65% of a business’s revenue comes from existing customers.
Businesses that aren’t actively trying to ensure that their customers keep coming back are losing out on extra revenue.
In this blog post, we’ll be sharing a few tips and tricks to drive customer retention for your business.
What is customer retention?
Customer retention is simply a set of strategies businesses employ to keep customers coming back. To improve retention and earn more revenue, every business must actively think of ways to ensure that a customer keeps coming back.
Bolt and Uber are the two most popular ride-hailing services in Nigeria. Asides from the advantage they have of arriving at the market first, they know how to keep their customers coming back through discount codes!
These companies don’t give discounts on rides because they have excess money to spend. It is to bait you into using the app again because of the discounts they’re offering. This is an example of a customer retention strategy.
When customer retention strategies are executed properly, your business will not just retain customers but get new ones. Aiming to improve retention and repeat customers isn’t a waste of time. Repeat customers are going to eventually become brand advocates.
Here are a few tips & tricks to drive customer retention for your business.
- Sell great products.
Unexpected right? But yes! The first tip to increase retention for your business is to sell good products. If a customer’s first purchase from your business ends up in a situation of what I wanted VS. what I got (the bad kind), there’s no amount of discounts that will make up for it.
If you want your customers to come back repeatedly, you have to sell quality. Not only will your business get returning customers, but there’ll be an increase in new ones. - Make a good first impression with customer service.
Customers know if they’ll patronize a business again based on their first purchase. First impressions matter, not just with people, but with businesses.
As much as you can, ensure that customers receive top-notch service at every given point in your business.
Just like the first point, no one will patronize a business where they felt insulted or aggrieved by the service they received.
If you’re looking for tips + tricks to take your customer service to a 100, you can read this ARTICLE for more. - A reward/loyalty program.
If you want to retain customers, reward them. Rewards serve as both an encouragement + incentive for customers. When it comes to rewards, there’s no one size fits for any business.
For ride-hailing apps such as bolt and uber from our earlier example, they offer discounts off rides as a reward program to keep customers coming back. Offering discounts is a much easier reward program than gift packs.
Hair store – Thehaircaterers offer free deliveries on orders above a certain amount.
Essential stores like supersaver and Ebeano offer customer accounts where customers get some goods free if they’ve shopped up to a certain amount in-store.
To make things even more interesting for customers, you can let them know that a certain amount of purchases will earn them something. A reward/loyalty program is a foolproof customer retention strategy.
Think about the shop down the street at Christmas that gives a free bucket. That’s a reward programme in full swing!
It doesn’t have to be too big to be rewardable. - Send a business newsletter.
There’s a reason many newsletters from companies have personas attached to them. A newsletter can be used to always keep customers in the loop. Whether it’s sharing available goods with them, or educative information, a newsletter ensures that you’re actively on your customer’s minds. And to retain customers and repeat customers, you have to ensure you’re always on their minds.
With a regular newsletter (twice or thrice monthly), the problem of “customer, have you forgotten me?” will stop being an issue for your brand.
If a newsletter may not be something your business can handle at this time, social media is a great tool to keep customers in the loop.
A bonus point to retaining customers is to personalize the shopping experience.
The share-a-coke campaign went viral because of its personalized experience. A coke bottle made just for you with your name on it as proof. Coca-cola earned billions of dollars with this retention technique.
Your business’s marketing/retention budget may not be up to a quarter of coke’s, but their ideas aren’t out of reach.
Personalize shopping experiences with named thank you cards, personalized discount codes and lots more.
Customer retention is hard, but with a great product, good customer service and a reward programme, you can increase your number of repeat customers.
For more articles on tips and tricks to help you keep your customers, read this post on making an indecisive customer a paying one.