The E-commerce space is getting crowded day by day. It is thus becoming more important than ever for brands to hold onto their customer with the cropping of new platforms every day. Holding onto your existing customers requires efforts like showering them with new surprise offers, effective customer care service, satisfaction, and providing them with a seamless experience and other initiatives while shopping. It is known as Customer Retention.
Customer Retention helps loyalty among your customers, providing them with good customer service while increasing its current customer base steadily through word of mouth, among other minimal efforts required. A loyal & satisfied customer is your biggest & forever brand ambassador.
Why Should Brands pay heed to Customer Retention?
Customer Retention is an essential parameter to growing your brand into a big business as it is associated with the brand’s reputation in the market.
Customer Retention is essential due to the following factors:
1)Acquiring a new customer costs much more than retaining an existing customer. Maintaining an existing customer requires the least effort, reducing customer acquisition costs, unlike for new customers- which is cost & energy intensive and takes up more time. As per estimation, the customer acquisition is five times more costly than retaining existing customers and is sixteen times more expensive to build a long-term relationship with the new customers. Businesses lose 1.6 trillion every year due to failure in customer retention efforts. That’s insanely huge. Therefore it is required to put effort into customer retention initiatives.
2)Existing loyal customers often end up purchasing more than the apprehensive new buyer. As an estimate, 60% of frequent visitors often make more than one purchase. It takes much more time to build a repo with an altogether new customer. Loyal existing customers bring in more profit & revenue as compared to new customers.
3)Retaining existing satisfied & loyal customers enhances a positive brand recognition experience. It helps protect your brand as an expert in the field and build a humane connection with your customers. Establishing an emotional connection with your users helps brands safeguard a distinguished place in an otherwise crowded space. It propagates your unique brand voice.
4)In a social media frenzy world where most users share their brand preferences and experience online easily and immediately. And others, before any purchase, look for online reviews to get the worth of every penny spent. Customer retention plays an essential role. Loyal customers are to bring in more customers by sharing their positive brand experience. Therefore, investing efforts in customer retention goes a long way.
5)Engage loyal customers are bits of help get feedback which serves as an essential factor in the success of a brand. Feedback helps improve your products & services and serve customers better. Brand engagement helps gain the trust of the audience. It estimates that the customers who resolve their issues & any glitches with the prompt customer care service are 84% less likely to reduce their spending with the brand. The customer care service as the customer retention strategy helps build a community of loyal and supportive customers.
Thus, it is clear from the above-given facts that customer retention plays a crucial role in business growth. It helps increase its profit and revenues manifold count. It should be a mandatory aspect of business growth strategy and should not overlook.
Four Solid Framework Strategy
Businesses looking to strengthen their customer retention strategy should focus on four solid framework strategies. And it should to taken into consideration while forming a solid customer retention strategy.
1) Audience Analytics – Know your customer
Audience analytics are the primary steps before making any retention strategy. It is essential to understand your audience’s interest, level of understanding, and language to incorporate into your effective retention strategy. Qualitative feedback is okay, but with quantitative analysis of audience analytics, they receive data-based facts which aid in the right decisions & enhancing the customer experience with your brand.
2) Personalization
After getting to know customers, it is time to use that data in implementing ways for customer retention. Customizing the message to users based on their geographical location, behavior, and interests invokes customer attention. It sets up an emotional chord with the consumers that you as a brand recognizes their need & preferences and equips them to serve them.
3) Strike a Conversation
Striking the conversation with your consumers makes them feel valued. It represents that for you, as a brand, each of your consumer’s voices matters to you. It aids in fostering a long-term relationship with consumers, thus increasing the customer retention percentage. Conversation helps brands work better in their customer care services by taking feedback and resolving them increases the trust and credibility of the brand.
4) Personify Experiences
Consumer getting their own personalized experience with the brand helps them remember the unique experience over a long period. It encourages them to share their positive experience with others and attracts more customers by retaining the old customers. Receiving personalized experiences delights customers and turns them into loyal customers who become brand advocates. The best type of marketing is the word of mouth marketing which gives better results than any other marketing tactic. Other prospective customers believe in customer reviews more than any other brand advertisement. Hence, the brand delight experience is one of the essential aspects of a customer retention strategy.
Conclusion : The above four solid framework strategies are the rock-solid foundation pillar of success in customer retention. It helps retain our old customers while adding up new customers seamlessly without struggling for the same. It helps your business grow exponentially despite not spending a fortune on customer acquisition costs. Trust & credibility in the brand is more with your old regular customers than developing it with the new customers from scratch.
Investing in customer retention strategies helps ignite a chain reaction of customer trust and credibility, which assist you to keep exponentially adding up new customers letting the business grow and multiply your profits & revenues over time.
