According to research, the average business has a retention rate of less than 20%. That means that most companies are churning — or losing — 80% of their customers over time. The consequences of this can be severe for your business. It results in lost revenue and wasted advertising dollars. The true path to having a successful product or brand is to reduce customer churn, so they stay around as repeat buyers.
Make sure you aren’t leaving profit on the table. Here are five powerful ways to serve your customers at a higher level (and keep them coming back for more) to help you.
1. Engage Your Customers More
One of the biggest mistakes companies make is failing to interact with their customers enough. By not reaching out to them occasionally, you will be out of sight and out of mind.
Eventually, this can result in your customers forgetting about your brand entirely.
As an example, most customers prefer at least one promotional email every month. So if you have subscribers sitting on your list, you should be engaging them with timely content. It could be a promotion, a question, a survey, or anything that keeps you top of mind.
Another method you can use is a simple phone call. Sometimes, speaking with a real person can make all the difference in the world.
Instead of just viewing you as another random business, they begin to see you as their partner in providing solutions for a particular problem. Real one-on-one communication never goes out of style.
2. Educate Your Market
Some products and services have a problem with market education. That doesn’t refer to the intelligence of your customers. That means that there is something that they don’t know or realize yet.
However, by educating them on this missing knowledge, they will come to see the true value of your offering.
For instance, someone looking to lose weight might not understand the specific advantages of using your product over the competitors’. By offering in-depth, relevant information, you can educate your market and increase brand loyalty.
Even within your market, there will be different education requirements. Someone at the “top of the funnel” might just be starting to realize that they have a problem that needs to be solved.
The farther down they go, the more information they will seek. So be sure to provide engaging content on your website and app if you have one. Speaking of which:
3. Improve Customer Service with a Mobile App
Providing top-tier customer service is key to reducing churn. People want to do business with companies they like and trust. Thus, by offering excellent service, you can win customers over for the long term.
A smart way to accomplish this is to develop a mobile app for your business. You can do this in-house, but often outsourcing this important function to experts will save you time, money, and hassle.
Having a mobile app allows you to control your brand messaging and communication style with your market. This way, you can design it in a specific way with your customers’ needs in mind.
It also reduces friction in terms of interacting with your brand. If your customers only have to click on your app to order another product or service from you, it’s much easier for them to become repeat customers.
Contrast this with having to remember your website URL or other information, and it becomes clear why an app is preferable.
You will be able to offer better customer service by communicating with them faster and responding to potential questions and issues.
Finally, the ability to offer select promotions and discounts right inside the app or create a push notification means that you can win new sales opportunities.
4. Implement Followup Systems
If you simply take your customers’ money and never communicate with them, don’t be surprised if you have high churn rates. Business is about relationships.
Yet, in all likelihood, you don’t have a specific followup procedure set in stone. This is a costly error that leaves a lot of money on the table.
Great followup is about leveraging and strengthening the relationship you have with your market. The more you structure and plan a followup campaign, the better you will become at keeping customers around.
Consider hiring an email marketing specialist to create email drip campaigns for people who have already purchased a product.
This also puts you in a position to upsell future promotions and products that increase your bottom line.
5. Innovate New Solutions
Your customers are human beings like anyone else. They are not just a number on a spreadsheet or database. That means that they get bored.
Even if you provide an amazing product that solves a real problem, people may grow used to some of its aspects.
Consider changing up various elements of your offer, such as:
- Color
- Size
- Flavor
- Price point
- Speed of delivery
- Delivery method
- Physical product vs. digital version
And much, much more.
You need to keep customers excited about your business. People are always looking for something new, even if it’s only a minor tweak.
But innovation is not done in a vacuum. Simply guessing what your market wants is a fast track to wasting your money.
Instead, consider surveying your existing customers and ask them what they would change or improve about your product.
This simple action will give you immense insight into what your customers are thinking. And if you can be a mind reader, you can retain business at a much higher level.
Wrapping Up
No matter what product or service you provide, reducing customer churn is a top priority. In business, the real money is made on the backend.
You can scale larger and faster by spending the same amount of money on marketing yet retaining more customers — and, therefore, revenue.
So don’t miss out on 80% of your repeat customers. Use the five strategies above and start building long term relationships with your target market.
Ashley Wilson is a content creator, writing about business and tech. She has been known to reference movies in casual conversation and enjoys baking homemade treats for her husband and their two felines, Lady and Gaga. You can get in touch with Ashley via Twitter.