How to Avoid the 8 Most Common Customer Retention Mistakes
How to Avoid the 8 Most Common Customer Retention Mistakes
Contributed ContentRetaining customers unlocks a whole new way of looking at sales. Ensuring customer satisfaction leads to having a successful business.
Customer retention can play a huge part in the success of your business and has always been important to businesses for as long as the concept has existed.
In business and particularly in startups, the joy at making sales for your product and service can cause ill-discipline in other regards, particularly in doing all that you should do to ensure that first time sales aren’t one-time sales.
Customers are a constant source of possibility and hope for further business growth. However, there’s a lot you can do wrong in trying to retain customers. So, let’s take a look at what can go wrong and how you might try and avoid these problems.
8 Ways to Prevent Customer Retention Issues
- Track customer behavior
- Create a strong email list
- Start a loyalty program
- Be open to receiving feedback
- Cement relationships through social media
- Keep your customer experience perfectly consistent
- Always be present
- Stand by your principles
1. Track Customer Behavior
Once a new customer begins to interact with your company, it’s vital that you immediately begin to record everything you can about what they do and how they do it. You need to understand why the customer came to you in the first place.
Understanding a customer and what they’re looking for is a major step towards being able to capture their business time and time again. It’s not obvious, but if you record all of their actions in relation to your company, you should find it very doable.
Knowing this information will also allow you to target your customers more accurately, with messages that capture their attention.
Talking to your customers directly will provide you with the most information, but you can also learn a lot about them by making good use of your website analytics. In particular, use the tools to find out more about what paths people take once they get to your website.
Gather data on whether they are reading the emails you send and clicking on the targeted adverts.
This way, you will gain valuable insight into the behavior of your customers and be able to tailor your site to give them what they are most interested in. You will then be able to build stronger and ultimately, more profitable relationships with your customers.
2. Create A Strong Email List
Failing to use email marketing is just shooting yourself in the foot.
“Email marketing is an immensely powerful tool, a privilege even, for companies looking to make the most out of the customer pool. Your chance of drawing a customer back in is at its highest when you maintain an effective email marketing list”, explains Chris Bell, tech blogger at Boomessays and Essayroo.
Compiling and maintaining an email list will prove a vital step as you develop your retention strategy. You can use the email list in a number of ways, but crucially you need to remember that you have to provide value to your customers. You can use the email lists to send them exclusive content or time-sensitive deals.
3. Start a Loyalty Program
Loyalty programs are only applicable to certain types of businesses but where they can be used, they ought to be. A loyalty program sends a message to customers that you aren’t going to abandon the relationship.
In fact, you’re going to do all you can to ensure that the relationship continues, including by offering them free items, discounts, and other perks, just for continuing to choose your company.
There is a whole range of loyalty programs. However, the most popular is the points program, which allows customers to accrue points when they purchase products, which they can then trade in for free items. This is a really strong retention practice and ought to be used a lot.
4. Be Open to Receiving Feedback
Feedback is a great source of data and another element that is expressly designed to indicate to you how you can continue to capture your customers over and over.
In this instance, you’re essentially able to hear directly from customers what changes or elements to emphasize in order to keep them coming back.
This sort of direct data is priceless for retention.
5. Cement Relationships Through Social Media
Social media presents bounteous opportunities to you for getting both first time and repeat business.
“One of the great things about using social media is that it is an environment in which you can cement your relationship with customers in a way which has a heavy influence on retention rates”, notes Jessica Liu, customer retention expert at UKWritings and Writing Services.
Build and foster this through social media, which is the top choice for customer care.
While over 34% of people prefer social media, others enjoy interaction through live chats, emails, and 1-800 numbers.
6. Keep Your Customer Experience Perfectly Consistent
People will come back to something if they enjoyed it the first time and can rely on the fact that the experience will be replicated.
This step is vital for retention since you need to give people that reassuring sense that everything will be how they remember it when they come back to you again.
7. Always Be Present
If a customer is considering returning to you, you need to always be there to catch ahold of them a second time.
Sometimes, customers will have some doubts about giving you more business. You can’t afford to let those doubts fester and turn into actions.
You need to be available at all times of the day to capitalize on their instincts to try and return to you for business.
8. Stand by Your Principles
This connects closely to the consistency principle but is important in a slightly different way. Customers want to feel like you exist in a way that transcends the simple act of making a sale.
Your company needs to hold onto your values in a way that doesn’t let your customers wonder whether they were told whatever they needed to hear to secure the sale.
They don’t have to be grandiose principles, but you need to stick to your identity. Each business needs to have an idea of what their starting points are for retaining customers.
Businesses should all strive to look at complaints differently and hire employees that love customer service.
Their employees should also communicate frequently with their customers and do their best to reduce buyer remorse.
Maintain Integrity to Keep Your Customers Happy
Retention forms a massive part of sales success and should be addressed with the same level of detail and care.
It’s not always complex and it can actually be easier than making the initial sale, but it will transform your company’s prospects when used correctly.
Through a few simple techniques, businesses of all sizes can retain their customers. Simply thinking about what you would want in a business provider is the first idea.
Keeping your customers invested in your business will lead to more success, but also will help your customers in the long run.
Aimee Laurence
Writer, Urgent Assignments