The common misconception that many businesses believe in is that the main goal of marketing is to only generate leads and acquire customers. While these objectives are heavily emphasized, they’re just a part of a bigger picture. Let’s say, you managed to attract clients with the help of professional marketing services, and got them to buy from your business. Then what?
What should you do to make them stay with your brand and become recurring customers?
The answer to that question lies in customer retention marketing. In this article, we’ll look into this branch of marketing, its best strategies and tactics with examples, so read it to the end.
Customer Retention Marketing in 2024
In 2024, marketers and businesses continue to put their effort and investments into customer retention marketing. The main emphasis falls onto creating highly customized experiences and incentives that foster loyalty with the help of data-driven personalization. Membership plans and subscription models are becoming more and more common because they provide clients with dependable engagement and value over time. Businesses are spending more to foster communities, especially on social media and in private online communities, that strengthen bonds with clients.
Benefits of Client Retention Marketing
- Cheaper marketing
Obtaining fresh leads is challenging. On the other hand, remarketing and keeping your former customer’s business is simple if you already have their phone number or email address. You save both money and time.
- Long-lasting connections with customers
According to SurveySparrow, over 70% of consumers claim to have had a ten-year or longer relationship with a brand.
- Increased ROI
61% of consumers say they only purchase from brands they trust, and sixty-six percent acknowledge that they do so more frequently.
- Word-of-mouth advertising
With client retention marketing, you can let your clients do promotions for you. 75% of loyal clients will promote your company by telling their friends and relatives.
What are Customer Retention Strategies?
If we look at the general meaning of customer retention strategies, they are a set of practices and methods that businesses utilize to keep their current client base interested, engaged and loyal to their brands. Every business opts for their unique strategy and set of techniques based on the specifics of industry, clientele, organization, and many other factors. However, there are several practices that marketers recognize as the most efficient. Here’s a shortlist of these customer retention methods that we’ll analyze further in the article.
- Get to know your clients through a thorough research
- Organize a stable connection with the audience via email marketing
- Use of loyalty and rewards programs to strengthen client relationships
- Emphasize on personalization
- Gamify your content and promotions
- Use client feedback for optimization
- Ensure accessible customer support
- Build community
- Offer membership and subscription programs
- Offer valuable content in convenient forms
- Make sure your mission aligns with customers’ needs
- Provide positive experiences
Top Client Retention Strategies for 2024
Let’s look at these special activities or strategies employed by a business to retain existing customers in more detail. Here are the prominent customer retention marketing tactics to employ in 2024.
Know Your Customer Base
For every brand, building their customer retention strategy should start with a careful research of their client base. Naturally, you can cater to their needs and ensure satisfaction only if you know what they need and what satisfies them. Use surveys, feedback widgets, and interviews to gain direct feedback from customers in order to better understand their needs and loyalty motivations. It’s also important to time these feedback requests correctly to minimize disturbance. You can also make a customer journey map to visualize and understand the experiences of your consumers.
Engage Through Email
Email marketing is a go-to channel for most businesses, especially ecommerce, to start communication with clients and set up the relationship starting from a welcome email to VIP campaigns for customer loyalty and retention programs. For example, welcome emails have the power to persuade potential customers to make a first purchase. However, a skillfully implemented nurturing sequence can keep them interested in returning to your brand for more.
Create Loyalty and Referral Programs
Another popular strategy among customer retention marketing tactics is offering clients to participate in loyalty and referral programs to receive rewards. The clear incentives in the form of discounts, bonuses, or gifts motivate the audience to join and engage. Especially tailored rewards based on customer behavior increase loyalty program effectiveness and repeat business.
Personalize Experiences
To ensure that clients stay loyal to your brand, make your connection feel more personal. Customers love feeling their needs and interests seen and cared for. Using customers’ first names in a personalized client retention strategy makes them feel valued and adds a conversational element. You can enhance their experience and keep them as clients by regularly checking in and collecting data.
Build a Brand Community
One of the strategies for customer retention is building strong brand community. This tactic helps to develop brand advocates, loyalty, and repeat purchases. Building this community through private groups, in-person Q&A sessions, and behind-the-scenes content requires a strong social media presence, so that’s what brands should consider working on.
Use Gamification
Make shopping fun and engaging. A key tactic for retaining customers here is gamification, which appeals to their need to feel appreciated and involved in a way that goes beyond a simple purchase. Retail and ecommerce stores can employ gamification by converting purchases into bonus points that can be redeemed for future purchases. With this strategy, customers have an excellent incentive to buy more with the thought of future benefits.
Ask for Feedback
Asking your clients for any sort of feedback or review on your products and service is a must-add to your customer retention plan. There are two major reason for that—you get to receive user-generated content and get to know what points of your service you need to improve. In case with the first one, not only can reviews and testimonials attract new clients, but they also keep existing ones coming back. The second point allows you to optimize your strategies and processes to be able to provide only positive experiences to clients, wich is a key to their retention. Make it a point to ask for feedback from time to time and assess how the most recent outcomes improve.
Offer Omnichannel Support
Every client has that one channel of communication that is the most convenient for them. Make sure that your customer service offers the most popular ways to connect to retain clients. Inconvenient method of communication and issues with connection can cost you precious clients. For example, when many people nowadays prefer messaging to calls, leaving a phone number as an only channel for supports service can be a serious problem. Imagine losing customers because of that. Therefore, providing several convenient methods that your clientele can use to contact you without any issue is one of the top retention marketing strategies.
How to Retain Customers: Recommendations by Flowium
In addition to the prominent strategies from the list above, our experts also share a collection of customer retention best practices that they gathered from the vast experience in working with B2B and DTC brands. Here is what can enrich your client retention plan and help with creating a better relationship with your clientele.
- Subscription Programs
Customers who use subscription services are able to maintain their investment over time, since they are assured of consistent engagement and revenue. You can improve value, show appreciation for regular customers, and promote subscription renewals by raising discounts or benefits in accordance with customer lifetimes.
- Exclusive Membership Perks
Developing a membership model provides benefits that improve client retention by encouraging a feeling of community. Members are encouraged to make repeat purchases and feel appreciated by receiving benefits like priority service, free delivery, and access to unique promotions.
- Shared Values
An effective practice how to improve customer retention is to strike a chord with what matters to them. Aligning your strategy with their values and encouraging to forming ties to your brand’s objectives can improve loyalty.
- Convenience
Making life easier for customers is crucial for ensuring retention. To retain customers who are leaving, it’s important to implement customer-friendly policies and eliminate any sources of inconvenience.
- Useful Content
Providing services and value beyond goods increases consumer engagement, authority, and loyalty. Offer your audience informative content on related thematics on a regular basis to build a foundation of devoted clients.
- Pleasant Surprises
Unexpected gifts or samples is a great way how to retain customer loyalty. It strengthens the bond between a brand and its customers by making a good first impression and promoting further engagement.
Customer Retention Strategies Examples
Let’s look at some of the customer retention programs organized by famous businesses and brands. These examples can give you a general understanding of how they approach the existing clients and the matter of their brand loyalty. Here are customer retention ideas that you can use as an inspiration for your plans.
Thank-You Email Series by Paravel
The simplest way to connect with a client after they finalized a purchase is to follow up with a thank-you message. Let your client know that your connection isn’t over as soon as they check out, and that you appreciate their choice of your brand. This example of customer retention campaign by Paravel show the correct way to do it. The ecommerce thank-you email is unique since it begins with a brief note of appreciation and contains only images—no text—in the body. Using actual customers and scenarios gives the email more excitement and personalization, which increases reader engagement. The email promotes repeat business by bringing up the positive experiences that clients have had.
Achievement Point from Xbox
Rewards, bonuses or other incentives is something that every client likes to see. In this regard, Xbox does a great job of maintaining community engagement by awarding points to players for accomplishments that can be exchanged for game discounts. Friends lists, achievements, and notifications are some of the features that entice users to log in and play longer. This customer retention strategy example is both profitable for Microsoft and produces a great customer experience.
Amazon Prime’s Exemplary Customer Support
Great support service is a key to returning clients who are pleased to make deals with your business. Big players like Amazon managed to become what they are partially because of a wide structure of customer support. They provide a variety of channels for support, such as chat, email, and phone, all of which guarantee user comfort and convenience which we listed as top practices to keep clients. This is a great customer retention example when, thanks to successful strategy, customers greatly appreciate the company’s focus on offering a flawless experience. Consequently, in 2024, Amazon’s Prime membership retention rate was 98%.
Rewards Program by Princess Polly
Another customer retention program example is Princess Polly’s tiered rewards plan. This Gen-Z-focused apparel brand offers points for acts such as following on social media and referring friends. This rewards program helps the brand enhance retention and customer lifetime value. The tiers offer varying benefits, ranging from General Admission to Backstage Pass. For example, a 15% discount is automatically applied to new members who are registered in the General Admission tier of their tiered loyalty program. They also combine it with the power of email marketing by sending subsequent emails to regularly remind subscribers of their current tier and available benefits.
FAQ
What is client retention?
The ability of a business to keep consumers as repeat clients and keep them from moving to a rival is known as customer retention. It shows whether the caliber of your service and goods satisfy your current clientele. Additionally, it is essential to the majority of subscription-based businesses and service providers.
What is the key factor for retaining customers?
The key to successful customer retention solutions is to examine your complete customer journey, or all the thoughts and emotions that consumers have about your brand. The settlement of support tickets and a business’s communication of its values are two examples of customer-facing interactions that have an impact on a buyer’s engagement with a brand.
How to know that you need to improve customer retention rate?
You can use the following formula to find your customer retention rate (CRR), which takes into account the clients you had at the beginning (S), end (E), and during the measurement period (N). This is how it appears: ((E-N)/S) x 100 equals CRR.
Your industry will determine your desired CRR. Still, 35% to 84% is generally seen as a respectable retention rate.
