Customer acquisition and customer retention, are both important for business but if you look closely, customer retention is more powerful, practical, and probably more difficult than customer acquisition. When a company tries to reach its target customers by selling its products or services, it demonstrates a couple of sales and marketing strategies entailing a few additional features that are different than what the competitors are offering.
Experienced outsourcing market research services also suggest the importance of customer retention. Most outsourcing market research services focus on customer retention part first and then move to the next marketing strategies.
Sometimes, it is better to hire contact center services for better customer retention and for getting a good conviction about your customers. Let us look at the insights shared by outsourcing market research services.
- Gaining the attention of prospective customers is just half the task, the remaining picture is quite big and more challenging. Once the customer gets first-hand experience with our products and services, we are completely exposed to them.
- The customer would be knowing exactly what our products and services compromise. Whether our claims were true as we claimed, whether our products or services are really promising or it was just empty words from the seller, customers would be knowing each and everything about our brand,
- Well, we are not invincible, it doesn’t matter how much try to perfect our brand, there will always be room for a little more improvement. Customers can find any fault if they want. However, how well they are greeted, heard, followed, and provided with, matters the most.
The Importance of Customer Retention
It is the measure of how much a customer can stay loyal to your brand. The customer retention metric defines the ability of a brand to keep their customer intact and keeps them recurring. It ultimately reflects the customer satisfaction rate, engagement, and attachment to the brand. It is just as simple as that if a customer sticks to your brand and regularly chooses your brand over the other brands, that means your customer retention rate is good.
Why are we trying to emphasize customer retention? Customer acquisition can be costlier than customer retention. The measure is analyzed from the customer’s first purchase, subsequent purchases, and up until their latest purchase. Their purchase patterns, feedback, conversations held, issues faced and resolved, and final takeover. All of these things are taken into consideration before calculating the retention rate.
The overall customer experience should be good, only then a customer would find a reason to stick with the brand. Acquiring the trust and confidence of the customer is a critical part of customer retention. If a brand is able to gain the customer’s trust and confidence, its word-of-mouth becomes an inadvertent marketing advantage for the company. They become an unofficial brand advocate of the company. Therefore, it becomes greatly consequential in acquiring new customers. That is why customer retention is more important.
Infallible Ways to Improve Customer Retention
Now that we know the criticality of customer retention for improving a brand's identity and growth, we are going to discuss a few tactical approaches that can ensure there are no loose ends. As a brand owner, you will need to confirm whether you did everything from your end to keep your customers engaged with your brand or not. The following strategies will ascertain a comprehensive approach to customer retention.
Upscale Email Marketing
Email Marketing is a nice way to approach your customers and extend your appreciation to them for choosing your product. This can be done when a customer has recently made a purchase from your company. Once the purchase is complete, you can send an email sharing the details of purchase transactions and suggestions you might share with the customers for making their upcoming purchases more beneficial.
Through email marketing, you can stay in touch with your customers even if they customer has not visited your website or store for purchase for quite some time. You can also devise some good upselling and cross-selling techniques and use them during email marketing pitches. Sending regular emails is a good way to keep the attention of your customers intact, but be mindful about sending one too many because that would be a bummer.
Go an Extra Mile
Delight your customers every once in a while. It puts a strong impression in the minds of the customers. Providing occasional discounts, gift vouchers, coupons, and freebies can be a good start for that matter. Although, there should be a clear distinction between the things that are included in a product or service.
Whenever you provide more than what was expected, the customer must know that difference otherwise they would presume that the extra delights were just part of the service or product. However, the companies should be mindful of extra delights, they are not one-time efforts.
You will need to be consistent otherwise customers would know that whatever you did was just a one-time marketing gig. Outsourcing market research services suggest that providing extras for customers is a way to show how much you care for your customers so, make sure they are genuine, not artificial.
Improve Your Social Media Presence
The imperativeness of social media is no longer a secret. All the marketing campaigns are displayed over social medial channels only. Therefore, it is quite an effective tool for maintaining a strong girth among customers. Especially, if your target audience belongs age group like millennials or generation z, you should be more about social media only.
Tag those customers who share positive reviews about your brand. They should be recognized and rewarded regularly. Outsourcing market research services try to gain a strong hold on social media presence as they venture into the customer engagement and customer retention maneuver for the client company.
Being a business owner, you should be putting creative and engaging posts about your product and services. Always focus on resolving the pain points of your customers while you do it. Those types of posts garner the attention of the customers more often.
Develop an Eccentric Reward System
A reward system is one of the best ways to keep your customers happy and stay loyal to your brand. Whenever a customer reaches a specific time period of being loyal to your brand, you can unequivocally present them with a reward for them. Make sure you are loud while doing it. Being loud here means you are announcing it to other customers too. Everyone should know about your rewards systems.
The rewards system could be based on the number of purchases done in a stipulated period or span of time a customer has remained regular to your brand. A proper reward system gives a customer a good reason to come back every time. This way all the customers can know what benefits they can get by being regular with your brand. Many companies offer free products and a chain of discounts for their loyal customers from time to time.
Personalize Every Experience of Customers
Whether it's an in-store seller or an online sales representative, everyone should have access to the purchase history, behavior, interests, and profile of regular customers. It helps the sales representative can offer products and services that are more interesting and relatable to the customers. A customer will at least stop and listen to what the seller has to offer if the product fits their purpose or interests.
Even when your grievance support agent is speaking with the customer during a concern or issue, they should handle them keeping their case file in mind. It is part of the post-sales maneuver though, but it can be used as a cross-selling or upselling opportunity. On the whole, our customers should know that as a brand, we genuinely care for their needs and will work gladly to make their transactions and experience a smooth sail.
Construct Customer-Centric Policies
Whether it is a return or refund policy, TAT, delivery rates, etc, make sure all your policies are made in such a way that they help the customers in the best possible way. However, it doesn’t give the customers opportunities to exploit those policies. You should be vigilant about the ways your policies can be used for taking advantage. No service is perfect, there would be many instances where the customer might be in a tight spot.
Hire a contact center service that offers good customer support service while adhering to all the rules and policies of the company. Conversely, they should be empathetic and wise enough to bend the rules in cases when they know they can help customers without hurting the business. Plus, depending on the type of customer problems, you can introduce new and more flexible policies for improving the customer experience.
Provoke your Customers to Create an Account
Whenever you are dealing with your customers, always direct them to a call-to-action button asking them to sign in. Tell them the benefits of creating an account so that they can manage all of their orders and services more effectively.
Creating an account gives the customer a sense of attachment, they will be remembering your brand from time to time since they have an account with your brand. Also, it helps you to create a more personalized profile of the customers so that you can handle them better every time they visit you.
Creating an account will allow them to get help instantly and more profoundly. The whole purpose of creating an account is to make their journey hassle-free every time they are trying to make a purchase or order something.
When a contact center service agent is dealing with the customer, he/she can know about the customer before they even start explaining. The experts from outsourcing market research services always recommend companies provide a call-to-action at the bottom of every conversation.
Conclusion:
Customer retention is not an easy phenomenon. There are a lot of things you might need to work on, in order to keep your customers within the loop. Excellent customer support is also paramount for promoting good customer retention. By following the above pointers, you can maintain good customer retention.
These are surefire techniques that work well with customers. Basically, the objective behind these techniques is to make the lives of the customer better. Any company that tries to help the customers in the best possible way always wins the customers’ trust and confidence - and that is all it takes to improve customer experience and eventually in retaining them.
