Actionable Methods To Increase Customer Retention

Customer retention is the metric that drives brands into the realm of profitability. It’s the art of retaining a client once the onboarding process has happened and it determines how well your marketing strategy is performing along with what customers think of your finished product.

Your customer’s lifetime value is the metric of metrics.

Why?

Let’s give a simple situation of why customer retention is important. Say you own a vitamin brand and each bottle costs $50. After analyzing your ads across various platforms, you determine it takes $70 to acquire one customer. Now you may be thinking that you’re losing roughly $20 per sale.

You would be right if you did not factor in a customer’s lifetime value. Now let’s suppose that this customer that you acquired for $70 is happy with your vitamins and decides to purchase them again.

At this point, you sell 3 bottles of vitamins to this single customer over the course of three months. Because of this $70 worth of ad spend you have netted a profit of $140. Once the customer quits purchasing you still retain their data and try to find new ethical ways of pitching them upsells.

Not bad, right?

So let’s take a look at how you can increase customer retention…

Set The Right Expectations

Setting customer expectations is critically important for customer retention and it’s something a lot of businesses fail at because of false advertising. New businesses especially suffer from setting the wrong expectations because they’re so eager to win over new clientele.

You are setting your business up to fail when you set a standard that is higher than you can deliver through your ad creatives or content copy.

By not over-selling a product you can sell more of it to those who wanted it in truth from the start.

Make sure you are clear in your advertisements and terminology. False promises will lead to either a chargeback or simply quiet refusal to buy again. So now that $140 purchase turns into a $20 loss even though the customer did not complain.

Some companies increase customer retention by starting a trial program. If you can’t do a trial then try to set up a sample product, demo, or truthful case study.

This will give your potential customers the ability to experience your product before they purchase and can cut down on chargebacks, refunds, and unsatisfied customers leaving that you didn’t even know about.

Stress Test Your Supply Chain

This tip is especially important for E-commerce brands that are delivering products on the regular, but it also pertains to digital products. If you cannot deliver quickly in the 2020s then forget about it.

A study by DC Velocity found that 70% of consumers expected delivery within 1 week.

That does not mean a full seven-day week either! Remember that most deliveries happen between the days of Monday and Friday. For startups, that demands being able to order products in bulk and having a warehouse facility to mail domestically.

Customer retention has never relied on delivery time as much as it does now.

A great way to get started without a lot of costs is to find a pick and pack service. They specialize in being your logistics partner. You ship in bulk them, and they will pack down the boxes into deliverables. Your tag system can be integrated with their software stock allowing for quantifiable stock changes.

you’re selling a digital service or product remember that instant gratification defines Generation Z. The “now” factor is greater than the “wow” factor as we move into the 2030s.

Create Variations

For this method let’s take a popular business model, monthly box clubs. The reason they’ve done so well is that people enjoy the excitement of variety in their lives and now they’re expecting this from the products they purchase and the brands that offer them.

There’s a reason why there must be a new phone release for big brands even if the technology has not changed that much.

Repeat after me…

Society.
Craves.
Change.

For good or worse change is the driving force behind much of society.

Going forward your brand needs to be dynamic and not fall into the pit of stagnation. Let’s say you sell a pencil box, and it comes in two colors. When you first released it the pencil box was a hit and you made pretty good money. Fast forward and it’s not selling so well…

Why?

Fatigue happens even to the best of consumers. To fix matters you can create a new design out of an old product and do a small relaunch. By doing this you will instill a newfound love for old products and leverage data you have already on previous customers.

Conclusion (Bonus)

Performance marketing strongly relies on a customer’s lifetime value. As a bonus, you should make sure to change your ad copy so that ad blindness does not set in on your target audience. With a dynamic approach, you can increase your customer retention rates and turn a failing campaign into a profitable one.

What is your tip to create higher customer retention rates?