Marketing team reviewing digital strategy.
What happens if you gain 10 new customers but lose 20 of your existing customer base? The net result is clearly not positive, and if the trend continues, your company’s market share will decline. Even if your bottom line is balanced, the business is not increasing its revenue. In the long term, this can challenge a company’s ability to compete and innovate.
Focusing too much on adding customers to the list causes marketers to neglect a company’s greatest asset: its current customers. Your company neglects these important individuals at your peril. It’s great that they have already subscribed to your service or purchased something from you online. But customers need a reason to stay, as you’re probably not the only attractive option.
Therefore, a vital piece of any company’s marketing arsenal is digital strategies aimed at keeping customers on board. The trick is to execute plans with more long-term potential than short-term potential. Let’s look at three of them below.
1. Keep them interested with engaging content
Need another reason to take a second look at your online content? Well, you found it. Effective customer retention strategies will be difficult to execute without a captivating attraction. The difference here is that you want your content to keep customers interested in what you can offer them.
Instead of introducing people to who you are, you’re finding ways to re-engage them. Digital marketers who leverage content well with existing customers use it as a relationship-building tool. They determine what stage of relationship various customer segments are at and distribute different materials accordingly.
Customers who haven’t made a purchase in months may need a reminder of why they value specific products. However, more consistent shoppers may respond better to information about how to improve their experience. Let’s say this segment’s data reveals that their interests include self-improvement techniques. Regardless of what your business sells, you can make a self-improvement podcast available through your ordering app to drive those customers back.
2. Make It Personal
The statistics on personalized customer experiences don’t lie. About 71% of shoppers expect personalization from the brands they do business with. Approximately 76% of consumers are frustrated when their experiences aren’t unique enough.
What does this mean for digital marketing strategies focused on customer retention? This means that generic approaches will not work. Everything from emails to product recommendations must use customer data. Customers don’t want to feel like they’re just another transaction. They are also less likely to respond well to emails advertising irrelevant promotions or products.
If your customer’s data isn’t up to date, getting it should be a priority. Otherwise, your customization efforts will be like putting the cart before the horse. Once you have reliable insights into your customers’ behaviors, interests, and preferences, you can deliver personalized experiences. This could include emails with discounts based on past purchases or how-to guides on existing products.
3. Start a conversation
Whatever the relationship, nobody likes to feel ignored. When the other side doesn’t seem to be listening, it can motivate people to leave. Not feeling heard is why spouses sign separation papers, employees hand in their resignation notices, and customers flock to competitors.
When a business doesn’t do much more than sell products, customers can think they’re just a number. They have little reason to keep shelling out their hard-earned cash, especially if the company doesn’t ask for feedback. Giving customers the chance to voice their opinions through surveys and online communities is a start. But acting on these concerns is more important because the lack of response makes voicing them seem like a waste of time.
Customers who indicate dissatisfaction in an online survey deserve individual follow-up. The conversation can reveal a problem with a simple fix. Let’s say you provide internet service and communicate the status of outages through an app. While this is convenient, what happens if the app doesn’t allow customers to speak with a live representative about a more complex outage? Adding a feature to allow questions to be asked of a person shows that customer input matters.
Social media is another avenue for feedback and personal conversation. Thread-driven communities are a way to interact with customers, gather insights, and respond to concerns. Such interactions demonstrate a willingness to treat customers as human beings with individual needs.
inspiring loyalty
Retaining customers is loyalty. Digital marketing strategies must be personal enough to make customers feel seen, valued and heard. Without these critical elements, a company’s campaigns can become a liability rather than a tool that delivers results. Marketers willing to increase their retention efforts are more likely to realize the bottom line they seek.