Keep your customers coming back!

In these difficult economic times, businesses will have to work harder to invite their
Customers back to do business or make purchases. If you do not give some good reasons to your customer to stay with you, your competitors will give them good reasons to leave.

The profitability of a business depends obviously on customer retention and satisfaction. Keeping your current customers is much easier and far less expensive than it is to get new customers or clients. Marketing surveys across the world confirm that keeping one existing customer is about five times more profitable than attracting one new one. To get a new customer, you have to convince someone who doesn’t know you. He or she has no particular reason to trust you. Why they will take a chance on you? Normally, a person will have to see or hear your message for a number of times before even considering you. Winning a new customer is literally a struggle.

With an existing customer, you have already done the hardest part of successfully winning your customer’s trust and confidence. At this point, you need a good customer retention strategy to have customers stay with you. You need to build a good rapport with your customers and make them feel special and valued.

Customer retention marketing
The aim of customer retention marketing is to convert buyers into loyal, long term customers. Loyal customers will return to you without even considering alternatives. Of course loyalty also has a lot to do with your company’s continuous delivery of superior value. The business must first satisfy the customer repeatedly to win customer loyalty. Customer loyalty plays a major role in sustaining profit growth.

For business, customer retention marketing is more than just an important consideration. It is easy to sell something to anybody once but the trick is to do it again and again. Top companies are able to create successful customer retention marketing plans and execute them accordingly

Here are some key principles –

Customers will return to you if they are happy and feel valued.
Marketers can take advantage of this behavior by offering promotions of various types. Promotion can be of different types starting from discounts and sweepstakes to loyalty programs and higher concept approaches such as thank-you notes and birthday cards. Promotions influence behavior such as offering announcements of special sales for loyal customers, or giving discounts to customers who return within a very limited time frame to use your services..

Businesses need to keep and analyze customer buying behavior.
Let’s take an example of some average customer behavior. Calculate the number of days between the first and the second purchases of every customer who has made at least two purchases. Suppose you find it to be 30 days. If a customer does not make second purchase within 30 days after the first one, you should react by organizing a promotion..

Customer retention marketing necessitates allocating marketing resources. You have to recognize some marketing activities and customers that will generate higher profits than others. One way to shrink your budget is to steadily allocate more of your marketing budget to more efforts with loyal customers. When you have a choice, instead of spending the same amount of marketing money on each customer, you spend more on some, and less on others. Customer retention marketing is all about allocating resources to the most profitable promotions, and them delivering them to the right customer at the right time. Customer data helps to reach the predictably known buyers, and saves lot of time and money on unprofitable marketing activities.

Your frontline staff needs to understand the importance of Customer Retention. You need to remind those who deal directly with your customers how much each customer is worth to your business. All business profits are ultimately earned from conducting successful relationships with customers. Customer retention plans helps to keep existing customers content and first-time customers coming back for more.

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