You’ve done a marketing campaign. You’ve got reach. You’ve got customers. Now, you need to retain them. Customer retention goes hand in hand with customer loyalty and long-lasting relationships, leading to positives for your brand, like continued support for your products and services and perhaps becoming brand ambassadors.
Having a high customer retention rate does more good than just those listed above, it can make your marketing life easier. Think about it, it’s easier to market to existing customers than trying to impress and gain new ones. A returning customer is one that already supports your brand, likes the services and products you offer, and wants to keep up with what your brand releases.
So, how do you get to this promised land of customer retention, loyalty, and continued support? Here are five ways to ensure this through marketing…
1. A smooth customer journey
First impressions really are everything.
Customers are more likely to return to a brand when their first impressions, like the ease of purchasing from your brand, is positive. So, making the customer journey throughout the entire experience as smooth as possible will ensure customer retention. Customers don’t want to be challenged when it comes to getting to the point of purchase. They don’t want to spend ages trowelling through relentless links and adverts to reach the product they’re interested in.
You can smooth the customer journey through branding. That’s the foundation for your brands marketing strategies and making everything clean, simple, and attractive will have high impact on your consumers. They will be much more likely to return to your brand than your competitors who have a difficult site to navigate.
2. Making your customers a priority
Whilst this is in the same vein as the first point, it’s also completely different. You’ll be aware, without us having to tell you, that your consumers should be a priority in your marketing techniques if you want to retain them.
Centring your efforts around listening to your consumers, their feedback, their wants, what they like, and what they dislike will keep them around for the long-haul. Focusing your strategies on improving customer service and keeping your ear to the ground to the discussions happening all the time on social media is a sure-fire way to ensure customer retention. They want to know they’re being listened to and seeing that reflected through a brands marketing is a brilliant way to show that.
3. Share your company values
64% of consumers say they have a relationship with a brand because they share the same values. By displaying your core values through letting customers in on your brand story, say through an ‘about us’ page, allows them to get an understanding on why and how your company came to be.
Consumers are looking for connection, a reason to continuously support and back a brand, so injecting your company values in your marketing strategies makes more a greater chance at higher customer retention rates.
4. Offering a loyalty program
An important aspect of retaining customers is by not taking them for granted. Rewarding them for sticking around may feel like a strange concept, but it’s actually very effective. Take coffee shops for example, their loyalty cards offer a free coffee after a customer has purchased a certain number of drinks. It’s gratification for the customer; they’ve supported this chain for, let’s say, ten purchases, so their eleventh is on the company! Plus, it means repeated business for the coffee shop.
The same goes when a customer spends over a certain amount on an online store, and they get a surprise gift with their order. It tempts the customer to spend that little bit extra from a brand they already love, to get a little surprise they haven’t had to pay for. It’s that something extra a brand can do to show that they appreciate their customers sticking around and continued support.
5. Get your email marketing up to scratch
Sending emails to your consumer before and after they have purchased from your brand gives you the opportunity to continue building a relationship with them, adding value to their experience, and making them likely to return.
Emails are where you’re able to personalise your marketing efforts to the individual, allowing them to see how valued they are to your company. The personalisation can be anything from saying thank you for their purchase, sending them tips and tricks from your industry, company news, promotional offers… the opportunities are endless with emails.
Contact us at blazon and we can help refine your marketing strategies to increase these important customer retention rates.
