How to Keep Your Customers In 2020
Author: Nikki Barnett Date Posted:11 May 2020
10 Essential Ways to Ensure You Retain Customers in 2020
As we move towards the half-year point, most company’s thoughts turn towards ways of improving the customer experience. Retaining them is critical, as nearly a third say they will not return to a brand if they have just one poor quality experience.
The reverse is true when they receive a wide range of great services, as existing customers then tend to return frequently and spend more money.
Here at The Hamper Emporium, we believe customer retention is even more valuable than gaining new ones. While you might not be in a position to fix everything all at once, identifying and improving the things that matter most to existing customers is vital.
Customers, Please Come Back!
The definition of customer retention is turning one-time buyers into repeat customers by engagement. It varies from generating leads or customer acquisition because these are existing customers that have been converted at least once. Tempting them to continue buying products involves a variety of tactics to forge lasting relationships, from surveys to corporate gift bags.
This breeds consumer brand loyalty, and hopefully, they will spread the word.
The strategies, methods and goals will vary between industries. However, for all markets, the concept is always to provide high quality products and customer service levels that keep clients returning for more.
Let’s take a look at just some of the benefits:
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Provides an opportunity to build long-lasting, constructive relationships
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Builds your overall reputation with referrals by loyal customers
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Increases brand awareness by word-of-mouth and media sharing
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Returning customers are known to be willing to try out new products
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Reliable feedback allows you to better identify issues and fix them
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Regular customers are more understanding and forgiving of mistakes
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Harvard studies show 5% increase in retention can increase profit by over 25%
10 Ways of Improving Your Customer Experience
Improving customer experience impacts across a wide range of areas in your business. You may think that customer service and the overall experience are the same things, or interchangeable. But, we believe that one is just a point of contact with your brand, and the other impacts directly on customer feelings and covers their entire journey.
Providing consistently high quality experiences that delight your customers is crucial. It’s also an extremely important step towards genuinely becoming customer-centric.
Understanding Your Customers
If your business is fully to understand what your existing customers want and need, you must be able to connect with them and empathise. Focus all your initial efforts on loyal customers and try to establish precisely what motivates them. You can even segment them and develop marketing personas, by identifying their unique characteristics. Then, your support team can recognise them easily and design a tailored experience.
Communicating the Way Customers Want
In an omnichannel world, it’s vital to be able to respond to customers the way they want. That could be telephone, email, text, live chat or social media. Customers need to experience a seamless and consistent high quality service across all platforms. You also need to be available whenever they want too, which means 24/7. If this is not practical, then you must create content that serves your customers, including FAQs, articles or chatbots that can provide answers and resolutions.
Building Lasting Relationships
It’s all too easy for your customers to be tempted by another brand’s quality products. Ensuring consistent and regular communication is vital. This includes other efforts like newsletters, advertising, SMS and email marketing, together with social media. Setting realistic expectations is an important factor too. Connecting with customers by using educational articles, updates on new products, and useful information are all effective tools for building lasting relationships.
Rewarding Client Loyalty
Creating a customer reward scheme or loyalty programme is also effective in increasing customer retention rates. These develop a relationship by giving them an incentive to return and making customers feel special. This type of royal treatment could include previews of new products, exclusive offers or discount deals. Making customers feel special and emotionally-connected can mean they spend 2.5x more. So it’s well worth rewarding loyalty when you buy gift vouchers, gift bags or corporate hampers.
Monitoring Your Social Channels
There are few better ways than social media for remaining in your customer’s minds. Engaging them should be a big part of your retention strategy and it provides the perfect medium. It should be embedded into their overall journey and monitored constantly. Customers are great at sharing but will also complain, so make sure to watch for any concerning signs. Deal with these publicly and quickly so that you demonstrate your high quality and proactive customer service.
Paying Attention to Surveys and Questions
Because we design our customer journey, it’s all too easy not to recognise when things are going wrong. But our customers can, and do. Paying close attention to the questions asked, any complaints and your survey results, is a great way to improve retention. Listening to customers and completing regular surveys about their experiences is all-important. These tools help you uncover unknown issues, implement the highest standards, and personalise your customer experience.
Engaging Clients with Email
Every email can help you to retain existing customers, whatever its content. They can help by setting expectations about your products and processes. They can say a big thank you too. Emails are a great opportunity for engaging customers with new products, special offers and useful information. Learning about your customers can help to create groups based on products, spend, discounts or demographics. These enable you to target emails specifically to a particular group and improve their journey.
Marketing Targeting Interests
Whenever you are marketing, by whatever route, these materials need to closely track your customer’s main interests. Looking to increase the retention rate means this needs to be aligned clearly with the things which hooked them in the first place. If you’re planning new content for social media, the same principle applies. Why did your followers like your original high quality content? When implementing strategies for customer retention, they should always be led by what your customers find interesting.
Displaying Social Responsibility
As high retention rates are linked directly to customers being emotionally involved, there is another important factor. Their shopping experience does not only include things like quality products, price and communication. Nowadays, it is also linked to social responsibility. Make them feel good about this and it will have a direct sales impact. Let them know that you are helping those in need or support a worthy cause. When you are viewed as a brand that cares about the world around you, customers will come back.
Being Transparently Honest
Our last strategy is an extremely simple one, and very easy to implement and stick to. It’s something that existing customers value more than anything else. Always be honest. Most people have had bad experiences and when this happens they quickly lose trust. So, ensure that you are transparent with everything, from products to purchasing. Providing your customers with honest information is an experience they will remember.
Customers Like Companies Who Value Them
Smart entrepreneurs and business owners understand that valuing customers is the first step towards keeping them. So, why not take that first step today and give your best customers a positive experience? Check out our full range of gorgeous gift boxes online, add some sophisticated corporate gift packaging and really make their day!
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