15 Customer Retention Strategies That Still Work

Did you know that if you increase your customer retention efforts by 5%, it can help you boost your profits by 25%-95%?

That’s right; if you have the right customer retention strategies at your disposal, your business can also boost its profits by up to 95%! But in case you’ve been lacking such strategies and are losing customers every day, then we’d recommend you to read on.

Our blog focuses on exploring the right strategies that encourage your customers to stay with your brand for long and become loyal. In this quick guide, you’ll read:

What is Customer Retention?

Customer retention is a process where you try to make your customers stay with the brand for long. Your business comes up with activities that keep the customers engaged with the brand and lower the attrition rate in this process. It is also a key metric that helps your business measure customer loyalty.

In a nutshell, customer retention helps you gauge your ability as a business to keep the existing customers satisfied with the products and services, and encourage them to bring in more people to the business.

How Can Customer Retention Benefit Your Business?

As read before, customer retention can enable your business to boost profits and acquire new customers. But other than that, there are other benefits that make customer retention a crucial aspect for your business.

• Improves Online Brand Reputation

Did you know that a whopping 90% of customers are influenced by positive reviews when buying a product?

That’s right; customers feel more invested in a brand if they come across good reviews. For them to read amazing reviews about your services, it is important to keep your existing customers satisfied. Make sure that you always engage with them and are there to answer their questions as and when they have one.

With a great service experience, you can encourage customers to spread the good word about your brand. This is a great way to maintain a good reputation online and attract new prospects for the business.

• Increases Customer Acquisition

Another benefit that your business can gain from implementing the right customer retention strategies is acquiring new customers at a reduced cost. That’s right: customer retention can help you attract and acquire new customers to the business. “How’s that?” you may ask.

Well, when you retain customers, they become brand advocates. These advocates help you market your brand without actually investing in other strategies. Their reviews about your services are more than enough for prospects to get the hang of how your products can help them. This strategy enables your business to attract prospects and convert them into customers efficiently.

• Helps You Identify Improvement Opportunities

As you retain more customers, you get more insights on how you can further improve your services as per their needs. This not only leads to a higher customer satisfaction rate but also increases your chance to attract new customers for the brand. But for this to happen, you need to make sure that you capture feedback from customers regularly. This tactic will allow you to make changes to your product and build a better service experience as well.

How to Calculate Your Customer Retention Rate?

Now that we know what customer retention really means, it is time we understand how this metric can be calculated.

Here’s a quick formula to help you see how you can calculate your customer retention rate. You need the following data to calculate this metric. These are:

• Number of customers retained at the end of a period
• Number of customers acquired throughout that period of time
• Total number of customers gained at the beginning of the period

15 Unbeatable Customer Retention Strategies Your Business Can Adopt 

After getting We’ve listed 15 evergreen customer retention strategies to help you effectively gain all the benefits. clarity on how leading brands like Amazon, Adobe, and Starbucks are retaining their existing customers, it is time to identify the right strategies that can help you do the same. We’ve listed 15 evergreen customer retention strategies to help you effectively gain all the benefits. Let’s explore them one at a time below.

1. Always be Proactive with Feedback Collection

Your first step towards successful customer retention is collecting feedback regularly from your customers. There’s definitely a lot that your customers would like to express when using your services. While they are still on your website, ensure to collect their feedback at every possible opportunity. If they come for support services, capture their feedback via the platform they approach you from. 

For example, if you are speaking with customers via live chat, you can capture their feedback using a post-chat form. This will help you capture feedback once a live chat session comes to an end.

You can even add a feedback solution to your website that will help you understand if the information on your website is valuable to them during the browsing process or not. Tools like Qualaroo can be added on the website to capture feedback from customers in real-time and identify where you can improve your services as a brand.

Recommended Read: The Importance of Collecting Customer Feedback

2. Surprise Your Customers Once in a While

From sending in freebies to offering free access to new features, you should surprise your customers once in a while to increase their engagement with the brand. Beauty brands like Innisfree do not shy away from sending in their freebies to encourage customers to shop from them frequently.

They send in freebies with most of their orders with two things in mind:

• One, they can let the customers try their latest products through freebies and see how they react to it.
• Two, to build a satisfactory purchasing experience for customers every time they shop from their platform.

3. Be That “Dependable” Brand for Your Customers

By dependable, we mean offering your services to customers round the clock. That’s right; customers can have questions about your services or products at any time of the day. Even in the odd hours of the day, you need to make sure that the customer can reach out to your brand, ask their questions, and get an answer as soon as they can.

To make sure that you can offer your support services 24×7 to customers, you can make use of platforms like:

• Live Chat: Help your operators take up as many customer service questions as possible. Using live chat, your operators can manage more service queries when compared to phone support.
• Chatbot: Capture the support requests and resolve some of the common questions even in the absence of your support team with the help of chatbot
• Help Desk: Never miss out on a support email by using a help desk. Even if you end up missing a chat with customers, they can easily be converted into tickets.

Besides this, you can create a knowledge repository that your customers can always refer to before approaching your support team.

Also Read: A Comprehensive Guide to Building Customer Service Knowledge base

4. Take Customer Complaints Seriously

Imagine if 91% of customers, who are unhappy with a brand’s services, leave without complaining, then how many of your customers must have done the same. 

While there is no way to maintain a count for that, you can certainly capture complaints you receive before, during, or even after you offer your support services. They can help your business understand what reasons prompt customers to leave your brand or even consider a competitor’s services when considering your services. 

As you address customer complaints, ensure to offer some form of discount or add a free service that builds a seamless experience with your business the next time.

5. Think Beyond Speed, Think Quality

Another customer retention strategy that you need to focus on is building a quality service experience. True, customers look for speed, and they’d like faster responses when speaking with the support team. However, we can’t deny that, at one point, conversation quality would also play a pivotal role in customer satisfaction. 

That’s why avoid rushing your conversations with the customers and think about how you can offer a solution in a more detailed manner.

6. Find Ways to Personalize Customer’s Brand Journey

If you know how you can personalize your customer’s experience, you can easily encourage them to stay longer with your business. Here are a few ways you can personalize your customer’s journey with the brand.

• Recommend products to customers every time they visit your store.
• Share updates for product upgrades via email announcements.
• Let your creative marketing run wild. Create personalized campaigns based on customers’ experience with the brand so far.

• Use the customer’s history with the brand to your advantage when weaving a personalized support experience during call or chat.

Learn: Personalized Customer Experience: What, How, and Why

7. Be Accommodating About Returns, Refunds & Exchanges

There are times when your customers aren’t satisfied with the products they receive. In a situation like this, if you do not offer a return or exchange policy, they might never return to your brand. 

Here we’d recommend you to loosen up a little and make changes to your return, exchanges, or even refund policies. Amazon is yet again known for its organized returns or exchange policies. After a customer complains about a defective piece, they request their customers to share proof of the defective piece. Based on the images, they decide if they should release the refund for a particular purchase or not.

8. Schedule Sales & Online Events to Keep Engagement Alive

Did you know that 83% of marketers find webinars effective as they receive more than 40% engagement from the target audience?

Such online events are a great source for organizations to stay in touch with the customers and audience. This way, organizations let the customers know what’s up and coming that they can wait for. 

Webinars, in general, help you increase awareness and give you the opportunity to understand customer reactions in real-time. You can even schedule in-person sales events where you can announce new products you plan to bring for your customers. 

9. Leverage Newsletter Subscriptions to Your Advantage

From content distribution to sending in monthly updates, newsletters prove to be a vital aspect of the retention strategy. A study found that nearly 9 out of every 10 marketers use email marketing to distribute content organically.

This is a great method for you to keep your customers engaged with the brand. You can also keep them informed on how to improve their process further using updated content pieces or what they can look forward to in the coming month.

10. Reward Customers with an Unbeatable Loyalty Program

If customers are staying with your brand for long, it is important to reward them for their continued support to your brand. Send such customers access to your loyalty program for free.

By making them a member of the loyalty program, you can provide them access to the best offers and exclusive sale sneak-peek to help them know what all products would be a part of the discount. This will allow your long-standing customers to stay back and look forward to more offers they may encounter via the loyalty program.

11. Reward Customers for Spreading the Good Word

Did you know that positive reviews of customer service online are read 6% more than negative ones?

That means customers who are posting positive reviews about your brand are helping you reach more customers and increasing your efforts at acquisition. Such customers should be rewarded for spreading the good word about your brand. This way, you can encourage your customers to stay longer with your brand. Rewards can also help to encourage customers to share their experience so far with the brand. 

12. Build a Community to Keep Customers Engaged

From the discussion about what to do in case something doesn’t work to sharing normal concerns around the product, an online community helps your customers in a lot more ways than you can imagine. 

With an online community, you give your customers a platform where they can share their concerns or even good experiences with others. They can even help other customers to find a solution. 

Brands like Sephora find it insightful and enable them to reduce support questions faster. They use this online community to help their customers get beauty tips from others or even great product recommendations that they can try in the coming months.

13. Offer Incentives Your Customers Can’t Deny

Besides having freebies, a loyalty program, or even rewards for positive reviews, you need to come up with an incentive program that your customers can’t say no to. These incentives can be inclusive of a trial for free products or even free repair or exchange services in case there’s an issue with your products.

Apple uses this incentive to retain its customers to the brand. They replace their handset during the warranty period in case of any damages. This gives their customers the assurance to stay longer with them.

14. Keep Educating Your Customers

Another customer retention strategy you can adopt is building educational content that helps customers learn about your products and services in detail. With the right information that keeps updating as per the new changes, it’ll be easier for you to ensure that customers do not leave your brand.

Here’s what you can do to educate your customers about your business and its offerings.

• Build a knowledge base that educates them about your products and how they work.
• Create a quick course for customers who prefer the self-training process.
• Send emails that share educational content like blogs, podcasts, ebooks, whitepapers, and more.

15. Believe in a Mission Your Customer’s Can Relate To

It is important for a business to stand for a cause that customers can relate to. There are established brands that stand for a cause and build content that helps their customers understand how they plan to be a part of the change.

For example, Nike, in 2020, stood against racism. This wasn’t the first time they stood for the same cause. In 2018, they designed a campaign in support of Black Lives Matter with NFL player Colin Kaepernick. However, their campaign grew strong in 2020 when they came up with the slogan “For Once, Just Don’t Do It.” This slogan was to tell people that they shouldn’t turn their back on racist activities.

This resonated with a lot of people along with their existing customers and helped them to increase their existing satisfaction rate too.

Three Examples of Customer Retention Strategies From Popular Brands

Now that we’ve learned how customer retention can help your business gain some significant benefits, it is time to see how a few brands are experiencing the same. Please note that their strategies for retention may differ, but they are a great source of inspiration for you to move in the right direction.

Starbucks

One of the reasons why Starbucks customers keep returning even after having multiple complaints around the brand’s services is because their complaints get addressed the right way. As soon as they see a complaint around the order on any of their social media platforms or even via email, they make sure to reach out to the customer and offer a formal apology for the same. 

Next, they even try to offer the best possible solution or offer to make up for the bad experience the customer had and encourage them to return to their stores again.

Amazon

Amazon, a leading eCommerce platform, is known for having a higher customer retention rate. That’s right; they have built their services in such a way that their customers feel the need to return frequently to their brand. They have a great system of rewards and offers that encourage customers to shop more often from their online store. They even ask for information from customers to suggest them the right products via newsletter or every time they land on their website. This personalized service is one of the reasons why they can retain customers successfully.

Adobe

Another brand that we can get great takeaways from is Adobe. Adobe is known for offering stellar deals to customers before they decide to leave their services for real. Their deals are such that customers end up getting convinced and decide to stay with the brand a little longer. As you can see above, Adobe shows lucrative offers to their customers before they decide to leave them. This strategy has helped them retain customers for long and improved their reputation as well.

Build a Solid Strategy for Improved Customer Retention

If you had a time machine, you would undoubtedly travel back in time when a customer decided to leave your business. However, that’s certainly not possible (at least for now). But as you start noticing the signs like less number of purchases in a specific duration or hardly returning to your website to check what’s new, then you need to have a retention strategy in place.

With a better strategy, you can vouch the fact that customer retention will certainly improve over a period of time. And with better retention, you can see an increase in loyalty, advocacy, and acquisition of new customers.

In case you are having trouble figuring where to start, then we’d say start by capturing their feedback regularly, make yourself available 24×7, stand for a cause, and much more. To help you get started, we’ve listed 15 customer retention strategies that will help you build your own retention program hassle-free. We hope these help you out!