Retain your customers– Nowadays, you may be facing one problem that is the biggest problem for most businesses as well. This major problem concerns retaining your customers for a longer period of time in such a competitive environment. In today’s competitive world, we may have to make sure that we are retaining our customers in such a way that they do not switch to any other brand. It’s not just about retaining your existing customers, you also have to make some strategies and implement them in such a way that other customers are also coming to your friend and becoming lower to your business product or service.
In this article, we will discuss the various important factors of customer retention. The things we will discuss are how customers become loyal to a brand and understanding the customer loyalty cycle, and different strategies to retain your customers for a long period of time and grow your business.
Before knowing the various strategies of customer retention, let’s first discuss what customer retention is and what are the benefits of retaining your customers for your business.
What is Customer retention
Customer attention is the process through which a company tries to make sure that their customer is connected to them for a longer period of time and remains with the brand forever. They always focus on both of their customers, like existing or new customers. Every small business, as well as the big brand, wants to meet the retention well higher as it will bring more profit to them.
If a brand is able to retain the customers with them this will bring business to the brand for a longer period of time.
Benefits of Customer Retention
- Retaining your customer is way cheaper than spending on acquiring new customers. This is the most cost-effective way to grow your business in the long term.
- The next most important benefit of retaining customers is that if your customer is loyal to you they will bring more profit as they will continue to buy products from you only and they don’t want to shift to another so they are bringing more business to you.
- If you are retaining your customers you will stand out from the crowd as majorly companies are faced with doing such things and this needs to use losses and higher expenses to tell.
- If you get loyal customers this will help you in promoting your brand through word of mouth if your customers are satisfied with your products they will definitely share with others and influence their friends and relatives to make purchases from your brand.
- This will also help you to engage with your customers and know what exactly customers think about your product this will also give you feedback in case you need to make a change in something in your product and this also help in improving your brand image.
- In case you want to learn something new you can ask your loyal customers to firstly test or explore in order to give you feedback. And on the basis of the feedback, you can make changes to your product.
- In today’s world where consumers have a huge variety of products, there is no chance to make any mistake. Only a loyal customer will ignore your mistakes and will give you another chance.
- Due to the high rate of advertisement spam, customers get irritated but an interaction or promotional message or mail from a brand with whom the customer is loyal will bring happiness to them.
- If you are retaining your customers, this will help you in building a strong brand image. And increasing loyal customers is the goal of every company.
So, we can see that returning customers is one of the most important factors of every business, regardless of the size of the company whether it can be a small store or a large enterprise.
The next thing we will discuss is the customer loyalty life cycle. There are four main components of the customer loyalty life cycle that are directly associated with customer satisfaction with your product or service.
Components Of Customer Acquisition
Customer acquisition- customer acquisition is a process in which you are trying to provide your service or product to new customers and make them attached to your brand for a longer period of time. You need to make sure that you are satisfying customers’ needs if the customer feels satisfied then only he will re-purchase the product from you.
Customer development- customer development is specifically when you are making your customers aware of all the benefits they will get from using your product or being your customer. This stage plays a major part in building an interactive relationship between the company and the customers.
Customer commitment- in this component you will communicate with your customers about all kinds of offers or events that are happening in your company and that can provide benefits to the customers.
Customer retention- this is an important part for us as it brings us a more competitive advantage. As customers become more loyal they will be retained by your brand for a longer period of time and they won’t switch to any other product or brand.
Let’s take an example of how you can retain your customer by using the customer loyalty life cycle. So let’s assume you own a company that produces men’s formal shirts. The first thing you will do is to target the right audience in order to reach your, potential customers. Now the first important thing you will do is to get your customers in different ways by communicating and doing a promotional activity you will acquire in your customers and provide your product to satisfy them with your product.
The next thing you will be doing is communicating with your customers as if there are any changes to be made for the kind of shirt they want to wear and at the same time you will tell them about what are the different benefits of wearing your brand product than others. Next, you will tell them different offers that you are providing for your brand shirts. This offer can be occasional offers or any promotional offer. Once your customers feel satisfied with your product you will have to build a strong relationship with them to retain them for a longer period.
How to Retain Customers
- The first step is to create your customer churn analysis. This will help you to understand drag and analyze the customers who churn and this also helps you understand the reason which leads to churn.
- In order to improve your business, you need to know how your customer feels about your product so you need to keep on collecting the feedback of the customer in order to analyze if they are facing any kind of problem which needs to be resolved immediately.
- Next, you need to maintain a calendar loop in which you will communicate with your customers every month. This will help you to get attention from the customers immediately. The more interactive you all are with your customers the stronger relationship will be between you and your customers.
- You can also send your company’s newsletter which is the simplest way to retain your customers. All you have to do in this type is to auto-generate the emails and customers will receive the email and there will be no extra cost.
- The next important step is to educate your customer about your brand very well in order to make sure that the customer knows each and every feature and benefit of the product. Make them realize how purchasing your product is a long time benefit for them.
- The next step is to build a strong trust relationship with your customers. In this step, you do not just have to communicate something you have to make so that you are satisfying your customer and making them feel in such a way that they are getting value for money while purchasing your product.
- The next step is to provide your customer with some unique service that no other competitors are providing to their customers. This will help you get a competitive advantage as well as the customers’ trust in your brand. If you are providing a unique service to your customers this will help you in retaining them.
- Now the final step is to launch different customer retention programs on the basis of different customer needs. By retaining your customers you will be able to create more customer value, brand value, and brand image.
As of now, you know how customer retention can be implemented in your business. Now let’s discuss the different strategies that you can use in your business in order to get a higher rate of customer retention. You are providing you a list of different strategies that you can imply to your business according to the customer requirements and your business product or service. Following are the different strategies that can be used in retaining your customers.
- The first thing that each and every customer wants is to buy a product from such a brand that always stays in touch with them. Customers want their brands to hear them and understand what they actually want and expectations from the brand. Brands need to stay in touch and always initiate the interaction with the customers in order to understand the customers well. If you know your customer well then only you can suggest to them or recommend the different products from your company that can suit them and satisfy their needs and wants. You always need to interact with customers even if they haven’t approached you in a while.
- You can use social media to interact with customers, and also communicate different offers. You can also know about customers’ opinions, interests, and motivation. This information will help you to get to know your customer deeply. You can find out the most loyal customers and give them different rewards for their loyalty. You can use social media to ask different questions, take complaints as well as for resolving any product issues.
- You need to provide a personal touch to your service in order to make your customers feel more confident, comfortable, and satisfied when they buy your product. You need to make your product service more trendy, comfortable, and friendly immediately after-sales.
- You need to provide your customers with a very great experience when it comes to customer service. Because according to much research there are around 70% of the customers leave brands because of poor services. You need to clean your employees in such a way that they provide a great service to the customers and resolve their disputes immediately without any delay.
- You need to take charge to solve customers’ problems in a very sympathetic way without using any wrong words. You need to train your employees to fix customers’ problems politely and calmly.
- If your customers are making a purchase you need to send them a survey within 24 hours for the feedback on the product they bought.
- You need to provide your customers with different surprises and gifts such as giving them special offers on their birth month or giving them extra gifts after exceeding a limit of purchase.
- You also need to send customized messages to the customers every time they make a purchase from your store or website. This message should be a connecting point from which customers feel connected to the brand for the service and product.
- When it comes to retaining your customers you should always provide them special incentives before they actually leave your brand or maybe your membership. For example, there are few customers who feel hesitant when it comes to buying a membership for the product for which they have to pay so in such case you can provide them one-year free service and after utilizing the service you can’t ask them variable charges and with that experience of membership the chances of buying the membership increases at a higher rate.
- You can also launch a loyalty program where you are giving different incentives to your loyal customers and also offering limited edition products at a lower price to them.
Conclusion
In this article, we discussed what retention is, what it means to your brand, how you can retain your customers, and what are the different strategies you can implement in your business to retain your customer for the long term. It is very important for every company to retain the customers are they bring the most profits to the company for a continuous long period of time. Retaining your customers will not only help you to grow business from them but they also help you in marketing your product by word of mouth and influencing marketing.
You need to train your employees such that they provide your customers with a unique and satisfying experience every time they obtain your service. You can start implementing the strategies that are mentioned above to retain your customers for a long period and get continuous business from them. These are only a few strategies for retaining customers but in case you have other strategies you can imply that as well but make sure that you are connecting your customers with the brand’s products in such a way that they never leave your brand for other products.
