Customer Retention

Every company wants to keep its existing customers. After all, no one wants their consumers to dash off to one of their competitors, right?

This is what’s called “customer retention.” In other words, even once a customer has bought from you or used one of your services, you can’t forget about them. You want to keep their loyalty and thank them for it. “Customer retention rate” is the percentage of customers that make repeat purchases, extra purchases, upgrade their order, and/or renew their subscription.

It’s easy to forget about our existing and loyal customer base as we embark on the endless quest to acquire new customers. Once you go down that road, you’ll potentially lose your loyal shoppers to a competitor. Why? Because you haven’t paid enough attention to them. Should such a disaster happen, it’ll take time, money, and effort to coax them back to you. If a customer leaves you for another company, this is called churn.

If you’re still unconvinced, know this: It’ll cost you anywhere between six to seven times more money to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one.

So, what to do?

Your company’s approach to customer retention practices should start as soon as a prospect interacts with you. Here are a few examples of ways you can strive to retain your customers:

• Carrying out regular customer surveys
• Speeding up response times to customer queries
• Loyalty programs where customers get discounts or rewards when they spend a certain amount of money, buy from you regularly, treating them on their birthday, etc.
• Personalized emails

Just to list a few examples.

All these little tricks should help you to retain your customer base and encourage people to return to you time and again—and not defect to a competitor.

Remember, if someone has bought from you before or previously used your services, there’s a good chance they know and like you. It’s a no brainer, these are the sorts of customers who’ll be your most predictable source of income. This is especially true if you thank them for their orders, ask them how their customer experience was, provide them with an excellent service, and send them incentives to come back! Makes sense, right?

It also means, should anything go awry, your customers are more likely to have faith in you to remedy the issue. Consequently, they’re less likely to leave you a bad review—win-win!

Not to mention, retaining your existing customer base is less work for you. After all, you know them, you know their habits, their likes, dislikes, etc. so you should know how best to keep them happy. However, it’s just as important not to take these details for granted. For example, people move homes, their income changes, and other life events may get in the way of their spending. That’s why it’s crucial to stay in touch with your customers via social media engagement, email marketing, or whatever else. Yes, all these tactics cost you money, but it’ll still be less than securing new customers regularly.