What’s a business without customers? It’s like a car without an engine. Your customers are the reason your business exists. They are the people that need your brand’s product or service.
Existing customers are the backbone of every business because through them you can generate new customers, meet your financial goal and make more money.
Some businesses make the mistake of focusing on attracting new customers without also focusing on retaining them. Whereas, the certainty of retained customers buying from you is about 70% which is pretty good for business survival; unlike trying to make a new customer buy from you. It’s even said that for every 5% increase in customer retention, there is always a 25 to 95% increase in profit.
Since your customers play a very important role in your business, then, you need to know how to retain them.
Customer retention is the process of converting one-time buyers into recurring or permanent customers. The main work involved in retaining a customer is satisfying and making your customers happy.
In this guide, you will learn 10 excellent strategies to keep customers in your business.
10 Excellent strategies to retain your customers in your business
Here are 10 reliable strategies to help you retain customers:
1. Offer a guaranteeÂ
People love guarantees. They want to be sure they are buying the right product. And you can only make them trust your product if you offer a guarantee. It might be a money-back guarantee or product guarantee. Based on research, clients tend to believe more in a business that offers a guarantee.
If you are running an online business, this is the fastest and surest strategy to make customers come back to purchase your product again without begging them.
Imagine customers who want to buy a product and you offer a full money-back guarantee if they don’t gain value from the product, they will be so moved to try it. Once they confirm the originality of your product, they will surely come back and that means you have successfully won their heart.
2. Create a customer loyalty program
A customer loyalty program is a component of customer retention strategies. This implies giving incentives to your customers for patronizing your business. Once customers sign up for your customer loyalty program, make them feel special by hooking them with a jaw-dropping offer, or letting them know about your new product.
For example, you can decide to give discounts and gifts to customers according to their purchasing power. This will make them patronize your business next time and then you can introduce other products to them with juicy benefits.
When referring to premium service, this is not about making your product expensive. It’s about packaging your product and making it unique from your competitors. When customers receive premium services for their hard-earn money, they will feel motivated to patronize your business again.
You can do this by giving them a warm welcome, attending to them on time, always making contact, and providing quality products. You make them gain value for what they pay for (over-deliver).
4. Leverage customers’ ideas
Another strategy to help retain a customer is by leveraging their ideas to make them glued to your product.
With this strategy, you show how important their opinion is to your business and you will also gather new ideas which you can apply to grow your business. Their active involvement will keep them within reach.
5. Provision of post-purchase support
You can continue interacting with your customers by giving them post-purchase support. This will help answer any questions they have regarding the product and you can also introduce products that can solve their problem at that instance, however, don’t be aggressive.
The perfect way to do this is by creating a simple tutorial video about your product or sending mail to them breaking down everything about the products. This way the customer will trust your brand, come back for more, and preach your brand to others.
6. Keep customers informed
Make customers feel they are part of your business team. Ensure you keep them up-to-date about new development, new products, and exciting milestones in the company. You can do that by sending them an email newsletter regularly.
If you have a new product that you know will be beneficial for them, let them know, and try to give them a discount they won’t easily get anywhere.
7. Conduct customers survey
Conducting a customer survey is one of the best strategies to retain customers, it will help you know their needs, the best way to contact them, and a lot of other information that can foster strong customer relationships. You can’t please every customer. However, with customer surveys, you can deploy tactics to tackle each customer’s problem.
You can do this by sending customers a quick online survey. The survey will contain mixed multiple-choice questions and a space to express their opinion. The survey can be sent to customers every three or six months.
8. Consider a subscription model
If you want to turn your clients into recurring customers, another simple strategy you can use is the subscription model. This works well if you sell any product that customers can’t do without and would naturally need to renew or re-purchase at regular intervals.
Once you set up the subscription model, customers will have no choice but to re-subscribe once they need it again.
9. Offer personalized services
This goes beyond sending a mail newsletter with your customers’ names inputted. It involves gathering all the information you know about them and sending them a product that is tailored to fit each of their needs. With this strategy, your customer will feel they are special and will surely come back for additional transactions.
From research, 91% of customers tend to like a brand that has their interests in mind and provides a more personalized shopping experience. The method will make you sell like crazy like the title of one of Sabri Suby’s books.
10. Ask for feedback
Asking for feedback is one of the ways to get information from your customers. It helps you to be assured you are building something that people want.
By asking your customers for feedback on your product, you become more exposed to other loopholes in your business and how you can refine your product to give a great review that attracts new customers.
Conclusion
Generally, retaining a customer in a business is very important for its survival. And all the customer retention strategies revolve around engaging your customers and offering them premium services.
When you offer them something they feel they can only get from you, they will stay and continually buy from you. If you are having issues with retaining your customers, apply the listed strategies above and you will see changes in your business.
