Why is customer retention important?
- The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 – 70%. While the probability of selling to a new prospect is just 5-20%. (Source: Marketing Metrics)
- Building loyalty with 5% more customers would lead to an increased average profit per customer between 25% and 100%. (Source: The Loyalty Effect)
- It is 25% more expensive to bring on a new customer than to keep an existing one. (Source: Harvard Business Review)
OK, so now we know the facts – customer retention is clearly essential for business growth. How do you go about that? These are our 3 easy steps to making it happen…
Step One: know your audience
Retain as much information from your data analytics as possible. Then ensure your campaigns are highly targeted.
The reason why we report and analyse our audience is to learn from it. What are their characteristics? What are their behaviours? What are their pain points?
Your audience list should be broken down into categories, such as: industry, company size, interests, buying habits – the list goes on and depending on your offering you will want to categorise accordingly.
Introducing a new product or service? You know exactly who will be interested in it.
If you are not doing this, you are spamming your audience and they will unsubscribe. Followed by soon forgetting who you are. Besides, sending people who are not interested in your product or service information is a waste of time and money.
Step Two: improve customer satisfaction
Survey your audience. Ask them what they want and give it to them. Tailor your offering and the way you offer it to the habits and needs of your customer.
If they say ‘their prefered devise is mobile over desktop’ then ensure your mobile interface is user-friendly, target your ad campaigns to mobile-only devices and consider offering an app.
If they say ‘they want more of this product and less of this’ then revise your budgets and put more man-hours into giving them what they want.
A happy customer is a loyal customer.
Step Three: increase cross-selling and up-selling
When it comes to up-selling, look at your business offering – there is always a pre-action or post-action for your customer.
For example:
You are a shoe retailer – you sell a range of shoes from flip flops to leather Chelsea boots. The pre-action is going to be that your customer wants a pedicure before she slips into those heels on Saturday night and your post-action for the man who just bought a pair of leather boots is that he will then need shoe polish.
OR
You are a bank – you have a new interest loan that you are offering, the first people that you are going to market this to are the customers that have credit cards with you. Its called a lookalike audience – its a different product but the needs of the customer are similar.
Follow these 3 steps for a bulletproof client retention strategy. Interested in rolling out a data collection campaign? Targeted digital campaign? The Edge Digital can help you do that… Get in touch marketing@edgepicture.com.