Essential Marketing Tips to Improve Customer Retention

Marketing professionals have been in charge of customer acquisition, but their focus is likely to change on improving customer retention, according to Gartner. If demand generation used to be both sales and marketing initiatives, it’s now falling under the marketing department to engage and retain customers.

To improve customer retention for your business, you need to look at all the channels you use in your customer engagement strategy and identify gaps and opportunities to improve performance.

To build a sustainable customer retention program keep reading the following marketing tips.

Optimize the use of technology

New technologies and tools have reinvented many, if not all industries. While improving customer experiences, technology has also increased customer lifetime value (LTV) in a way that drives revenue.

Integration of new technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AO), Machine Learning (ML), AR (Augmented Reality), and other software can very easily:

• Solve poor customer service issues
• Drive your marketing strategy efforts
• Make your employees work smarter
• Offer self-service options
• Adopt agile methodologies at work
• Increase your overall business efficiency

With statistics showing that 82% of customers have refused to collaborate with brands because of bad customer service, it’s time for businesses to improve this aspect.

AI and ML technologies can analyze your customers’ data and predict their needs, pains, wants, etc. this is incredibly helpful when designing customer journeys.

The power of data allows companies to do a lot of predictive analysis that can be a crucial factor in improving customer retention rates.

Automate customer conversations

Traditional forms of communication such as calling customers or sending emails, or contacting them via post are known to be impersonal and old-fashioned.
With the rise of digital transformation programs, more companies are looking at implementing digitization.

Nowadays, the only communication that truly engages customers is conversational messaging. Known to automate customer support, conversational messaging can free up time in your team.

Agents can focus on important tasks and priority customer needs than spending time manually responding to customer queries.

Automated customer support is great because no matter your business hours, customers can always get the help they need 24/7.

Improve customer journeys

Improving customer journeys can be challenging. But it’s also truly rewarding for marketers to see the impact a well-thought journey can make for the business. The most important things you can do are mentioned below.

Define customer retention objectives

In our case, customer retention is our primary goal. So we want more visits to the site, more engagement on social media, more problem resolution, and increased revenue.

What we need to do is segment our audience better for our marketing messaging to be personal.

Preventing cart abandonment is another step you must take in designing a better experience. Analyze past shopping behaviours and customer interest to identify how you can create more personalized marketing campaigns.

Look at your existing customer journeys

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and go through each step and interaction. Check all the demo sign-ups, booking appointments, or landing pages.

When are your customers receiving the information? Is it instant or after a while? Based on their download and interest shown on the site, do you personalize future content based on their intent?

Are there any friction points that you should be aware of? There might be a broken link or an agent who seems online for chat support but isn’t.

Implement new customer touchpoints

Now that you know how your existing customer journeys are performing, it’s easier to improve them.

Customer journeys include many customer touchpoints that make up the whole customer experience. In many cases, marketing teams forget to insert important customer touchpoints.

For example, trigger customer feedback after your customers contact customer support and get their resolutions. Surveys could improve your ratings and testimonials.

Allow customers to switch channels when they feel like they are not getting the best customer service. In fact, 74% of them have used multiple channels to start and complete a transaction. This is easily done with an omnichannel communication strategy.

Analyze results and optimize

Managing end-to-end customer journeys can be difficult but not impossible. Understand how your customers navigate through the experiences with your brand to make improvements.

Build an understanding of what’s working and what’s not. Predict customer needs and correct them.

If you know that your contact centre receives many low-value inbound calls regarding outstanding balances or missed deliveries, then look at ways to automate messages. Solve this with rich media messaging or automated voice calls.

After you’ve redesigned a new customer journey, track everything. All the successes and shortfalls should be teachings. Optimize customer journeys as you go and be open to new ideas.

Personalize Everything

80% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company that provides a tailored experience.

Whether that’s custom advertising or a text message, you need to personalize it. Sending relevant and personal marketing messages is what will set you apart from the competition.

Your customers will feel valued when they see that your brand pays attention to the channels they prefer to be contacted. Or the time of day they can pick up the phone.

Also, keeping their information accurate will help you in crafting your messages. Make sure you have their right title, name, email address.

Did you know that 42% of customers are frustrated by impersonalized content? Connect your audience to the right content so they can consume the right messaging. There’s no doubt that content marketing can grow your business, so take your time developing a good strategy and calendar.

Improve Customer Retention Rates

Building and maintaining a good relationship with your customers takes time. Make sure your company has your business objectives aligned so that you can invest in the right opportunities.

Customer retention can save you a lot of money when looking at the overall customer life cycle, so remember to use the right customer engagement tools.

Transparent communications with your customers have proved to be very effective for brand loyalty, so make sure your messages are delivered empathetically.

Lastly, be patient as this process takes time. It can take as much as decades. Remember that your business grows with your customers, so always be receptive to innovation and new customer engagement programs.