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What is Customer Retention? Importance, Metrics, and Strategies

Businesses are working hard to attract customers through marketing, social media, and branding strategies. You’ve invested much time, money, and effort to earn your customers’ trust. It is where a strong focus on customer retention comes into play. 

To improve customer retention, you need to consider your customer experience. You will trust more customers by creating an experience that delights them. However, if your business doesn’t meet customer expectations, you may lose them before you have a chance to fix things.

In this blog, you will understand Customer Retention, its importance, key metrics, and Strategies.

What is Customer Retention?

Retaining Customers is about building relationships with existing customers, making every interaction count, and providing them with an unforgettable experience. It meets customer expectations and motivates them to return and repurchase your products or services.

That loyalty, in turn, means that the more they relate to you, the more value you can offer them, and the more they will reward you for the expense. As a result, you will increase each customer’s Life Value (CLV), the amount of revenue you will receive from them throughout your business relationship.

Ultimately, it’s about building your customer’s trust.

Why Retaining Customers is beneficial?

The main benefit of retention is increasing the amount of money you can earn from each customer. 

The benefits of retaining customers are as follows-

  • Increased Profitability: Many businesses derive most of their revenue from existing customers. Therefore focus on the area of ​​your business that is a priority. It will improve not only your income but also the success of your business.
  • Low Cost: Keeping an existing customer is way cheaper than acquiring a new one, which means a more affordable long-term plan.
  • Average Order Value: Low-value customers spend more time as their order value increases. It is because a slight increase in retention can lead to a considerable profit rise.
  • Best way to grow your business: Word of mouth is one of the best ways to grow your business. The more loyal your customers are, the more likely they share positive feedback and recommend your company to others.

Importance of Customer Retention

Increasing your retention rate is an opportunity to improve customer relationships, acquire new ones, and understand what people want from you.

1. Loyal customers tend to spend more

Once you convince a customer to buy from you for the first time, it will be easier for you to convince them to buy more from you. The more your customers buy from you, the more their orders will increase over time if they are happy with their purchase.

2. Focus on Customer Lifetime Value

Customer Lifetime Value focuses on the amount of money a customer will bring to your business when they are a paying customer. Typically, if you take the average order value of a customer, multiply it by their purchase frequency, and then multiply that by the customer’s average lifetime, you get their CLV. 

3. Develop customer loyalty

If you want to increase the likelihood that your customers will recommend your business to their friends, family, and co-workers, you want satisfied customers. Customer loyalty is key to generating new leads and word-of-mouth marketing opportunities.

4. Access to more data

When it comes to eCommerce business, data is essential to understand current and existing customers better so you can cater to their experience. The longer a customer stays, the more information you have, and the more you can learn about their buying habits. 

Key metrics for Retaining Customers

Your strategies for retaining customers should be driven by data rather than sales numbers that can quantify your efforts. Let’s look at some key metrics you can use to determine the retention rate of customers.

1. Attrition Rate

The attrition rate is the number of customers a company loses over some time relative to its existing customer base. To calculate the attrition rate, take the number of customers your company lost at the end of a specific period and divide it by the total number of customers at the beginning.

Attrition Rate = Number of customers lost at the end of a specific period/ Total number of customers at the beginning of that period.

2. Calculating Customer Retention Rate

To calculate, determine the number of customers you have over a period of time and subtract that number from the total number of customers at the end of the period. You then divide this number by the number of customers you had at the beginning of the period.

CR rate= (Total customers at the end of the period – new customer acquisition) / Customers at the beginning of the period * 100)

Various customer acquisition strategies can be used to acquire new Customers.

3. Repeat customer rate

The repeat customer rate measures the probability that an existing customer will make a purchase more than once.

To calculate your repeat customer rate, take the number of purchases made by more than one and divide it by the total number of unique customers.

4. Frequency of purchase

The purchase frequency formula is related to the customer repeat rate and represents the average number of orders for each customer. Take the same period used for your regular customer rate (such as a month or a quarter) and divide the number of charges by the number of unique customers.

5. Average Order Value (AOV)

The AOV shows the average cost per purchase. Use the same time for the buyback or repeat purchase rate and divide your total annual revenue by the number of orders completed.

Strategies for Retaining Customers

1. Excellent customer service

It may seem evident at first glance, but remember that what a company calls good customer service is not always what a customer calls good customer service. There is always a big difference in perception. Many organizations believe they are customer-centric, but only a few customers feel the same.

Here are some ways to take customer service to the next level:

  • Provide a unified and consistent experience. Customers should always feel they are receiving the same care and attention, whether you communicate with them by phone, email, or messaging service.
  • Provide multiple connection channels to meet different communication preferences.
  • Refer the suitable agents to the right customers and identify the best-qualified agent in the region by assessing the customers’ needs.

2. Collect feedback using customer surveys

The best way to find out what customers think about your business is by asking them. Gathering feedback through customer surveys and identifying potential complaints is a great starting point for understanding what needs to be improved in your online operations.

Customers appreciate it when you ask them what they think. You care about them and are willing to go the extra mile to wear them.

3. Build customer trust and long-term relationships

Building customer trust requires a strategic focus on all aspects of the customer experience. Deliver relevance and value at every customer journey stage to build lasting relationships.

Educate your customers on how to best use your product or service before and after purchase.

To resolve customer issues, you may do the following-

  • Provide excellent customer service and fast and accurate responses across multiple service channels.
  • Maintain a calendar of daily communication sessions across all channels.
  • Offer convenience with fast delivery, free returns, and mobile pickup.

4. Communicate with your customers

Communicating with customers through their chosen channels is key to retaining them online. Today, there are 3.9 billion email users worldwide, and while social media has grown in popularity, email remains the preferred communication tool for consumers. 

No matter where you interact with customers, it’s essential to be consistent and use your information for direct relevance.

Targeted email marketing is the best way to communicate effectively with your customers.

5. Use Marketing Automation to re-engage your customers

Today’s marketing automation technologies enable marketing teams to embrace all marketing strategies to keep operations streamlined. Re-engagement of customers is only one of these factors.

Marketing automation solutions should use artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML). With this, it becomes easier to re-engage your customers with personalized content.

Always study the marketing automation trends before applying them.

6. Be active in your community

Clients are becoming more socially aware, which means you can too. Clients look at whether your organization makes donations, whether its employees participate in community development initiatives, and with whom you communicate and collaborate. 

You don’t have to have an elaborate corporate social responsibility (CSR) program or donate to charity; there are easy ways to show that society cares. The key is to get creatively close to your brand.

7. Always look for ways to delight customers

Discounts and freebies are great ways to keep your customers happy, but they can be expensive. Instead of relying too heavily on these customers, you must embrace using small, thoughtful gestures.

It may seem small, but if you can make people feel good about using your product, they are more likely to stay.

8. Surprise and excitement about gamification

Surprise and joy have become a buzzword that gets thrown around a lot, but that’s because it works, and nowhere is that more evident than in gamification. Using game systems to motivate customers is very effective because it taps into people’s competitive nature and simultaneously emphasizes the brain’s reward center.

Gamification incorporates game technology to increase customer engagement, improve sales, and build brand loyalty. A game-based loyalty program benefits you and your customers by allowing you to engage with customers modernly.

Today’s games use customer analytics and create multi-step experiences, all of which are linked to increased value for the customer and business results for the brand.

9. Use Personalization

When it comes to individuals, people come first. Customers not only want to be treated like people through personalized recommendations and service, but they also want to see the humanity behind your brand.

You can use the best personalization software and tools to make the experience for the customer delightful.

10. Measure customer lifetime value

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) estimates the benefits of future interactions with your brand’s customers. Understanding CLV can help you move from a short-term business model focused on the next quarter’s profits to a long-term model that values ​​ongoing customer relationships.

The easiest way to calculate a customer’s CLV is to subtract the amount you spent to acquire and retain the customer from the customer-generated amount.

11. Onboarding

Recommendations vary depending on the specifics of your company, but the goal is to educate customers about your product and brand. You don’t want to tip them off about your business philosophy, but being too quiet can make customers feel ignored.

 When a customer buys your product, you can email them a summary of how they used the product and the customer service team, so they know who to contact if they have any issues.

Conclusion

There are many strategies for retaining customers, but there are no shortcuts. You can’t break personal relationships, so why should we think professional relationships are different?

The bottom line is that the above guidelines should hopefully give you some new ideas on approaching Customer Retention, but they aren’t rules. Use whatever suits your business and do it in the best possible way.

For more help on strategies and metrics to retain your customers, you can schedule a demo with NotifyVisitors.

FAQs

1. What are the top 3 ways to customer retention?

Here are the top 3 ways –
1. Know your customers better than they know themselves.
2. Be kind and respectful
3. Provide the service you expect

2. What are the challenges to retaining customers?

Challenge 1: Your offers lack specificity


Challenge2: Customers don’t feel valued


Challenge 3: Customers are not satisfied with your product


Challenge 4: You focus more on getting new customers than on repeat customers.

3. What metrics can we use to retain customers?

The metrics for retaining customers include calculating attrition, retention, and customer repeat rates.

Tanya

She is a content curator at NotifyVisitors. She writes SEO-friendly blogs and helps you understand the topic in a better way. Apart from writing, she likes to do painting and gardening.

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