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Best customer retention strategies: Part VI

1.Make sure no engagement is left behind:

One of the best things that you can do to improve your customer retention is to adopt a policy in your company that no customer engagement is ignored and a response is sent as soon as possible. There are a variety of tools out there like Mention, Hootsuite, and Sproutsocial which are all great for monitoring social media. You can leverage these tools to increase your customer engagement rates and gain higher exposure.

Customer engagement
Customer engagement

2. CRM:

Customer relationship management (CRM)  refers to practices, techniques, and technologies that companies use to manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle. CRM helps improve business relationships with customers resulting in customer retention and driving sales growth.

CRM systems are further designed to compile information on customers across different channels.

 

3. Set up an exclusive club for your loyal and highly active customers:

As a matter of fact, people like to feel special and considered important. So, that’s exactly what you should strive to do in order to achieve customer retention.

Setting up an exclusive VIP club takes time and money but will help you stand out from the crowd. Also, if done well, and optimized, will bring you positive returns.

Benefits for high performance customers
Benefits for high-performance customers

4. Make the most of social media:

Social media, today, is undoubtedly the most efficacious way of engaging with customers and retaining them. It can play a vital role in building more meaningful connections with customers, so they stay with you longer.

You can keep your customers updated and let them know about your latest offers. Moreover, you can also provide benefits like digital discount cards for following you on these platforms.

Social media
Social media

5. Upgrade your customer experience:

You should keep upgrading your website. You further need to consider these aspects while enhancing your website features:

i) redesigning your website

ii) considering solutions for device compatibility

iii) optimizing the load time

iv) providing easy navigation to customers

v) offering transparency and much more!

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Best customer retention strategies: Part V

1.Measure lifetime value:

There is a huge difference between the one-off profit you might make on an average sale and the total combined profit your average customer represents over the lifetime of their business relationship with you. Once you recognize how much-combined profit a customer represents to your business when they purchase from you again and again,  you’ll realize that customer contentment is the most important aspect of the customer retention process.

The moment you understand how much time, effort and expense you can afford to invest in retaining that customer, you will be in control of your marketing expenditure.

Related image

2. Gifts and premiums:

Premiums are promotional items like toys, collectibles and household products linked to a product, and often require box tops, tokens or proofs of purchase to acquire. Premiums fall into three categories:

i) Free premiums – sales promotions that involve the consumer purchasing a product in order to receive a free gift or reward

ii) Self-liquidating premiums – the consumer is expected to pay a designated monetary value for a gift or item

iii) In-or on-package premiums – small gifts are included with the package.

You can include these goodies into your customer retention plan to make it successful.

Premiums
Premiums

3. Tell your stories through case studies and testimonials:

Testimonials and case studies will facilitate your customer retention strategy further. It will make it easy for you to convince your existing and potential customers. They’ll help you tell your story in an easier way.

Case studies can also act as great content pieces for your blog. Once you have your reviews you can leverage them to do a number of things from increasing traffic and sales to turning them into fully fledged case studies.

Customer reviews

4. Meetups, webinars, and offline events:

You can organize meetups at local boutiques where fans of the service will meet up and have conversations about the different creative projects they are working on. You can also invite experts in your niche to participate and give knowledgeable presentations to the participants.

Make the event an iterating experience so that people can know when the next one will happen and so it will turn into a routine for your fans. Assure that all the sound and other logistics are organized appropriately and beforehand.

Offline events
Offline events

5. Sell over and over again:

Precisely, your selling has just begun when someone makes that initial purchase decision because virtually everyone is susceptible to buyer’s remorse. To lock in that sale, and all of the referrals and repeat business that will flow from it, you need to employ techniques that allay your customers’ fears and demonstrate by your actions that you genuinely care.

You should thank them and remind them again why they’ve made the right decision to deal with you. In other words,  you need to prove constantly that they have made the right decision.

Sell and then sell again
Sell and then sell again

 

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Best customer retention strategies: Part IV

1. Ameliorate your content management:

For making choices between different services or products, people usually go with the products and services which we have heard about from their knowns or came across while browsing the web. Thus, to entice the visitors and ultimately achieve customer retention, you need to produce content which you, yourself would read and share with others.

Moreover, you need to find marketing channels and spend the time to learn how to leverage the numerous free and paid marketing channels out there. Twitter, Google+ and other communities can help you find commonly discussed topics that you can write about.

2. Overcome buyer’s repentance;

Buyer’s remorse is defined as a sense of regret after having made a typically large purchase.

Buyers are usually afraid of 2 different things:

i)Their money was worth more than the product

ii)Their colleagues won’t approve of the product or service purchase.

Therefore salespeople should effectively address buyer’s remorse before its occurrence. The salesperson should be able to convince the customer as to why this is the best option for them. If your customer is not convinced and still wants a refund, try supporting your words with case studies or testimonials that show how your product was able to efficiently solve problems in similar cases earlier.

3. Indulge in live chats or Skype calls to know your customer’s requirements:

One of the most efficacious techniques of creating an impact with your customers is to get on a call with them. This will help you get really useful feedback that you can use to improve your business. Moreover, you will stand out in that customer’s mind and make the impression that you genuinely care about their needs.

4. Make use of the system of unearthing complaints:

As a matter of fact, 96 percent of discontented customers don’t complain. They just walk away! That’s because they often don’t know how to complain, or can’t be bothered, or are too frightened, or believe it won’t make any difference. Whilst they may not tell you what’s wrong, they will tell their friends or knowns.

A system for unearthing complaints can, therefore, be a savior for your business, because customers who complain are giving you a gift, they’re still talking to you. In other words, they’re giving you another opportunity to return them to a state of satisfaction.

5. Send targetted campaigns to your customers:

You can target your customers with personal and optimized marketing campaigns with the help of some amazing email and marketing services. Services like Vero and MailChimp are great for data-driven email marketing and event-triggered email marketing.

 

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Best customer retention strategies : Part III

1. Employ a proactive approach towards customer service:

Instead of waiting for problems to occur, a company that implements anticipatory service can curb problems before their occurrence. And the best way to do that is to employ a proactive approach. Knowing the problems beforehand and being ready with the best solutions helps a lot in customer retention.

Anticipatory service
Anticipatory service

2. Inculcate courtesy system:

A courtesy system refers to a powerful system that enhances the interpersonal skills of your team and changes the spirit of your organization. It involves speaking to colleagues politely and pleasantly and treating them just like you would want them to treat your customers. This will help your team to feel worthwhile and important, which will further result in pleasant social contacts at work. It also motivates them to provide extraordinary service consistently. This results in long termed loyal customers.

3. Be an expert in your particular field:

As a matter of fact, if you know every bit of your business you will likely retain more customers. Your customers will trust you, rely on you for the best pieces of advice, and recognize you as an inevitable part of their business success. All you need to do is inform them of upcoming changes. Also, you need to provide some insightful recommendations regarding their business. This proactive, approach will render customer retention strategies more effective.

4. Do whatever it takes to woo your customers:

Going that extra mile for your customers to provide customer satisfaction is an easy way to build strong relationships. By doing this, you can build some serious long-term loyalty. Moreover, if your clients know you are more than ready to go above and beyond, they will stick with you when competitors enter the lucrative market.

 

Wooing customers
Wooing customers

5. Loyalty Programs:

Loyalty programs are defined as structured marketing strategies designed by merchants to encourage customers to continue to shop at or use the services of businesses associated with each program. In marketing generally and in retailing more specifically, a loyalty card or rewards card identifies the card holder as a member enrolled in a loyalty program. With these cards, customers typically earn the right:
i) either to a discount on the current purchase

ii) or to an allotment of points that they can use for future purchases.

Loyalty programs
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Best customer retention strategies : Part II

1. Reactivate the lost customers:

Customer retention can be easily achieved by dedicating resources to entice your lost customers. You can further regenerate business by approaching them in the correct way, with the correct offer. In other words, reactivating customers who are familiar with you and your product helps increase your sales.

As a matter of fact, re-contacting and overcoming their remorses and convincing them that you still value and respect them will surely result in exceptionally increased sales and boosted customer retention.

2. Utilize computerization:

Automation is yet another customer retention strategy that helps to minimize downtime. It further helps keep clients’ networks performing at their best. Moreover, leveraging automation tools and streamlining repeatable processes, companies can meet their commitments more efficiently. This further leads to customer loyalty.

Automation
Automation

3. Provide an impeccable customer service:

What is an impeccable customer service? – It means moving the product or service you deliver into the realm of the extraordinary. And how’s that done? – By delivering higher than anticipated levels of service to your customers. It includes:

i) dedication to customer contentment

ii) providing instant response

iii) no buck passing

iv) on-time delivery

v) error-free-delivery process

vi) recruiting outstanding people to deliver your customer service.

Exceptional service leads to fortunes in repeat customers, whereas poor service will drive your customers away.

Excellent customer service
Excellent customer service

4. Inculcate customer feedback survey:

As a matter of fact, customer feedback surveys are invaluable for learning whether you are meeting your clients’ expectations or not. So, Instead of comparing feedback across a broad range of customers:

i) narrow the data down to a specific client

ii) see what that client thought

iii) and take action from there.

You need to trend feedback across a period of time. You should track feedback survey in order to compare which areas have benefited and which have not. It will provide you with data regarding:

i) what customers are at risk

ii) which areas of your business need improvement

iii) and where you excel.

5. Avoid ethical shortcuts:

The design, build quality, reliability, and serviceability of your product or service should meet customers’ expectations. The way you handle the small things, as well as the large, demonstrates service integrity. Moreover, customers will be attracted to you if you are transparent with them, care for them, take a genuine interest in them.

Product integrity
Product integrity
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Best customer retention strategies : Part I

Customer retention is termed as a process of inculcating those techniques by the companies that help in the exemption of customer defections. The sole purpose of customer retention programs is to help companies retain as many customers as possible through customer loyalty and brand loyalty initiatives.

As a matter of fact, customer retention begins with the first contact a customer has with a company and continues throughout the entire lifetime of the relationship.

According to a research an average business loses around 20 percent of its customers annually due to customer dissatisfaction. In some industries, this leakage is astoundingly 80 percent. However, following some preventive measures can help curb this loss.

Here we have mentioned some of the best customer retention techniques that will enhance your customer retention significantly once implemented and will have a gigantic impact on your business.

1. Build relationships online and develop trust:

In today’s era majority of people are glued to their computer screens for hours due to those enticing social media platforms. so, connecting with your clients through these mediums can benefit you to a large extent. Majority of your clients will have active profiles on websites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc. So, it makes sense to connect with your potential customers through such sites. Moreover, trust is crucial in business, and building relationships with clients will cumulate that trust for you.

A study by the African Journal of Business Management found that commitment tends to grow along with trust. So you should take an interest in your clients and their business. Simply providing a service is not long enough. You further need to start building shared values with clients and showing you take an interest in them and their success.

2. Let your interest in the leads be consistent:

Though every business loses some customers virtually, not all of them measure or recognize how many of their customers become inactive. Ironically, many businesses spend lavishly on building that initial customer relationship. Then they leave that relationship unattended, in some cases even losing interest as soon as the sale is made. The easiest way to grow your business is to avoid losing your customers. Once you stop the emanation, it’s often possible to increase your growth rate quite efficaciously.

3. Identify customer expectations:

Set expectations early and lower than you can provide, so that you can eradicate uncertainty as to the level of service you need to offer to ensure your clients’ satisfaction. This technique enables your company to ensure you are always over delivering.

Since clients tend to remember negative experiences, so, your client will no doubt cite a negative experience as a reason to cancel his or her contract with you.

4. Use a rolling calendar of communication:

Building relationships with your customers are not enough! You need to be in touch using a rolling calendar of communications. This is a programmed series of emails, events, phone calls, “thank you’s”, special offers, follow-ups, magic moments, and cards or notes with a personal touch etc. that ensure constantly and automatically at pre-decided points in the pre-sales, sales, and post-sales process.

People not only respond to this in a positive manner, they really appreciate it because they feel valued. It acknowledges them, keeps them updated, offsets customer remorse, augments the reason they’re doing business with you and makes them feel part of your business and that too an important one!

5. Implement a monthly email marketing campaign and start a blog:

Email your existing customers once every month. Touch base with them, keep them updated with your services and share a couple of great articles you believe will help them profit from their business. You should also link to your articles as a way to drive your customers to your blog.

Write a weekly article on something interesting, say, an accomplishment you feel your customers would value. However, you need to be consistent with your blog. You need to start using it as a medium to build relationships with your customers.

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Lead generation strategies: Part V

1. Corporate literature:

You should know how to create efficacious professional brochures and fliers that effortlessly sell for you by educating your prospects about the benefits you offer. These brochures and fliers should be capable of addressing their questions and their needs for your product or service. Basically, your brochures and fliers should help boost lead generation and bring in as much profit as possible.

2. Podcasting:

Podcasting is a concoction of ‘broadcasting’ and ‘i-pod’. It is a form of audio broadcasting on the Internet. The reason it became linked with the iPod in the name was that people download the broadcasts (audio shows) to listen to mostly on their iPods.

It is a medium for businesses to globally distribute their ideas and create a following of like-minded fans. It is beneficial for industries such as journalism, education, and entertainment allowing anyone to freely create and distribute news and media as it helps in an enormous lead generation in the long run.

3. Premiums, gifts and offers:

The Lead generation offers, gifts and premiums are irresistible bribes that give a piece of valuable information to the sales prospects in exchange for their contact information. These are positioned on the landing pages of websites.

4. Profits on the back end:

If most of your sales and profits occur when customers repeat purchase from you again and again, you should make it a point that you are doing everything possible to motivate as many customers as you can to make their initial buying decision as quickly and easily as possible. Making it easy and enticing for the customer to start doing business with you by adding extra incentives or by making your initial sale at break-even or a small loss, means that you will benefit sooner rather than later from all the repeat business.

5. Experiential marketing:

This is a marketing strategy that directly engages consumers and encourages them to participate in brand development. Experiential marketers believe that consumers should be actively involved in the production and co-creation of marketing programs.

These are the major lead generation strategies that will boost up your sales in the long run.

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Lead generation strategies : Part IV

1. Display and sell your wares at trade shows:

Trade shows, exhibitions, and fairs are such events where many serious prospects will be present. Such events are great opportunitues to strengthen you lead generation efforts. But there is an art to successful exhibiting which, if learned, generates immense rewards. There are few other sales forums where prospects and clients come to you. Also, you can use this opportunity to get valuable opinions on your products and services.

Besides attracting new business, exhibitions can be used to introduce existing customers to additional products.

Trade shows

2. Database marketing:

Database marketing is a systematic approach to the gathering, fortification, and processing of consumer data (both for customers and potential customers) that is maintained in a company’s databases. With the aid of database marketing, much more consumer data is maintained, and that the data is processed and used in more sophisticated ways.

Among other things, marketers utilize the data to:

i) learn more about customers

ii) identify and focus on target markets for specific campaigns (through customer segmentation process)

iii) compare customers’ value to the company and

iv) provide more dedicated offerings for customers to live up to their expectations.

Since database marketing provides an extended access to potential customers so lead generation becomes much efficient.

3. Target marketing:

Sweepstakes and contests with large grand prizes tend to attract more entries regardless of the odds of winning. Therefore, the value of smaller prizes usually totals much less than that of the top prize. Firms that incorporate target marketing such as Publishers Clearing House and Reader’s Digest, have also found that the more involved the entry process, the more entrants. Businesses often obtain marketing information about a customer from sweepstakes entries which leads to an active participation further leading to a boost in sales.

4. Card deck offers and inserts:

A card deck offer is a product description on an individual card. The card is about the size of a postcard generally placed within a pack along with 50 or more other cards. It’s a quick and enticing way for many busy people to “shop” through a variety of product offers. You can normally target and send your offer to a large number of carefully selected prospective customers.

This method is less costly as compared to other marketing techniques. On the other hand, inserts give you a direct approach to both homes and businesses in the desired geographical area, giving you the flexibility to drop any number at any time.

5. Social media visibility / Viral marketing:

Social media makes the process even easier because of all of the information that people readily share, and also because of the large number of users on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and more! 40% of people spend more time socializing on social media than face to face in today’s era. So needless to say, social media makes for the perfect place to identify your target audience and turn them into new sales leads benefiting your business.