19 Best Customer Retention Strategies For Digital Entrepreneurs

19 Best Customer Retention Strategies For Digital Entrepreneurs. Whether you agree or not, it is cheaper to retain and maintain your existing customers as compared to getting new customers. Additionally, it is also easy for current customers to purchase your product or service again and again. This is especially true in the case of an e-commerce business where the conversion rate is slightly less.

So, if you are hunting for some customer retention strategies and tips, then we have got you covered.

Let us start by asking you a question.

When was the last time you tried to engage with your existing customer?

If you have not tried yet, then now it’s time to do it.

Customer retention can help you in increasing the sales and revue of your business without incurring much cost.

What is customer retention?

Customer retention includes a number of marketing activities and targets that businesses use to increase the number of repeat purchases and improve the profitability of existing customers.

Customer retention strategies and techniques will help you provide more value to your existing customer base. This will help you increase the repetitive purchase without incurring much cost.

Additionally, you don’t need to spend too much money on acquiring new customers if you have an amazing customer retention ratio.

Now that you might have got an idea about customer retention. Let us dive deep into the topic and get an overview of 19 amazing customer retention strategies.

1)  Give an amazing customer experience

The first in this list of customer retention strategies is to give an amazing customer experience. Always remember that customer retention is the by-product of customer experience. This simply means if you offer an amazing customer experience, your customers would surely opt for your product or service again and again.

Everything that you do will impact the customer’s decision on whether to make a repeat purchase or not. Generally, customer experience includes all the activities that help you grow your business, starting from a website, marketing, content, and a lot more.

Thus, a great customer experience would always help you in retaining your existing customers.

2)  Resolve the issues

Picture this.

You are having some issues with a newly bought cell phone from an online store. You try to raise a ticket but there is no reply from the customer support team. How would you feel?

Annoyed, right?

Your customers would feel the same if you don’t resolve their doubts, query or issues in a quick time. In fact, the primary reason for the bad customer experience is not resolving the issue at the right time.

According to some research, 59% of the customers are more likely to buy from a brand that resolves their query in less than a minute.

So, make sure that you pay attention to this.

Pro tip: implement a live chat option on your website.

3)  Give real-time support

We already mentioned that a bad customer experience can take your business downhill. To cover up this situation, you need to give real-time and live support to your customers.

So, make sure that you empower your customers with live support and real-time engagement programs like live chat support, video chat, and more. The live support tools will help you in satisfying the query and issues of your customers in few minutes.

Additionally, by using these tools, you can guide your customers on how to make a purchase, fill the form, or on-boarding process.

Pro tip: Try to personalize your customer support. This will surely help you in taking your sales and conversion to next level.

4)  Give customer feedback

How would you know whether your customers are satisfied with your service or the quality of your product?

Customer feedback will help you with this.

It is one of the easiest ways to find out whether the customers are happy or unhappy with your service or product. It can also be a vital factor for any business and in determining the growth of your brand.

Customers’ feedback will give you an overview and perception of your business. It will give you a complete overview of how your business is performing. So, make sure that you start collecting feedback from your customers.

5)  Omnichannel customer service

Some customers expect a seamless and high level of engagement and amazing experience in transition between channels like phone, social media, and websites. Thus, a business that tries to engage with the customers by identifying their journey needs to go more personalized while delivering the marketing message.

Moreover;

If you get an understanding of how the customers interact with other channels of your business, you can better optimize your process. This will help you in delivering better customer service and retaining more customers.

Some pro tips:

• Map your customers’ journey and get valuable insights via it.
• Use analytics and tracking tools on the website.
• Identify the best channel to be used by your customers and personalize it.

6)  Map your customer’s journey

The next in this list of best customer retention strategies is mapping your customer’s journey. We are 100% sure that this technique is not on your top to-do list. If this is the case, then you’ll be losing out on a great number of opportunities.

This will help you in identifying and rectifying the problems that customers might face in their journey. This will help you create a seamless journey and will make your business more customer-centric.

Most of the businesses and brands don’t focus on this, and they regret it later.

We don’t want you to fall into this trap, so make sure that you map your customer’s journey and take steps to improve it.

Pro tip: Google analytics is a great tool that will help you in mapping your customer’s journey.

7)  Delight your customers

Whether you agree or not, one of the best ways to retain your existing customers is by delighting them. This technique works like a charm and entices the existing customer to stock your product and service.

This technique is all about going an extra mile ahead and taking steps to satisfy the needs of customers and give them a delightful experience.

But how do you delight the customers?

Well, the answer is simple. By listening to your customers and by understanding their needs and wants.

Also, try to deliver your service and product at a low cost by keeping your profit margins low. This will help you in giving an Aha moment to your customers.

8)  Create amazing content

When it comes to the best customer retention strategies, how can we forget about content?

You should try creating educational content that will make customers familiar with your products and services. Tell them how your product or service can make their lives easy and better.

Highlight the pros and cons of your product. Be genuine and transparent while creating content around your product. This will help you in winning over the customer’s trust for sure.

Educative content will surely make customers loyal to your brand.

9)  Listen to your customers

Businesses that put a lot of effort to carefully listen and understand the needs of their customers are able to sustain in the long run. Apart from this, listening to the customer’s needs and demands is also a great customer retention strategy.

Thoroughly listening to the customers will help you create a positive brand image in their minds. Your customers might also feel that you are able to understand their problem and solve it quickly.

But sometimes it might get difficult to listen to the customers who are repetitive. Also, listening to unhappy or angry customers can be intimidating quite a few times.

You can handle such situations by making chat scripts for different and various types of solutions.

10) Maintain communication with email marketing

We know that feeling of excitement when you get a notification that a visitor has filled their cart with a product and also made the payment. You get excited that one sale is coming to your end.

But what happens after that?

Would you let that customer go away with only 1 product or do you want to cross and upsell them?

In our opinion, you must try cross-selling and up-selling your existing customers in order to retain them for a long time. And nothing can be better than email marketing when it comes to cross-selling and up-selling.

Email marketing is also a better way to develop a long-term relationship with your customers.

11) Build a community

Community creation works like charm.

People, especially the customers, enjoy the feeling of being a part of a community of like-minded people where they can get product recommendations, reviews, and options.

You can create the same feeling in the minds of your customers by creating a Facebook or LinkedIn group. If you are running a website, then you can also create forums.

Having a community will give a platform to your customers to talk about your product, ask doubts, resolve issues and do a lot more. It will also help you promote your offers in a better way.

12) Keep track of retention metrics

In order to maximize your customer retention efforts, you need to track certain customer retention metrics.

When you keep track of these metrics, you can come up with better customer retention strategies.

You’ll also come to know which strategy is giving you the best output and which is performing the worst.

It will also help you retain your customers before they become your former-customers.

13) Use the power of free

The word FREE is the most powerful word in the marketing landscape. If leveraged properly, it can surely take your business to the level of awesomeness. It has a psychological appeal attached to it.

Whenever a customer sees the world free, it creates a feeling of excitement in them.

Of course, it can surely take your sales and conversion to the next level, but overusing it may take your business downhill.

Following are the best ways to use the word FREE to retain customers:

1. Offer a free trial to existing customers.
2. Give them free products and services.
3. Offer free shipping to existing customers.
4. Give free access to premium services to existing customers.

14) Use employees engagement

When it comes to customer retention, brands and companies need to go beyond product and pricing. They need to focus on leveraging the most underutilized assets, i.e employees of the companies.

When employees are engaged and motivated, they give a personal customer experience, which increases brand loyalty.

Several research and studies have found that brands are able to retain more customers via employee engagement programs.

So, make sure that you keep your employees motivated and engaged.

15) Gifts and discounts

Customers love to be appreciated and one of the best ways to make them feel appreciated is by giving gifts and discounts.

You can try to offer a discount to customers who regularly buy your products or avail your service.

Also, you can tell your customer service team to inform customers why they are receiving this special surprise.

Offering such discounts and gifts will not only help you in retaining customers but will also elevate your brand.

16) Provide amazing service

This may seem quite obvious but still many brands overlook this.

You need to understand the fact that what business thinks of the best customer service does not always match up with the customer’s expectation.

In fact, 75% of businesses feel they are customer-centric but only 30% of customers think the same for these brands and companies.

So, you need to level your customer service up to the customer’s exception.

17) Customer onboarding

Customer onboarding depends on companies. It is the process by which you aim to educate your customers about your product or services.

Obviously, you don’t want to bombard your customers with a wall full of text talking about the pros and benefits of your products, but you cannot be quiet as well.

You can create a simple blog post or video tutorial about how your product or service can make customers’ lives easy.

You can also think of conducting a webinar that would work like a charm especially in times of COVID-19.

18) Leverage gamification

This is yet another important technique that will help you retain your customers.

You offer rewards points to your loyal customers or give them a credit if they refer your product to their friends and family.

You can also think of starting an affiliate marketing program to take things to the next level.

19) Keep your customers informed

The last on this list of 19 best tips to improve customer retention strategies is to keep your customers informed about last offers, deals, and discounts going live on your website or store.

Send them email newsletters or notifications and inform them about deals that you are running live.

This will keep the customers engaged with your brands and they’ll surely buy more from you.

Conclusion:

With well-crafted and designed customer retention strategies and techniques, you can take your sales and conversion to the next level.

You can also understand the needs and wants of your customers.

With the help of these 19 strategies, you can surely take your customer retention to the level of awesomeness.