How To Use Exit Interviews and Surveys To Improve Customer Retention

How To Use Exit Interviews & Surveys To Improve Customer Retention

A lost customer is painful for your business – both for your bottom line and your ego.

The importance of customer retention isn’t to be taken lightly. That’s why, in this article, we take a look at how to use exit interviews and surveys to improve customer retention.

You may be wondering, “What’s the purpose? After all, they’ve already left my company?”

The purpose of conducting exit interviews and sending surveys is to find out what you did wrong, why the customer left the business, and how you can improve so you keep more of your current customer base.

So, let’s get to it.

Customer Retention Stats

According to Score, the following can be said about an unhappy customer:

  • For each one of your customers who complains, 26 remain silent.
  • The average unhappy customer tells eight to 16 people about the bad experience.
  • 91% of unhappy customers will never buy from you again.
  • If you try to resolve a customer’s complaints, 82-95% percent of them will stay with you.
  • It costs you about five times as much to attract a new customer as it does to keep an existing one.

Those are some heavy prices to pay for lost customers. Now, wouldn’t it be nice to know why they are leaving and what you could do differently in the future to prevent such a loss?

The Customer Exit Interview

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5 Customer Retention Strategies To Keep Your Customers Happy

5 Customer Retention Strategies To Keep Your Customers Happy

For many years, companies have spent the majority of their marketing budgets and marketing manpower on customer acquisition. They thought that if they could only reach more people, they would sell more.

Today, as studies abound on the Internet, companies have powerful data to back up the importance of customer retention. To that end, businesses across the world are focusing their marketing efforts on how they can motivate their customers to return again and again.

In today’s article, we’re going to introduce you to five customer retention strategies to keep your customers happy.  Content customers are motivated to purchase again, and they’re more likely to be ambassadors for your brand.

#1: Communicate Frequently

You’ve probably heard the term, “top of mind.” To retain your current customers, you have to stay at the forefront, so when they’re ready to purchase, it’s you they think of.

One of the best strategies for staying in touch is through your email marketing and blog posts full of tips and tricks. Personalized marketing that provides valuable content at the right time is key to relationship building.

Content really is king – when it adds value to your customer’s life. With your blog and email marketing, you provide actionable, engaging and often highly entertaining information to your customers.

For example, let’s say you are a real estate company. You might provide 10 tips on how to stage your house for the sale. This is a great blog post published in the spring as homes start to hit the market. This also indirectly promote your services.

Your customers will remain happy and stay engaged when you provide the personal touch and targeted information.

#2: Reach Out Using Automation

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7 Things You Can Do To Become Awesome At Lead Generation

7 Things You Can Do To Become Awesome At Lead Generation

The digital landscape is immense, and the competition is fierce, so marketing your business through your website is vital to your success. When you concentrate on lead generation through your website, you’ll have more success growing your business.

In today’s article, we look at 7 things you can do to become awesome at lead generation. We’ll highlight some best practices and give you suggestions for moving forward with lead generation.

According to Marketing Charts, 94% of B2B buyers conduct some type of research online before making a purchase. With this many people doing their research online, it is immediately apparent why you need to become a pro at lead generation.

You want to capture those leads right on your landing pages to increase your conversion rate and ultimately your sales.

Why are leads so important? Well, because nothing happens inside your business without leads. You need actual, live people to make your business grow.

Let’s uncover 7 things you can do to become awesome at lead generation.

1. Give Every Page a Purpose

To increase your lead generation, you want each one of your landing pages to have a purpose. Consider the information architecture of your pages.

Continue reading “7 Things You Can Do To Become Awesome At Lead Generation”

Essential eCommerce Industry Stats For Page Speed

Essential eCommerce Industry Stats For Page Speed

The world we live in is fast-paced and constantly on the move. Our ever-evolving electronic world has trained people and increased their desire for getting things immediately. They want what they want when they want it. Patience left long ago with the land-line.

If your eCommerce site doesn’t load quickly, you will lose conversions and thus revenue.

People like fast sites. Google likes fast sites. If your site is notoriously slow to load, it’s time to get off the fence and do something about it.

In this article we’re going to touch on essential eCommerce industry stats for page speed. Because fast sites do better than slower ones, we’ll talk about stats relevant to you. Then, we’ll dive a little deeper and give you some tips on improving page speeds.

How Fast is Fast Enough?

According to Strangeloop, the typical eCommerce site takes nearly five seconds to load usable content for the site visitor. They tested load times of the top 2,000 retail sites, and they noted the average site takes up to 10 seconds to load. Continue reading “Essential eCommerce Industry Stats For Page Speed”

I Hate Which Test Won?

Disappointment Sucks

I was recently privileged to speak at the Velocity Conference in Santa Clara this year. My presentation was on the topic of Conversion Rate Optimization applied to your entire organization.

One of the points was focusing on process, not results. (I’ll discuss that in a future post). An example I used was recent post by Which Test Won that shared how some site got a 972% increase in engagement by making the form longer. Reasonable hypothesis IMO.

My point was simple: Unrealistic expectation creates disappointment. “Expectation is the root of all heartache”, William Shakespeare.

Here’s that section of the talk in a nutshell:

 

 

I love Which Test Won. It’s a great place to get ideas and knowledge of what other have tried and succeeded and failed at. I highly recommend it! But… When someone posts that they got a 972% increase in engagement by increasing the length of a form, that is only going to produce disappointment. Imagine your boss reading those results and then later in the afternoon you report to her that you just completed a round of tests and got a very respectable 7.8% increase in conversions over a 30 day period with over 25,000 conversions tested. Her reaction is not going to be great. Your success will feel like a failure. You’re going to feel like you got crapped on, when the company should throw a raging house party for YOU, at YOUR NEW HOUSE they just bought you! “Surprise!” That won’t happen with unrealistic expectations. (OK, it won’t happen at all. But you get the idea.)

Velocity Conference Jon Correll Presentation

It’s a simple point. If you’re tasked to make changes and run tests, and then show those results to people with unrealistic expectations, you’re not going to be successful, as failure is part of the process. You need to embrace failure and love learning.
I’m not even going to go on a rant about showing these conversion rate “increases”, that are really more a point to the significance, not the true relative increase. If I did rant about that, then I would have to start the post with why I’m a hypocrite in discussing it, as I have done the same.

Back to the “I Hate Which Test Won?” story…

(the day after my presentation) Continue reading “I Hate Which Test Won?”