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Research by HBR shows that improving customer retention rate by 5% boosts profits by 25%. Therefore, customer retention is an essential aspect of the survival of organizations. Business people who understand the value of Customer retention always strive hard to ensure that their customers get the best experience to keep them as their existing buyers.
Essential action points to help you grow your customer retention rate;
Give gifts to your customers like capes, umbrellas and more.
Send out appreciation messages and emails to your customers after shopping.
Put in place a referral program that benefits potential existing buyers and new customers.
Give loyalty points to customers after making purchases.
Customer Retention Techniques
1. Customize client experience
Customization is now the thing. Therefore, what is not personalized is not given attention. Emails that are not personalized are ignored by clients most times. Because people have a lot of work at hand and are busy, people read only what has directed them or a message meant to be theirs. And one of the easiest ways of letting a customer know that the news is theirs is by personalizing it.
You have to customize a customers’ journey depending on the variables. You can use recommendation engines to get personalized product recommendations. You can find suggestions based on location, shopping and browsing history.
Additionally, you can use exit-intent pop-ups, abandoned cart messages and discounts to excellent your customers and improve their experience.
2. Meet clients on their terms
A personalized approach to a customer makes them feel unique. And as a business owner, you have to interact with your clients so that you can get to know more about them and better your relationship. In addition, every day, customers' demands, expectations and habits change. This means that you have to keep engaging them to find their new needs.
Customers love to approach and contact businesses in different ways. While some prefer using Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, live chat, e-mails and LinkedIn, others prefer making direct calls to speak to a customer service representative. This means that you have to communicate with your customers through their preferred communication channels to meet their needs and build a more significant customer service experience for your e-commerce business.
3. Surprise your clients
By nature, most people love to be surprised, which is one way of growing and improving the customer service experience. You can bring in surprises in a customers’ purchasing process to excite them and enhance their experience with your business. One of the most recommended ways of surprising your clients could be; offering them free shipping or an incentive to complete the purchase and inform them during the checkout process. This motivates customers to support your products and repeatedly brings in more referrals.
4. Create A Customer Loyalty Program
A reward system for potential buyers is a great way to keep them returning. The simplest and most popular loyalty programs use a point system: customers earn loyalty points every time they buy from the brand. Then, when accumulated, these points earn them a reward, e.g., discounts, special client treatment, and freebies. Another loyalty program is a card-based system where customers get rewarded for loading up and spending money through the card. With a loyalty program that rewards customers with monetary or non-monetary gifts, people will feel compelled to keep coming back.
5. Impeccable Customer Service
Offering an excellent customer service experience to buyers makes you a lion in the game. The feeling and the environment a customer finds when they come to a store for shopping determines whether the buyer is more likely to come back or not.
A bright welcome and goodwill you portray to customers to help them find services make them re-consider shopping with you. A salesperson who helps a customer find their best products while factoring in their budget and allowing customers to address any queries in the selling process usually wins more sales and customers' hearts. Excellent service leaves the customer feeling happy, satisfied and amazed at how they were handled. Such perfect customer service and experience keep customers coming for continuous support/ purchases, thus resulting in more sales.
Customer service experience refers to how a brand communicates with its clients at every step during the customer’s journey. As competition continues to evolve, you need to find strategies to make customers shop from you again and again.
6. Request Feedback
Getting customer feedback regarding your product and its performance is very vital. It helps you know whether you are doing the right thing or not, whether you need to include anything in the product for better functioning or not, and other highlights that you may need.
Clients care about the value the product adds to them. If your product helps customers achieve what they want, they will return. The reverse is also true.
As a company that wants to achieve a customer-centric system for all and the benefit of the entire company, you have to give attention to a client’s point of view and respond to their preferences to improve their experience via enhanced product development.
This, therefore, requires you to have a system in place that will help you get feedback from clients so that you gather their input and address them or incorporate them at once. This gives you an advantage of knowing what your customers want and building onto the exciting customers’ ideas to build another product that customers might love.
7. Read the data from your platforms
Customers feel free to share their comments and feelings about company products through social media networks or platforms. This effort will help you as an entrepreneur gather insights from all those platforms and learn more about their complaints and attitude towards your products or services and seek where you can improve.
To capture comments from your customers, you can open accounts on social media sites on platforms like Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest that you think your customers use. Furthermore, you can add a call to action on your website, inviting them to follow your business platforms, and then you could follow them back as well.
8. Maintain Constant Contact Outside The Sale
After a customer has purchased the product, they sometimes feel forgotten by the company. Keep frequent “check-in" communications to get feedback on product satisfaction and explore new areas of opportunity.
A company’s sales team is one of the closest teams to customers. As a result, they have the power to influence a customer’s decision than any other person in the company. In addition, the sales teams can advise on what they think should be the most significant ways of promoting customer service to retain a good number of customers.
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