5 Best Strategies for Customer Retention

With the growing impact of COVID 19, the world has been taken aback. But as the businesses resume their operation, they are facing challenging times to acquire new customers for their product or service. While most businesses focus on getting new customers, very little lay stress on customer retention in general. Whether you own a gym, wellness studios, spa or any membership driven business, you need to follow these strategies for member retention. As customer engagement and retention professionals, we understand the need for sound retention strategies in our current market. In today’s fast paced economy, you no longer have the luxury of trial-and-error, so you need to know if your campaign will work the first time through. This is why we have put together these 5 member retention strategies for 2021 that have been proven to actually work and can help you take your retention marketing to a whole new level. But before that, have you ever thought why we need these strategies in the first place?

Retention strategies

Why do we need retention strategies?

Although you may have heard that there is a need for retention strategies, unless your own business has struggled in this regard, it can be hard to comprehend. However, the numbers don’t lie when it comes to this need. For example, only 32% of customers will make a second purchase after one year. That’s two-thirds of your audience that is walking out of the door. On top of that, these customers are actually easier to sell to than first time customers, with some reports claiming it is anywhere from 3 to 12 times simpler to resell existing customers. Additionally, a 5% increase in retention can increase profits by up to 95%. Not only do these stats show the importance of customer retention, but they may even make you wonder why you haven’t been focusing on this before. Now that you have a better understanding of the need for these retention strategies, let’s look at 5 tactics for improve customer retention techniques in 2021 and reducing customer churn.  Step how to retain customers:

1. Make a good first impression with onboarding

The first of our retention strategies focuses on one of the largest areas of customer churn: the onboarding process. Unless you have a sound strategy in place, up to as much as 75% of your customers will be gone within the first week and by the end of the first month only 4% of customers will have stuck around. This is obviously a huge problem. However, with the right tools and focus, you can make a last first impression that keeps them around. The important area you want to focus on here is avoiding creating roadblocks that hinder your customers’ progress. These might include asking too many questions, requesting too much responsive action too soon, and many other annoyances that might lead customers to churn. Typically, by referring to your user engagement metrics, you will be able to identify and target the specific areas where customers are dropping off. Once you get over this first hurdle, your customer retention strategy will already be greatly improved. Start free trial

2. Guide customers through the process

Now, what often happens when businesses start to employ retention strategies focused on onboarding is that they forget to take care of customers further through the process. Instead, you should treat each area of the process like onboarding and always be aware of where your customers find themselves and how you can improve their experience. A powerful way to do this is with marketing automation and engaging customers with SMS and Email communication. By establishing triggers and touchpoints along the customer journey, you can deliver tailored messaging and content directly to your customers in order to keep them engaged and remind them of why they came to you in the first place. Through a multi-channel approach, customers will be less likely to churn and may even make more repeat purchases.

Marketing automation

3. Empower customers to meet their full potential

As you help guide customers through their journey, it is up to you to give them the tools they need to reach their full potential when working with your company. Without your intervention, customers may come and go without ever realizing all the capabilities of your product or service. Ideally, this should never happen, but unless you are actively pursuing a relationship with them, they will fall through the cracks. Depending on the type of business you have, there will be a few different ways you can do this. For instance, customer-facing businesses that rely on repeat visits or purchases have found that improve customer loyalty programs can help their customers to discover new areas they might not have found previously. The important part is that you find what your customers love most about their experience working with you and then do your best to improve that experience whenever possible. This consistent improvement in user experience will essentially improve customer retention rate quite significantly.

4. A churned client is still your customer

Now, you may believe that the customer journey ends when a client churns. However, as long as they are still receptive to your brand’s messaging, there is always a chance to win them back with targeted retention strategies. By never letting go and pursuing these customers persistently and respectfully, you can win back customers that others would have let go. For example, many of us still received win-back campaigns from Blue Apron and Dollar Shave Club. While some of us only used each of their services for a short time, we still receive monthly emails letting us know about the latest deals. While some might see this as annoying, we know that if we ever wanted to join their program again, we could very easily do so. By keeping yourself within arm’s reach, you make yourself accessible to these customers and who knows, they might be looking for that extra nudge in the right direction. And these nudges will establish a recall in your customer’s head, making them sign up for your business membership. Isn’t this achievable?

5. Measure twice, cut once

As we mentioned earlier, you should always be measuring the success of your customer retention strategies in order to analyze them and learn how to better treat your audience. It goes back to an old saying: Measure twice, cut one. If you can consistently track user engagement and analytics, you can create better campaigns that will lead to higher success rates. However, this is often easier said than done. In order to get the measurements you need, you will want to map out your customer journey and pinpoint areas where analytics can be taken so that you can continue to improve. If you are just starting your campaign, building in these tools from the ground up will do wonders for you in the future, so make sure to keep this in mind and ultimately keep your customer satisfied with your offerings.

Measure twice

Overhauling the entire campaign

At this point, you can see that each of these retention strategies should be used in combination with each other for a fully optimized campaign. Unless you have already put these strategies into place yourself, this will call for a complete overhaul of the entire campaign. That being said, you shouldn’t worry about this. In fact, you are likely due for an overhaul. Thankfully, now that you have these customer retention strategies in your tool belt, you are well on your way to retaining more customers, creating better customer engagement, and offering an exceptional customer experience. From there, the rest is up to you. We hope these customer retention strategies for 2021 will bring your business new fortunes. For a FREE Demo session with Gleantap, contact us. sign up now Get the full story here:

Importance of Customer Retention for your Business Growth

In 2021, finding a customer, holding their attention, and retaining them long term has become increasingly complicated. Now that consumers have so many options, for companies to keep their customers around they need to be constantly adapting to meet their needs. The importance of customer retention has never been more apparent. While there is a sea of customer retention techniques to be found online, we wanted to focus on the importance of customer retention. Why is it so necessary? Who stands to benefit? Is it worth it in the long run? All of these are questions business owners ask themselves all the time. In this article, we are going to explore the answers to these questions and more. If you have never considered how important customer retention is before now, prepare to have your eyes opened.

Why Is Customer Retention Important?

For the average person in business, a large part of their job is acquiring new clients. A large amount of time and energy is dedicated to this pursuit. After all, it makes sense to want more clients and customers than you already have, right? What a lot of these people don’t understand, however, is how expensive recruiting new customers can be. On average, securing a new customer is 7x as expensive as keeping an existing customer. 7 times as expensive! Obviously, customer acquisition is important, but unless you are focusing on all aspects of their customer journey, you are going to have a revolving door business model. This leads to our next common question.

Who Stands To Benefit From Customer Retention?

As we mentioned earlier, it is far more expensive to find a new customer than retain an existing one. However, this doesn’t really answer the core question being asked: who stands to benefit from customer retention? While cutting down costs is always good, it isn’t always a good enough reason to shift focus completely to a retention-based model. For one, your customers stand to benefit enormously from a retention based agenda. This at the heart of the importance of customer retention: the customer. It seems obvious, but you would be surprised how little time and money is spent in this area. Customer retention In a recent Retention Science study, 70% of marketers said that their Retention Marketing is average at best, with room for significant improvement. This means that right now your customers are likely not receiving the attention they deserve. Who stands to benefit? Your customers, and by extension, you.

Is Customer Retention Worth It In The Long Run?

While customers in this day and age are becoming less loyal to brands, it is still vital to put effort into your customer retention marketing. The importance of customer retention is not found in keeping around an extra customer or two, but in treating your customers the way they should be treated. Another great thing about the time we live in is that people are vocal in their support. Treat a few customers right and they might bring 5 of their friends back to sign up.   Golds gym case study However, this is again why treating your customers right is so important. Customers might tell a few of their friends about you if you treat them well, but if you don’t, the whole world will know about it. This is the double-edged sword of new tools like social media and online reviews. It is up to you to do something about it and start your customer retention campaign as soon as possible. Will it be worth it in the long run? Let’s put it this way: there may not be a long run for your business unless you get started soon.

ustomer retention campaign

5 Importance Of Customer Retention in 2021

Now that we have look at a few frequently asked questions about customer retention, let’s take a look at the benefits associated with doing it well.

1. Identify referral sales opportunities

As we mentioned, happy customers are likely to tell their friends about your company. Make it easy for them to give you a referral by implementing a system that rewards them for doing so. Once you receive these leads, explore them further and see if you can earn some new customers.

2. Foster a constructive relationship with customers

Your customers are humans too and all humans want to be treated with respect. This is where we see the importance of customer retention. The relationships you build with your customers will define how your company moves forward. It’s up to you to make sure that is a constructive direction.

3. Rectify flaws with company policies and procedures

Loyal customers are your best sounding board for making your companies policies and procedures better. Unlike an unhappy customer, who might vent their frustrations online in a negative way, loyal customers will tell you about the flaws in your company in hopes to make it better for their own use. Listen to them when they come to you. If you are doing it right, they want you to succeed as much as you do and they’ll tell you how they think you can do that.

finding the right customer

4. Enhance brand reputation

Companies with the best customer service and retention strategies also have very strong brand reputations. This makes sense if you think about it. These companies are turning their customers into brand evangelizers simply by treating them right, the first time. The best way to enhance your brand reputation is by focusing on customer retention, plain and simple.

5. Understand future needs of customers

One of the best ways to understand the future needs of customers is by working with them on keeping them around. For every one complaint a customer has that they speak about, 10 others will have but never tell you. Listen to your customers when they bring things to you and it will help you understand your future customers. Along with simply listening to them, you can also track user engagement metrics to monitor trends. By following these fashions, you can see how your customers are thinking and where they want to go. Your job is to help them get there.   sign up now Get the full story here: