Customer Retention Strategies: How to Boost Loyalty

Keeping customers involves keeping those people who know and trust your business. You’ll know customer retention is good when someone keeps returning, renews a subscription or buys again. That’s a customer who’s supporting your business, and the reason? Every step to buy, subscribe or interact with your website is simple and straightforward. They also love your products and/or services. If you’ve ever lost a client quickly because of not responding fast enough to a query or not fixing something that was broken in the purchasing journey, you’ll know just how important customer retention strategies are.

This is why so many brands are concentrating on looking after their existing customers, not forgetting about them and only trying to attract new ones. Read this and find out some simple tips to keep your customers loyal and returning time and again.

What Customer Retention Involves

Customer retention involves ensuring that those customers who return, continue to do so. There’s a reason they keep coming back, so ask yourself what it is. If you’re unsure, consider the following: Being loyal is a feeling loyal customers have. They trust your brand and aren’t keen to look for an alternative. So, they purchase from you more than once, or subscribe again, and check out what you have that’s new and exciting. A brand keeps customers by making them feel supported and looked after, and by offering them products that they want and need.

Why Retention Works

• When you try to find new customers, you first need to advertise and gain their attention. Once they are interested, you must hook them in, answering queries and persuading them that what you offer is just what they’re looking for. It takes a lot to get their attention and get them to try your products and/or services. And you need to do this before you will gain their trust.
• It’s a completely different ballgame when you have an existing customer. They know your product/service, and it’s likely they already trust you. That’s half the work done.
• New customers are often recommended to you by your loyal customers. When a customer is happy, they can bring others along for the ride. This is a great way to increase your customer base, and recommendations won’t involve new advertising and marketing strategies.

Customer Retention Strategies That Work

How to create a great customer experience? Read below:

1.    Show Value Upfront

Look after new customers. Welcome them and give them extra attention. If they buy something, make them feel supported. Check they’re happy with their product, ask if they found the purchasing journey and payment simple, and delivery easy and fast. If they have any onboarding queries, respond to these immediately so they feel that you care.

2.    Fix Problems Before They Happen

To do this, answer any queries immediately, whether they arrive in email form, on WhatsApp, social media or in the online chat. Your customer wants a simple, clear response as quickly as possible. For this, you need customer care that works, whether it is repeated questions being answered by an AI bot, or a caring team that takes every issue seriously. When the customer is angry, or needs a complicated response, ensure that a human customer support agent is on hand to respond.

3.    Keep the Customer Happy

If it looks like a customer is about to leave, you need a rescue plan that will work. Respond immediately to their action, such as “What blocked you from carrying on? Can we assist?”. Give them a simple next step that will take the problem away. Then follow up a few days later to see whether they’re happy or still wish to abandon a cart/stop subscribing/return a product.

4.    Offer Self-Service Assistance

For simple queries, ensure there are ready FAQs, responses that customers can find themselves that answer their questions without them having to wait for customer service to assist. If you have a list of perhaps the top 20 repeated questions, and answers to these in the FAQs section, this will save your customers time and energy. Update these regularly so they are correct.

5.    Personalise Customer Support

If you have a system that keeps track of your customer’s history in Customer Support, you will have an idea of the customer’s personality and requirements. This facilitates resolving issues and makes the customer feel heard. It also takes less time, as you don’t have to ask as many questions; all the answers are already available.

6.    Increase Trust & Loyalty

When a customer has a complaint, you need to handle it quickly and efficiently, to increase trust. Own the error. Explain how you’re going to fix the issue, and once the problem is solved, get back to the customer to ask if they’re happy with the outcome. Solve the problem effectively enough so that it doesn’t recur. You don’t want the customer returning with the same problem time and again. If you do this, you’ll not only retain your customer; you’ll also build loyalty.

7.    Offer Simple Education

By giving your customers the tools to educate themselves about a topic or a product (through blogs, tutorials, guides and FAQs), you give them the confidence to tackle problems on their own. This provides extra value, and retains the customer, because they feel looked after. You could perhaps send customers a monthly email with news about new products, sales, specials and a few simple tips on using a particular product.

8.    Build a Community of Customers

Creating a little family, or community, of like-minded customers makes them feel part of your brand, like VIPs. Perhaps you send them special invitations to try out new products, with information on these items only available if they’re part of the “special” community. Give them special offers, news about upcoming sales and specials before everyone else. Make they feel as if they are important to you.

9.    Regularly Collect Feedback

If you have a continuous conversation with your customers, you know when something isn’t working, and can help fix it before it becomes a major problem. Ask for feedback regularly and then provide information on what you’re doing to sort an issue or improve a product so they know you care about what they have to say. If you send out a survey, make it short and clear, simple to respond to quickly. Share their feedback with everyone so they know you cared about their comments.

10. Delightful Surprises

Reward milestones and celebrate a customer’s progress to help them succeed and make them feel part of everything. Always add a personal message so the customer feels that you care. Respond quickly and keep track of your responses. All these things make customers feel special.

3-Step Success Strategy

Step 1: What Keeps the Customer? Depending on your business, work out what keeps customers and what loses them. If you have an online store, consider repeat orders, fast delivery and few returns. If you have a subscription base, check whether they renew or not, and find out what stops them.

Step 2: What Are Their Problems? Work out where customers get confused, irritated or stuck. Don’t guess what the issue is: ask them outright, then do everything you can to resolve the issue.

Step 3: What Are the Warning Signs? Monitor signs of problems, such as plenty of queries and slow responses, people asking for refunds or to cancel subscriptions, etc.

Once you have the answers to these three questions, it’s easy to act. You’ll know immediately know needs help and what issues you need to sort out immediately.

How to Track Retention Numbers

• Customer Retention Rate (CRR): This is the percentage of customers who remain loyal over a set period. Calculate the percentage of customers who stay this way:

S = Starting customers; E = Ending customers; N = Number of customers.

The formula is ((E – N) / S) x 100.

Here’s an example: Start = 100, End = 110, New = 20:

Using the formula, this shows the following: ((110−20)/ 100) × 100 = 90%.

• Churn Rate: This tells you the number of customers who leave and don’t return.
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): The total amount that a customer spends with you. Obviously, this will be more if they stay a while, purchase more and/or upgrade/renew a subscription.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): Check whether customers recommend you or whether they are discontented and leave.
• Support Health Metrics: Constantly monitor how long it takes your customer support team to respond to a query, the amount of time it takes to resolve a problem, and whether they do this timeously or there’s a backlog.

Note: Try to review these metrics once a week.