Customer retention or ensuring the loyalty of your clients isn’t easy to accomplish. Strategies that deliver good results vary from one company to another. The demographic profile of the audience that you’re interested in will also play a role.
The provision of high quality customer service is obviously the biggest essential when it comes to ensuring retention. In fact, 33 percent of American customers report that they’ll look for another service provider after just one instance of poor service.
Trust in companies is also going down with 55 percent of customers reporting that they now trust brands less than they used to.
So, what can you do to ensure trust, promote relevant services and deliver an excellent client experience every single time? Here are some of the essentials you’ll need to master if you want to maintain high retention levels.
Create an empowering experience
If you make it easy and convenient for clients to interact with your brand, chances are that they’ll be willing to stick around.
New technologies provide excellent opportunities for the creation of an empowering experience.
Online communication, online ordering, augmented reality (AR) apps, self-checkout and mobile product selection before a customer arrives at the venue are all examples of digital transformations that can help with customer retention.
Starbucks is one of the companies that embraced such innovative methods of interacting with clients. It gave customers a mobile app they could use to personalize and make their order before arriving to a shop. Once they did, the coffee was waiting for them. Reducing waiting time and putting the client in charge of vital processes can result in massive customer retention improvements.
Relevance and effectiveness of communication
Marketing to ensure customer loyalty is very similar to texting a romantic interest – you shouldn’t overwhelm prospects and you should definitely deliver a relevant message that people want to see.
Choose the right communication channels. Your corporate website, your blog, YouTube and social media provide distinctive opportunities for the publication of very specific message types.
Get to know your audience well. A persona can help you find out what your clients like, how they prefer to interact with companies and what types of content yield the best results.
Online communication provides a lot of data you can save and analyze. As a result, your coming campaigns can be much more focused and based on customer preferences. Online marketing campaigns allow adjustments on the go. Don’t hesitate to find out what your clients are looking for and when you do, modify your content accordingly.
Loyalty programs and rewards
Making your loyal customers feel extra-special ranks among the most powerful retention approaches.
Loyalty programs are very popular and they work. Statistics suggest that 52 percent of clients will join a loyalty program if their favorite brand offered one.
You can offer many incentives to ensure long-term retention. Special discounts for loyal customers, bonus point cards, early access to new products and free gifts with purchases all rank among the loyalty program options that deliver excellent results.
It’s important to show loyal customers that they’re being appreciated. While you may have to invest a bit in the creation of a loyalty program, consider the following – emotionally-connected clients will spend 699 dollars with a company annually while others will spend an average of 275 dollars.
Loyal customers are thus much more valuable for your brand. Any sum you invest in ensuring their retention will result in a high ROI.
Reviews and user-generated content
Online media empower clients to share information about their experience with brands. This information can be very beneficial in terms of maintaining loyal customers and acquiring new clients that could stick around.
You may worry about negative reviews but here’s the real deal – while 35 percent of Americans will post about a negative experience with a brand, 53 percent of people will post about their positive experience. Happy clients will also share information with an average of 11 people and refer those individuals to products or services they like.
Allowing clients to share their experience and responding adequately can help you maximize loyalty.
Even a dissatisfied customer can be turned into a loyal fan when you investigate the situation and offer a suitable type of compensation upon necessity.
Online reviews and testimonials strengthen your marketing strategy. They also allow for a consumer opinion survey. You will get valuable information about the quality of customer service and the areas that will benefit from some improvement.
Don’t over-promise and don’t over-promote
Honesty and transparency in your communication with clients happen to be the heart and soul of loyalty.
Don’t over-promise in an attempt to lure new clients into sticking around.
While a marketing campaign may deliver excellent results the first time around, people will not return to your brand if they don’t get what they’ve been promised.
Expectations should be aligned with your clients on a regular basis. Under-delivering is the first step towards ruining the quality of your customer service. Once you get there, you’ll find it almost impossible to dig yourself out of the grave.
Over-promising and heavily promotional campaigns don’t deliver great results anyway. Hence, you may want to move towards informative or emotional campaigns. Consumers want to get something valuable, engaging or funny from their interactions with brands. When delivering beneficial and entertaining content, you’re building a solid foundation of trust and emotional connection.
These are just of the customer loyalty-focused marketing options you can give a try to.
Start the process with learning a bit more about your clients. Equipped with this information, you can come up with marketing campaigns that are tailored to the individual needs of the audience in question. Work on creating a customer community around the brand. Be approachable, respond to inquiries quickly and strive to make service better.
Accomplishing these things in one way or another will give you a solid customer base you can rely on in the long run. Even if you have to spend some money on the process, you will soon find out that the investment was 100 percent worth it.