these factors are a big threat to the business, and thus, it is important to apply some retention marketing policies. To familiarise you with the ways that could help in client retention, here is an explanation of the top practices that are generally recommended.

The Freemium Model

There is no doubt that freemium model does work for the business. If done effectively, this model can help business professionals convert users into customers who pay for your services. The practice is easy to initiate by giving a free 1-month trial to the clients allowing them to use the services and the products for free.

Service providers can also choose to introduce the features for customers in a way that they will be awarded with free incentives if they successfully invite other users to sign up for the services through email or other social media networks.

Personalisation Builds Loyal Customers

Personalisation is the key when it comes to building loyal business relations. It is a general phenomenon that visitors leave web pages with 10 to 20 seconds. A number of factors contribute to this. However, personalisation is the key to retaining customers for a long time. For providing an exceptional personalisation experience, service providers must think from users’ point of view.

For instance, a change in product pricing or an alternative promotional offer (relevant to the clients) holds immense importance in creating personalised experience for the clients. This added relevance can trigger customers to stay on the websites for longer and contribute to the conversion rates. An additional AB testing to ensure the effectivity of different versions of the page is going to add more to make the personalisation more effective.

Customer Feedback Survey Implementation

Implementation of customer feedback survey is a valuable way for learning how the business is behaving in respect to clients’ expectations. Altering the services depending upon the queries listed by the clients can turn out to be an important factor in growing the services in a positive manner. Thus, for implementing the services, service providers need to measure:

  • Feedbacks on an individual level
  • Suggestions from the clients
  • The effectivity of these suggestions

Working on the feedbacks is always going to pay in the form of retaining the clients for longer and build specific client retention strategies that pay in the favour of the business.

Effective Client Support/ Service

Effective client services lead to longer client retention. Providing better than expected services are also beneficial. In order to be specific with different clients, their queries and additional concerns must be solved instantly. Unsatisfied customers are never going to contribute to the growth of the business.

Thus, providing effective client support includes a consistent reply to queries, going above the call of duty if required, and providing prompt deliveries. Extraordinary customer support offers prospects for future that have the potential to contribute to the growth of the business. Satisfied clients are sure to talk about the exceptional experience they were having while getting the services. Hence, keep focusing on providing effective client support.

Treating Complaints as Gifts

Many clients do not to report their problems and just walk away from the services. This is practiced by nearly 96% of the clients involved in ecommerce businesses. Clients generally do not report their problems due to a number of reasons. Some are either unaware of it or think that it does not make any difference. But they will definitely talk about their experience with others.

Therefore, if your are getting complaints about any of the services, take it as the lifeblood of the business. Thus, if clients are complaining about the services, take it as a compliment and work on rectifying the mistake.

Personal Relation with Clients Through Social Media Channels

Clients remain loyal to the businesses if they are given a good experience. For this concern to be fulfilled, service providers must know the clients on a personal level. This is possible with the communication through various social media networking sites. For a more specific approach, it is suggested to designate particular teams for respective clients.

Follow up them on varied channels to know more about the clients. Depending on these stats, it becomes very much easier to serve clients specifically for their requirements that too in a professional way.

CTA with Inbound Keywords

CTA or call to action adds value to the featured content over the website. Bonding these CTAs with inbound keyword can add more traffic to the website. Thus, a review of the most searched keyword is essential to embed the same in the CTAs. Call to action remains a perfect chance for the visitors to reply on the services instantly. Embedding these with typical keywords thus adds more to the conversions.

Creating two or three call to actions with the top keywords is not enough to maintain the effectivity of CTAs. Service providers need to do frequent research on the effectivity of these keywords and in case any keyword is no longer efficient, it must be replaced with the one having higher searches.

Relevance in Content

Customer retention is more like handling a management job where relevancy is the key to success. Whether it is about creating the CTA or establishing a relationship with clients, relevancy matters the most. And when it comes to managing the content over the website, mistakes cannot be committed in terms of relevancy.

Relevancy in the content is thus considered a successful retention marketing strategy for a number of ecommerce companies. Visitors really put some efforts to search for their stuff over the Internet and they cannot be cheated with the content that is just not up to the mark. Therefore, research thoroughly while creating the content for the websites. It also plays a major role in boosting the ranking of websites.

Discounts & Coupons

People love things that come for free. And when it is about getting discounts on favourite ecommerce websites, they are sure to check the deal once. Therefore offering attractive discounts and awesome offers with selected coupons can enhance client retention. In addition to offering attractive discounts, let your users know about these attractive deals with regular newsletters.

Prior to sending these newsletters, jot down the list of subscribers who are interested in that very service. It is never good to bother customers who are just not interested. It is just a waste of time. Hence, target your efforts towards something that could yield results in favour of the business.

Choose Right Platform

One of the best ways to improve client retention is to make use of channels that clients prefer the most. While a greater number of communication channels have evolved these days, a number of clients still enjoy mailing services. Hence, depending upon the preferences of the clients, choosing the right platform could be your key to a successful client retention policy.

There is no doubt about the fact that online chats are critical while answering queries. Thus, serving them significantly that too over a client’s favourite channel is always going to contribute to better client retention strategy.

Conclusion

These retention tactics are well-researched to hold customers for a long time. Thus, including these tips can easily help the online merchants boost customer retention. Retaining customers with these tips is an easy practice to gain profit from the clients who have remained associated with the business for long. It just requires some serious efforts to gain the trust of the clients with these prescribed ideas to implement the customer retention policy in the best way possible.

Note: The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author and does not necessarily reflect the views held by Inc42, its creators or employees. Inc42 is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information supplied by guest bloggers.

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