If you are in the business of retaining customers (which we should all be!) you need a war chest of customer retention strategies that can help you combat customer churn, as well as keep your customers engaged and growing with your product or service. We’ve got five strategies that will help you crack the code of your customers for better engagement and keep your company growing.
Retain Customers with Customer Service
This should go without saying, but time and time again, it comes up in our conversations with clients. Your customers delight in being served well. The difference between a good meal and a poor one, many times is the level of service. What is it like to be served by your company? Hopefully you’re not like Comcast, you should be more like Zappos. Do customers have delight in dealing with you? Operationally, this is a big hill to climb but worth every step.
Retain Customers with Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is the tool in which we use to combine customer information with customer action to automate marketing and communications to your customers. Marketing automation is a great tool for customer retention, because we are able to react in a one-to-one action to your customers based on their engagement or purchasing habits. Imagine being able to send a deeply personalized email to every customer after each purchase, or target a product or service to customers who previously purchased a particular SKU. That is just the beginning. Marketing automation can help you keep customers engaged and retain them with highly relevant communications just at the right time.
Retain Customers with Content
What does content have to do with customer retention? Great question and the answer is simply – value. Strong content marketing like our Customer Engagement with Inbound Marketing, creates content that engages and educates your customer on all aspects of your products, services, and company’s unique abilities. The high value content being delivered to your customers builds brand affinity and loyalty to your brand as you deliver value with every post. Its a small value extension that has huge payoffs.
Retain Customers with Discounts
If you are hoping for us to give you a green light for coupons, I’ve got some bad news. We never advise companies to do this. We’ve outlined our case in Never Discount Your Product, and Using Coupons to Kill Customer Loyalty. It’s a slippery slope when it comes to discounts and retention. You’re actively lowering your value proposition to your customer, and bleeding money in a last chance effort for ROI. Couponing has its place, it’s just not in true retention.
Retain Customers with Personalization
Even if you don’t use marketing automation, you can still dive into personalization in different ways. It could be in doing less automated, yet still personalized, emails based on purchase habits. Or if you are a B2B service company, it might be a once a quarter check-in call from your CEO to your biggest accounts.
[tweetthis]People do business with people, not companies.[/tweetthis]
If you can make sure you have a personal (person-to-person) connection, you’re on the right path. The goal should be that every customer should reflect that “X company knows me, and serves me well”.
