How to Retain Customers and Cultivate Brand Loyalty
Growing your business’s client base takes calculated efforts, including an optimized customer acquisition strategy. The goal is to reach an optimal customer conversion rate of high-value clients conducive to company growth.
A huge component of this equation that businesses often overlook is the value of customer retention – and how the marketing flywheel strategy can completely reshape the way you think about customer acquisition as a whole.
We’ve created a guide on how to create long term value to retain customers. If you follow these principles, you’ll have a better chance of attracting quality clients in your industry and, more importantly, keep them coming back.
What is Customer Retention?
Customer retention is your company’s ability to gain repeat purchases from a client while preventing them from purchasing from your direct competitors. Although it might seem simple on the surface, the practice of customer retention within a marketing flywheel strategy can be quite complex, requiring serious and ongoing analysis for success.
Customer retention can be achieved by incorporating into your marketing strategy the consideration of multiple elements involved in the function of your business, including customer experience, customer service, brand value, and the quality of your product or service.
Without proper customer retention marketing, your ideal clients will have a hard time finding out how valuable your company might be to them. Thus, customer retention marketing is integral to acquiring customers with long-term value.
Why It is Important to Retain Good Customers
High-value customers are hard to come by and even more important to retain. This is because your customer retention is often a measure of how good your product actually is. In addition to consistent revenue streams, repeat customers provide you with a valuable segment of your marketing analytics and can even become brand ambassadors if your product serves them well enough.
Knowing you’ve satisfied customers enough for them to return again does wonders for your product integrity, team morale, and ability to scale and expand your business. Customer loyalty can often become the backbone of year-over-year decision-making and growth.
The good news is that through proper marketing channels, customer retention often is easier than acquisition – but only if you are intentional and focused.
How to Identify Valuable Customers
You might think instinct and raw purchase orders can provide enough insight to deem certain customers valuable. However, your idea of an ideal client or target demographic can be skewed or incorrect without using customer retention CRM (customer relationship management) to cull data.
Without using CRM to retain customers, a profitable or successful business may be sacrificing the ability to grow and scale without identifying its most valuable customers.
This means you should be working to create data-driven customer personas – a merged representation of the existing data in your business combined with what you project to be the best client based on your particular market. From there, you can continue to develop your customer acquisition flywheel to attract the most valuable customers available to your business.
Long-Term Value Strategies for Customer Retention
Just like customer acquisition, data plays a significant role in how you create strategies for customer retention. Your business should be providing opportunities for your clients to re-engage and share about your business, and you should be able to quantify and adjust as a result. In order to give yourself the best chance at success, consider these customer retention strategies:
- Prioritize Customer Experience: Having an awesome product is only one part of compelling a customer to give you repeated business. You need to provide engaging and helpful customer service from the moment a lead enters your marketing flywheel. Additionally, your re-engagement marketing needs to be tasteful, non-intrusive, and provide real value to an existing customer. Finally, listening to feedback and showing that you have updated practices is a huge part of keeping brand trust for the long term.
- Create a Brand Advocate Program: When you find high-value clients, let them know that you think of them as such. Offering them referral incentives or VIP perks, such as early product drops, is a great way to show your appreciation. Similarly, engaging in social listening and other feedback can resonate with any customer. In an era of easy digital communication, make sure you are using the necessary platforms to remain seen and heard by your customers.
- Keep Your Content Fresh: Your user experience starts with a modern and friendly website. Your website is best seen by developing your search engine optimization (SEO). Your SEO is bolstered by having engaging and properly-researched content across all platforms tied to your site. Once your users get to your site, the content needs to be authoritative and well-structured so that your high-value clients are reassured of your company’s worth. All components of your business should be tied together by high-quality content that’s easily accessible.
- Leverage a CRM’s Automation and Personalization Options: Customer Relationship Management is the core tenet that shows you the true value of your customers and how effective your retention methods are. This involves tracking your clients’ value metrics and assigning them different actions based on where they are in your marketing and product lifecycle. CRM software will allow you to create segments for each of your customers, automate the actions that allow you to dazzle them, and most importantly – CRM is your data center for actionable decisions.
- Customer Feedback: In today’s busy digital business environment, customers can feel microscopic or unheard if they give feedback that does not get a proper response. Conversely, if your customer service is exceptional and you respond to feedback (either positive or negative), it can make all the difference for a customer. If you take customer feedback seriously and engage with customers already in your flywheel, it can create serious value for your business over time.
- Investing in Employees: Your business is only as good as the sum of its parts – your product, leadership, employees, and strategies must all be fine-tuned. In terms of employees, they can be great sources of long-term value if they are happy and properly equipped to help customers out. This is best achieved by having proper training, a happy work environment, and a comprehensive plan for each role that your employees take on. Similarly, investing in top talent recruitment in your industry will pay dividends over time.
There’s no magic formula for retaining your most valuable customers. Even the best strategies require persistence, data analysis, and willingness to adapt in a timely fashion. We recommend working with trusted marketing professionals who can help you assess your process and how best to sharpen it for optimal growth.
Get the Tools to Help Grow Your Business
Our team at Striventa is passionate about helping businesses realize their utmost potential. It’s why we work so hard to perfect the fundamentals of flywheel marketing and its application. Customer acquisition and retention can be challenging, but we’d love to team up with you and optimize your process.
If you’re looking to take your business to the next level, reach out to us for a one-on-one consultation today. One conversation could be a game-changer for you and your business!