With stiff competition, customer retention remains a great way to achieve success in eCommerce. After all, one of the characteristics of the most successful online businesses is high customer retention rates. The reason why customer retention is very important is that the highest percentage of a company’s business comes from returning customers. It’s official and backed by statistics.To that effect, I thought I would share the top six fundamental strategies you can use to retain your customers. Are you ready for those? With that said, let’s get started:
1. Strengthen Your Customer Relationships
The first tip to retain your customers is to ensure a great relationship between your business and them. Nonetheless, there are many ways to strengthen the relationship with customer relationship management (CRM) app or software being one of them.
A reliable CRM management software will help you gain valuable insights into your customers’ behavior, buying habits, opinions, needs as well as preferences. With that information, it’s easy to modify your products, services, or business operations in a manner that’s in line with those.
The good news is that some top-rated website builders like Wix offer customer relationship management(CRM) plugins that allow you to do just that. Other builders such as WordPress, Site123, Squarespace, and Weebly support a wide range of customer relationship management software or apps.
2. Provide Exceptional Customer Support
Customer support remains a very important part of customer retention. Enabling your customers to make correct and cost-effective use of your product by helping them in various aspects including installation, troubleshooting, or maintenance in a friendly, and timely manner will surely set you apart from the rest.
Speaking of which integrating important customer support features like Live Chat into your website can be a great way to provide support to your customers promptly. A good website builder can help you do that effectively. You might want to take a moment to read this expert review of the top-rated software for creating a professional website in 2020 if you don’t mind.
Besides adding an easy-to-use Live Chat feature to your website, you should employ professionals to handle calls and emails from customers who seek support. Your customers’ calls shouldn’t go unanswered or take too long to get answered. The same applies to their emails.
3. Be Sure To Engage Your Customers During Key Events in Their Lives
There is no getting away from the fact that life has many events for everyone. Some events are happy while others can be very sad and life-changing. I’m talking about birthdays, life’s achievements, weddings, loss of jobs, deaths of loved ones, etc.
Being there for your customers during these events can make them connect to your brand at personal and emotional levels you never imagined. Simple acts of kindness like sending birthday wishes as well as congratulatory, consoling, or condolence messages can really go a long way in retaining your customers. By the way, that’s what customer life event marketing is all about.
Luckily, there are many tools you can use to know your customers’ key life events, thanks to social media. Mostly, these tools obtain the data from social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram to which consumers post. Some of these tools include Tableau, Hootsuite
4. Be Consistent in Providing Quality and Value
There is no getting away from the fact that offering quality isn’t a cheap affair. You get to spend more on superior raw materials and topnotch employees. Plus, you get to spend more time in producing each unit of the product or service than your competitors actually do. Because of that, your output remains suppressed and limited, which means lower profits–but only in the short-run though.[adsense]
But frankly speaking, choosing to not cut corners on quality is a very worthwhile sacrifice. After all, quality is an extremely critical part of satisfying your customers and retaining them. Once you solidify their loyalty, you can safely increase your prices without the risk of losing them. That’s how this sacrifice pays in the long-run.
5. Avoid Scandals and Public Backlashes
Scandals are very bad for business because they ruin a company’s reputation, turning off the ethical consumer. Just to prove it; in 2018, Ivanka Trump had to shut down her fashion brand, which had previously been quite successful. Reason? Sales dropped by almost 45%. Why? Because she took part in her father’s (President Trump) presidential campaign. After Trump was elected, rumors emerged suggesting that he got helped to win the election by Russia. This prompted an FBI investigation, which culminated in 2019 with Trump getting impeached by the congress.
As you can see, scandals and public backlashes can make you lose many customers, putting your business at the brink of shutting down. You need to build a strong reputation characterized by impeccable integrity, ethical and moral standards for your business without hesitating to let go of employees who aren’t willing to abide by those.
6. Create a Powerful Customer Loyalty Program
A loyalty program is one of the traditional ways of retaining customers. Typically, it entails presenting a loyalty card to customers, which earns redeemable points every time the cardholder buys your product or service. Then once the points reach a specified limit, the customer can use them to pay or get a discount for something at your store or another outlet, of course under certain terms and conditions. Customer loyalty programs really work and they are a very effective tool for not only retaining customers but also encouraging them to shop more.
Final Thoughts
There is no getting away from the fact that running a successful business nowadays can be extremely challenging, thanks to stiff competition everywhere. But with the right customer retention strategies, it’s easy to gain an edge over your competitors. These strategies are; strengthening your customer relationships, providing exceptional customer support, and being sure to engage your customers during key events in their lives, The remaining strategies are being consistent in providing quality and value, avoiding scandals and public backlashes not to mention creating a powerful customer loyalty program.
