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Marketing team reviewing digital strategy.
getty
What happens if you gain 10 new customers but lose 20 from your existing client base? The net result clearly isn’t positive, and if the trend continues, your company’s market share will shrink. Even if your net results were break-even, the business isn’t growing its revenue. In the long term, this can challenge a company’s ability to compete and innovate.
Focusing too much on adding clients to the roster causes marketers to overlook a business’s greatest asset: its current customers. Your company neglects these important individuals at its peril. It’s great that they already signed up for your service or bought something from you online. But customers need a reason to stay, since you’re probably not their only appealing option.
Therefore, a vital piece of any company’s marketing arsenal is digital strategies that aim to keep customers onboard. The trick is to execute plans with more long-term 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’ve found it. Effective customer retention strategies will be difficult to execute without a captivating pull. The difference here is you want your content to keep clients interested in what you can offer.
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 relationship stage various customer segments are in and distribute different materials accordingly.
Clients who haven’t made a purchase in months might need a reminder of why they value specific products. However, more consistent buyers may respond better to information about enhancing their experiences. Say this segment’s data reveals their interests include self-improvement techniques. Regardless of what your business sells, you could make a self-improvement podcast available through your ordering app to pull these clients back in.
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. Roughly 76% of consumers grow frustrated when their experiences aren’t unique enough.
What does this mean for digital marketing strategies that focus on customer retention? It means generic approaches won’t fly. Everything from emails to product recommendations must use client data. Customers don’t want to feel as though they’re just another transaction. They’re also less likely to respond well to email blasts advertising irrelevant promotions or products.
If your customer data isn’t up to par, getting it there should be a top priority. Otherwise, your personalization efforts will be like putting the cart before the horse. Once you’ve got reliable information about your clients’ behaviors, interests and preferences, you can provide tailored experiences. These could include emails featuring discounts based on past purchases or how-to guides about existing products.
3. Strike Up a Conversation
Whatever the relationship, no one 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 turn in their resignation notices and customers flock to competitors.
When a business doesn’t do much more than push products, customers might think they’re just a number. They have little reason to keep forking over their hard-earned dollars, especially if a company doesn’t invite feedback. Giving clients a chance to voice their opinions through online communities and surveys is a start. But acting on those concerns is more important because a lack of response makes expressing them feel like a waste of time.
Customers who indicate dissatisfaction on an online survey deserve one-on-one follow-up. The conversation may uncover a problem with a simple fix. 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 let clients talk to a live rep about a more complex outage? Adding a feature to allow questions to go through to a person shows that customer input matters.
Social media is another avenue for feedback and personal conversation. Topic-driven communities are a way to interact with customers, collect insights and respond to concerns. Such interactions demonstrate a willingness to treat clients as humans with individual needs.
Inspiring Loyalty
Retaining customers is about building loyalty. Digital marketing strategies must be personal enough to make clients feel seen, valued and heard. Without these critical elements, a company’s campaigns can become a liability rather than a tool that drives results. Marketers willing to increase their retention efforts are more likely to achieve the net gains they’re after.
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