An expanding customer base will surely help every business, especially when they just got introduced to your business. Unfortunately, a wide customer base does not always equate to high turnovers. A lot of work makes your customers stay loyal to you and even become advocates of your brand. If you just got started with not as many customers as you would prefer, the next thing to do is to find ways to make the ones you have to be the source of your projected revenue.
Bet you have heard the term Customer Retention so many times, and you know a bit about it. Guess what? A bit is never enough. Looking deeply into what retention means, Customer Retention is the ability to turn customers into repeat and loyal buyers, preventing them from switching to competitors. Customer Acquisition is more expensive than Customer Retention because you do not spend as much. All you have to do is find ways to keep them to yourself.
Now that you know what Customer Retention means, let’s move to several ways to retain your customers and turn them into advocates. When they become advocates, they find it easy and interesting to talk about your products to their friends and family.
5 Important Customer Retention Strategies
- Build trust and Focus on Long-term relationship
For any successful relationship, trust is vital – when you pitch to prospects and, fortunately, they decide to be your customers. Don’t neglect your promises and your value proposition. Here are 3 ways to build trust
- Provide information about new updates, and how to use your product or service frequently
- Communicate problems before your customers notice
- Keep in touch by checking if they need any support
- Curate a Customer Reward Plan
Every loyal customer likes to be appreciated even though your business is steadily solving their problems, and they became loyal due to important reasons e.g. health, household necessities, utilities, etc. You need to acknowledge their loyalty by rewarding them. Use these 4 strategies to curate a good customer reward plan;
- Identify the loyal ones
- Choose an accurate time frame – Festive periods (Christmas, Eid celebrations, New year, etc.)
- Set a budget – You want to reward customers, cool…but don’t let the budget hurt your revenue.
- Prepare your tactics – Tactics like VIP treatment, 13th-month package, End of the year merchandise, and a lot more.
When you have successfully hacked a good reward plan, you just opened a floodgate of more loyal customers.
- Engage Customers Frequently
How well do you include your customers in your day-to-day business activities? People love to feel wanted and cared for, It’s the way the human mind is structured. Before taking up any new project, seek the opinion of your existing customers, you can put structures into it by sending survey emails and taking polls on social media. Check-in with them if it is something they are open to trying.
Even if it is an existing project, keep in touch from time to time to know if they are catching up.
Here are 2 major ways you can frequently engage your customers:
- Social Media – create content that informs, educates, and entertains. Focus on real-life issues and pain points they can relate to.
- Newsletter – Share newsletter about updates, tips that will help your customers.
- Treat Complaints like Gifts from your Customers
As a business owner, we know you don’t hope for complaints from time to time but when the complaints start filing in, see the positive sides of them and prepare to treat everyone one of them as a matter of urgency.
Effective ways to treat complaints;
- Acknowledge and accept it
- Apologize instantly
- Go above and beyond to fix the situation
- Automate your Business
In this age and time, growing businesses opt for faster and more automated systems to scale. Especially when dealing with customers, the flow from taking orders to delivering orders must be smooth. In between the flow, adopt a system that provides business tools to manage customers, share invoices, and accept payments. If your business operation is slow, it might discourage customers from patronizing your business repeatedly- The main reason why you should make use of every business tool provided on the Glade app. These tools set up your business for a global reach.
If you would like to have more of this information, feel free to let us know in the comments.
Cheers 🙂