How to Increase Customer Retention and Keep Generating More Sales

Brand and marketers know that Acquiring a new customer is hard and costly and once you get one you don’t want to lose them. They pass through all these stages to become a customer.

Brands end up making some mistakes that cost them their newly acquired customers and that leads to loss of potential earnings for your business.

It’s every business goal to retain their customers and keep selling them their products or services.

This article will help give some strategies you can use to increase customer retention. Keep your customers for a long and increase sales and profits for your business.

What is customer retention?

To start with, let’s define what customer retention means. Simply put this is keeping your customers engaged with your brand so they keep buying from you for a longer time.

It’s the ability of businesses to keep customers happy and continue selling them your products or services for a long time.

 Importance of retaining your customers

Reduces churn rate

Many customers use brand services or products for once then leave the business.

With customer retention, you can keep those customers for a long. They will keep buying from your business and increase your profits.

Increase business referrals

Retaining customers for long means they are happy with the services or products you offer them.

You are having a great impact on their lives as you help solve their pain points.

Happy customers become your brand ambassadors and are more likely to refer other customers to your business.

Research by Invesp shows that customers referred to your brand have a 37% higher retention rate and 4 times more likely to refer to other new customers to your business.

It is costly to acquire new customers

Businesses spend a lot of money prospecting and converting leads into customers.

Every time you get a customer and you lose them you get back to the drawing table and those extra expenses affect your business.

Keeping customers for long reduces the expenses of acquiring other new customers.

Easy to sell to existing customers

You know your customers better and it makes it easy to sell to them. Retaining customers also opens an opportunity to increase your brand sales.

You can offer cross-selling and upselling opportunities to your existing customer.

This will help you give the customer the best value as you keep solving their pains and also increase your earning potential.

Calculating customer retention ROI

It is important to keep calculating your customer retention from time to time. Below is a formula you can use to calculate your business customer retention.

You can define the time gap you want to calculate your customer retention. Let’s say six months, one year, or two years, etc

Customer retention example

If you start your business with 40 customers, keep marketing your business, and acquire 20 more customers with 5 churn customers.

( (55–20) / 40 ) ) x 100 = 87.5% retention

Strategies to retain your customers

Act on customer feedback

Customers will give you their feedback on your products or services. It is essential to act on this feedback as soon as possible to meet your customer expectations.

Here are some customer feedback questions you can that can help you improve your value to customers.

You can also ask your customers for feedback to know how they enjoy your products or services and what they need to improve.

Create high-quality content

As your customers keep using your business, you need to keep engaging them. Create high-quality content to engage your customers.

You can create different types of content across different platforms. Ensure that you have a documented content marketing strategy for your brand.

Research shows that 69% of successful marketers have a documented content marketing strategy.

Your content should be what your customers are searching for. Guide them on how to get the best out of your products or services. Include visuals for engagement.

Use the right keywords and optimize the content for high ranking in search engines.

Apart from just retaining your current customers, you increase the chances to attract more target customers to your business.

Keep improving your products or services

Customer needs and wants change with time and your business has to accommodate the changes.

To retain customers keep delivering to them services or products that match their changing needs.

Look out what your competitors are doing, how they are serving their customers, and then keep improving your products or services and implementing new strategies to say ahead of them.

Offer awesome customer support

Your customers will have needs or challenges as they use your products. To help retain those customers, ensure you support them in the way they need.

If a customer has a problem and it takes ages to resolve the problem, they will leave and join your competitor.

You lose the opportunity to make more sales from that particular customer because you didn’t give them the customer support the way they wanted.

Your customer support plays a greater role in your overall business growth. Research shows that 89% of customers share experiences that have on a brand.

If these customers have negative experiences with your brand because of poor customer support, it can negatively affect the growth of your business.

Deliver on your promises

Have you promised your customers something?

Well, ensure you deliver it as soon as possible. Keep all your promises to your customers.

To retain your customers and keep making repeat sales from them you can use this strategy.

Make a promise and over-deliver on the promise.

Use email marketing

To retain your customers you need to keep nurturing them and provide useful content and information that helps them.

Since you have their contact details, use email marketing to give your customers product updates and any other information.

Subject lines are very sensitive to your email marketing campaigns. Use subject lines that are captivating to increase email open rates and customer engagement with your emails.

Use personalization

Personalization is essential to help retain your customers. Understand your customers and deliver products or services that are personalized to their taste.

Give your customers products or services in the way they want and at the right time.

Here is some research on customer expectations and the experience that brands deliver.

It is easy to personalize your products or services to the way your customers want.

The above research also shows that 44% of customers who get a personalized shopping experience are more likely to become repeat buyers of a brand.

You have their details and also have a buyer persona that guides you to understand their needs better.

When customers see your brand is helping them with the right services or products they need they will stay with that brand for a long.

Use power of testimonials

Customers trust other customers who have used or are using your products or services. Here are some testimonial statistics by Wyzowl.

That’s why you need to collect testimonials from your customer. Great awesome testimonials from your current and past customers are a clear sign your business has excellent offers.

Testimonials from different customers using your services or products can play a great role in building trust with your customers and keeping them for a long time.

Improve customer experience

As customers use your products or services, give them the best customer experience.

Research shows that customer experience is one of the most exciting opportunities for brands.

When customers get the best experience with your brand it helps them solve their pain points.

They get to know more about your brand in a great way and the impact the brand services or products have in helping them solve their pains.

As long as you keep giving them the right and best experience in solving their pains, they will keep using your business and you increase their retention.

Have a great onboarding process

Another reason that can make customers leave your business in a short time is poor customer onboarding.

You may have great products or services but if your customers don’t know how to use them to solve their challenges it would help them.

It is essential to have a great onboarding strategy for your customers. Have a great team to address your customer concerns as you onboard them and use your services. Here is an awesome onboarding plan by the Hubspot brand.

The right onboarding helps your customers see your business value proposition and increases your chances to retain the customers.

Use loyalty programs

These programs are great at helping brands with customer retention. Through the programs, you keep motivating your customers to use your products. You can offer your loyal customers discounts.

A great customer loyalty program can help you give your customer a great marketing experience and keep them for a long time.

There are different loyalty programs you can use for customer retention. They also help improve your customer relationships

Run A/B tests

To offer the right services or products that your customers love and what to use every time needs experimentation.

You can run an A/B test for your services and see what works best for your customers but avoid these mistakes in the process.

If you are running a SaaS business you can run A/B tests for the different features you offer in your services. Here is a simple a/b test plan by invesp.

 You can then evaluate how your customers react or ask them for feedback on them.

With customer feedback improve and create the right match of what they want.

Running a/b tests can help you deliver the best to your customers, retain them for a long time, and keep making more sales.

Conclusion

Customers are the center of your brand and retaining them for a long time selling your services or products can help grow your business.

As you market your brand and acquire your new customers you must keep in mind that retaining those new customers to your business should be your primary goal.

If you have been wondering what to do to retain those customers, consider the above tips.

They will help as you grow your business and generate more sales and revenue for your brand.