How to Craft a Tenacious Strategy to Improve Customer Retention Online

Did you know that only 13% of consumers are loyal to a brand and the remaining 87% shop from all around? So, it’s crucial for businesses to build relationships with their customers and increase customer retention. Rather than simply focusing on acquiring new customers, customer retention is a cost-effective strategy to grow your business.

A common practice to increase customer retention is to have a dedicated customer support team. However, a successful customer retention strategy involves more than just attending to calls from customers. You need to also send them personalized emails, introduce loyalty programs, and create educational content for your customers.

In this post, we’ll talk about some effective customer retention strategies:

1. Personalize Your Emails Marketing

Email marketing has always been a powerful marketing strategy. In fact, email campaigns have been known to generate the highest median ROI of up to 23%.

The infographic created by Post Funnel is proving that personalized email marketing campaigns can do wonders for your customer retention strategies. Personalization can increase sales, email click-through rates, and customer satisfaction. In fact, 56% of marketers have reported an increase in sales and 58% of marketers reported an increase in customer satisfaction with personalization.

The numbers clearly indicate and emphasize the power of personalized email marketing.

Image Source – The State of Digital Personalisation, 2016

However, what’s important to note is that personalization isn’t just limited to sending an email to your customers addressing them by their first name. Effective personalization of emails involves much more than this.

You need to customize your emails to your customers based on their interests. In fact, 52% of B2C customers and 65% of B2B customers are likely to switch brands if they don’t receive personalized recommendations.

For example, Amazon sends personalized emails to their customers based on their browsing histories or past purchase histories.

Image Source – Amazon

2. Make Online Navigation Easy for Customers

You need to keep your website navigation simple and easy. This will help you improve the product search experience for your customers. And that can lead to an increase in your online customer retention rate.

Customers who know what they want to search on your website can use the search bar. But customers who don’t know what they want or are first-time visitors, they rely on your website navigation. So, you need to make sure that the navigation is convenient and easy to understand.

Also, categorize your products into different groups and display them in the navigation bar. However, don’t create too many product groups as this will lead to nothing but confusion.

Below is a screenshot from the Nike website. And you can see how systematically they have categorized their products into different groups.

Image Source – Nike

3. Have a Customer Loyalty Program

One of the smartest and most effective ways to increase customer retention is to introduce a customer loyalty program. There are many customer loyalty programs to select from such as loyalty bonuses, rewards, customer referrals, and/or user-generated content (UGC). When done correctly, these programs can nurture your relationships with customers and increase the retention rate.

You need to identify and reward customers who are loyal to your brand, You can also ask them to refer your brand to their friends and families in exchange for rewards.

The online footwear brand, Kuru, implemented a rewards program for their loyal customers. As part of the program, customers earn points when they write a review and give referrals.

Image Source – Yotpo.com

4. Create Educational Content About Your Product

Once your customer has purchased products from you or has signed up for a service, you need to send them informative and educative emails. Quick information about your products or services will guide your customers and help them learn their uses and functions better.

These educational emails need to contain basic information or training on how to use your services or products. This can help your customers solve the issues or problems they discover while using your services or products.

For example, online advertiser, Outbrain, sends a series of training content to their customers via email. The training material guides customers on how to start using their advertising services which is available on their platform.

Image Source – mention.com

5. Share User-Generated Content on Social Media

Some brands underestimate the power of user-generated content, however, this can be a very effective customer retention strategy. UGC also helps to provide social proof which can help you build customer loyalty. In fact, 93% of consumer purchases are driven by user reviews and feedback.

Brand sentiment can also significantly increase when you share user-generated content on your social media accounts. It showcases that your customers perceive your brand favorably. And this can help you win the loyalty of your customers as well as acquire new ones.

Here’s an example of how BMW leverages UGC on Instagram. BMW askes their followers to use the hashtag #BMWRepost and share photos of their BMW cars. BMW then reposts the best content on their Instagram account.

Image Source – Instagram

Final Thoughts

Customer retention is as important as customer acquisition for your business. In fact, it’s more cost-effective than acquiring new customers. And this is why your business needs to have a tenacious customer retention strategy.

To improve customer retention, you can personalize your emails to customers or share user-generated content on your social media accounts. You also need to create educational or informative videos about your products or services. Make sure that the navigation of your online store is easy. Customer loyalty programs can also help you improve customer retention.

Do you know of any other effective customer retention strategies? If so, please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.