Keeping the customers you have today has never been more important for your online business.
While finding new customers and growing that side of your business is terrific, keeping your current customers and increasing their loyalty is cheaper for our business in the long run.
We’re going to look at retention marketing and your online business. They are a match made in heaven, and we’re going to explain why.
First, let’s look at some statistics on the importance of retention marketing.
The Value of Retention Marketing
If you’re one of the many businesses not currently working to retain your existing clients, we’re going to provide you a few reasons why it’s time to refresh your marketing strategy.
Here’s a few reasons why retaining current customers is “better” for your business than acquiring new ones.
- A 2% increase in customer retention has the same effect as decreasing costs by 10%.
- Acquiring new customers can cost nearly five times as much as making your current customers happy.
- About 80% of your profits will come from just 20% of your existing, loyal customers.
- If you reduce your customer defection or churn rate by 5%, you’ll increase your company’s profitability 25-125%!
- Nearly 70% of your customers will leave your company because they don’t think you really care or because you provided poor customer service.
- Companies that prioritize customer service generate 60% more in profits than their competition.
- When customers are happy, they will tell nine of their friends about it. On the flip side, when customers are unhappy, they’ll tell 22 of their friends.
Now that we’ve solidly convinced you of the importance of retention marketing and your online business, let’s look at some tactics that work.
Create a Loyalty Program
One of the best and easiest ways to increase customer loyalty and encourage repeat business is through a loyalty program.
You probably have a few loyalty rewards cards in your own wallet, and we bet you use them.
Loyalty and rewards programs work. Offer your customers points for each dollar they spend, and when they’ve accrued enough points, let them spend them in your online business.
If your customers are currently working towards an award with your business, they’ll have little reason to check out other online shops.
Rewards and loyalty programs are some of your most effective retention tactics.
One tip when it comes to rewards programs – offer your customers the ability to earn points for other things than straight up purchases. Reward them for social shares, follows and comments. Reward them for downloads or attending events.
Bottom line – give them no reason to do their business elsewhere.
Use Social Proof
People feel more comfortable shopping at your online business if they know others are happy with your service and your products.
In today’s digital age, and because of the proliferation of social media, customers are more likely to take action if they see positive social proof.
How do you provide this? You can add customer testimonials and reviews to your website and provide an avenue for people to leave these online. This is a great strategy to get people interested in sticking around.
Leverage Email Marketing
When it comes to retention marketing, email marketing is one of the most cost effective ways to increase loyalty and drive new conversions through your website.
Email is the best way to keep your online business top of mind for your customers. It reminds them of your business and prompts them to remember you when they’re ready to make a purchase.
Email marketing helps you build and solidify a relationship with your customers. Whether it’s through drip campaigns, abandoned cart reminders, email newsletters or transactional-type emails with promotions, email marketing drives business.
Nurture a relationship with your customers by providing them valuable, educational, interesting content mixed with promotional emails.
You can establish your online business as the leader among your competition through your email marketing strategy. You essentially become the expert in your field.
With email marketing, you can also segment your lists. For example, you sell pool and hot tub supplies. With email marketing, you can create emails for each segment so the pool customers receive emails personalized for them. The hot tub customers in turn receive info only they’re interested in.
Be sure and collect emails from your customers at all times. A healthy email list then lets you send out emails regularly. A note – send emails on a consistent basis. Tell your customers upfront how many you’ll send each month and what they can expect from you.
This can help you keep them on your list and limit your unsubscribes.
Provide Great Customer Service
Finally, providing exceptional customer service is the ultimate way to conduct your retention marketing.
If you don’t provide good customer service, odds are your customers will leave you for someone who will.
The experience you provide your customer is what he’ll remember. If the experience was lacking, you didn’t respond to negative comments, or problems weren’t attended to, then you’ve lost out.
Train your staff and make sure they are well-versed in your customer service policies.
Take a look at every step of your customer’s experience with your brand. Look at your website, your checkout process, your shipping announcements, your social media interactions and how your employees speak to customers.
Check every touch point your business has with your customers. Repair any weak links. By looking at the key touch points, you get a full picture of the customer experience.
Final Thoughts
We’ve looked at retention marketing and your online business. And, you now know the two are a match made in heaven.
As you move forward with your marketing strategies remember this little nugget of information: it is cheaper and much easier to convince your existing customers to buy from you again than it is to acquire new customers.
If you keep this in the forefront of your retention marketing strategy, you’ll remember that it’s money well spent.
As a final thought, we don’t want you to think that new customers aren’t important. They are.
Yet, once you’ve attracted them, you’ve got to work to keep them, and the work you do to keep them is more cost effective than getting more new customers.
Invest your time and a bit of your money on customer retention, and you’ll increase your customer lifetime value which is vital for your bottom line.
Are you ready to squeeze more profit out of your website by fine-tuning your landing pages to skyrocket growth? Are you ready for landing pages that convert?
That’s terrific! We’re here to help you optimize your website so it works fluidly for your website visitors. In fact, we promise you we’ll do just that.
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If you’re ready to work with the leader in landing pages and conversion rate optimization, contact us today. We’ll provide you with our FREE site performance analysis so we can work on your landing page conversion rates.
Image: Kate Serbin
