You need to keep hold of them!
Customer retention is a business strategy that includes keeping your customers returning for more and staying loyal to your business and brand. Having a loyal customer base is the REAL cause for celebration. They purchase your goods and services repeatedly, spending more money than the ‘one-off’ customers, and they’re much more likely to recommend your brand and products to their friends and family—as well as sing your praises all over social media.
Good customer retention strategies are the best way to boost your profits and encourage repeat business.
But what are some magical, mystical customer retention techniques that will make your business a force to be reckoned with?
Flowbird takes a look.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
Like its name suggests, CRM is a tool for managing customer relationships, which is key to customer retention.
A CRM system lets you keep track of every interaction your customers have with your business, enabling you to optimise and personalise their customer experience.
With CRM, you can improve each customer’s journey and your sales processes and marketing efforts - which means you can improve customer satisfaction, making them more likely to stick around for the long haul.
A good CRM platform, like the one offered by Hubspot, helps you accomplish this across your WHOLE business—not just within your sales department. It also offers a library of integrations that you can use to offer a fantastic customer experience at every touchpoint.
Whether you’re a brand new start-up or a vast enterprise, Hubspot’s CRM system is ideal; it gives you sales, marketing, service and CMS (Content Management System) tools, so they’ve covered all bases.
Marketing Automation
Every customer wants to feel unique and valued. A personalisation tool such as marketing automation allows you to customise the individual’s experience with your brand - and what customer doesn’t want to feel that a brand is tailoring things to suit them!?
Marketing automation collects your customers’ data so that you can use it to make personalised recommendations and offer promotions and offers to fit the individual’s needs. This personalisation makes customers feel like they’re interacting with a small, warm company that cares about them and what they want - even if you are a huge global enterprise.
There are many points during the customer’s journey that you can personalise to improve customer retention, and one of the easiest (and most common!) ways is through targeted emails.
Personalising emails involves addressing the customer by name or title, referencing your previous interactions with them, and providing them with relevant info, such as links to blogs or articles based on recent purchases.
Hubspot offers Marketing Hub, a marketing automation tool that integrates seamlessly with your CRM to create personalized customer experiences. It lets you personalise your marketing campaigns via email or social media platforms.
Customer Loyalty Schemes
A super easy way to boost your business’s customer retention is to give your customers a bonus for doing business via a loyalty programme. Let’s face it, why would anyone switch to a competitor if sticking with you means some reward?
You can set incentives for repeat customers, such as points, discount codes, free sample products and more.
Offer Top-Notch Customer Service
We all make mistakes, and even the most successful business will find itself on the receiving end of a complaint or demand a refund at some point.
However, research shows that it’s not mistakes that send customers running for the hills—but how they’re dealt with. So, if you have excellent customer service that responds to and deals with queries and complaints in a timely and satisfactory manner, you’ll still retain those customers and get their repeat business.
Live chats, chatbots, and conversation inboxes are all features that can help you resolve customer issues quickly and efficiently as soon as they arise. This gives your customers confidence in your brand and the feeling that they are talking not just with a ‘business’ but with people who care about the problem at hand.
For your business to grow and stand out among a sea of competitors, it’s not enough to create great content to lure in customers; you need to keep them coming back for more and eventually becoming spokespeople for your brand.
If you want to know more about how CRM and Marketing Automation can benefit your business, contact the experts at Flowbird. We can find the best package to help you manage your customer relations, personalise your service, and offer excellent customer care through various software platforms - giving your business the boost it needs and keeping those customers coming back for more.
Score Like a Rock Star
Lead scoring is beneficial for leads (prospects) and a brilliant way to score existing customers.