Effective Strategies for Customer Retention
Customer retention is an invaluable metric for online retailers. Repeat buyers are far more valuable than those who purchase once and never come back again.
Customer retention can only be improved through consistent communication and personalization. Discover how data-driven insights can help create successful strategies.
1. Create a Strong Customer Relationship
To keep customers returning to buy from you, it is crucial that you build strong relationships. The first step towards doing this should be identifying their problems and needs – so you can address these as efficiently as possible to ensure a pleasant customer journey.
Loyalty programs are an effective way of building customer satisfaction and loyalty among existing customers. One option would be creating a loyalty program where every purchase makes a donation towards a worthy cause (such as fighting childhood cancer or rebuilding the Amazon rainforest), giving shoppers an added feel-good factor while incentivizing future purchases.
Retaining customers is cost effective: five times cheaper than acquiring new ones and 31 percent higher spending among repeat buyers than with new buyers. That is why creating a strong retention strategy for your business is so essential, keeping more customers and increasing revenue at once.
2. Keep Customers Up-to-Date
After investing time and resources to attract customers, it is vitally important that they don’t leave. One effective strategy for keeping them around is providing value even after their purchase has been completed.
Staying on top of customer accounts enables you to track purchasing habits and send reminders when it’s time for renewal or reorder. Loyalty programs encourage continued purchases with valuable rewards for returning buyers.
Repeat purchase probability, or the likelihood that customers will make repeat purchases, should also be kept in mind as an essential metric to monitor. It can be calculated by multiplying purchase frequency with average order value; and serves as an excellent way of tracking whether your business is expanding or losing customers.
Customer retention strategies can boost revenue and promote brand loyalty by turning newcomers into return customers. A customer service solution like Zendesk equips agents with tools necessary for providing personalized interactions that create an exceptional experience for each individual customer.
3. Make It Easy for Customers to Return
Retaining customers is the cornerstone of subscription-based businesses and service providers, providing more cost-efficient growth than through new customer acquisition.
One of the best strategies for increasing customer retention is offering a quick, simple, and free return process. Customers appreciate it when stores provide personalized communication as well as rewards exclusively available to loyal customers.
Establishing an online community where customers can gather to interact and share experiences can be an excellent way of building customer loyalty and brand advocacy. Informing shoppers that a portion of their purchase contributes to fighting childhood cancer or rebuilding the Amazon rainforest can make customers feel good about associating themselves with your business and can increase customer retention – especially when this support is exclusive for loyal customers.
4. Focus on Customer Satisfaction
Marketing, sales and customer service strategies work hard to draw in new customers – it is also vitally important that those customers remain happy! Satisfied buyers remain loyal to brands which evoke positive emotions and provide memorable experiences for them.
Provide customer support that’s simple to navigate on all platforms is an effective way of increasing retention and loyalty, such as Zendesk’s Agent Workspace which enables agents to see customer context while streamlining conversations for quicker resolutions.
Create online communities for existing customers as another method to increase retention. Customers can interact and share their experiences with one another while discussing your brand in these forums, encourage participation in surveys or user tests to learn more about your audience and develop the most beneficial product, make repeat purchases simpler by offering customer accounts with autofill functionality for shipping information and previous orders (great incentive for new shoppers!) as well as an incentive program with auto-fill capabilities which makes purchases even simpler – this may help retain existing shoppers while encouraging newcomers to stick around!
