How to engage and retain existing customers

Leads, customers, and sales are the three most important goals of every business. If you want yours to thrive, you must take care of your most important asset – customers. However, most people are obsessed with creating leads and don’t think a lot about customer retention. Getting new leads is always a good thing. But, your primary focus should be to engage retain existing customers.

The reason for this is simple. Researches have shown that more than 65% of sales come from existing customers. You can’t really rely on people who stumble on your website, place an order and leave immediately. A loyal customer base has a lot more power than that.

Now, we’re not saying that you shouldn’t look into tactics for increasing website sales. These things are still important. However, you want to concentrate on bringing the existing customers back. If you increase customer retention by as little as 5%, you can expect at least a 70% increase in profits. So, here’s a couple of ideas on how you can do it.

Offer surprises

Almost every person in the world looks forward to great surprises on their birthdays. And there’s nothing strange about that. So, why wouldn’t you do the same with your customers?

If you want to nurture them, think of a valuable offer that you can give to them, but without their knowledge. If they don’t expect anything, they’ll be touched by a sudden surprise. And the best thing about these is that they don’t have to cost you a fortune. Some companies send handwritten notes to their customers, and the customers love it. It’s a big sacrifice to write to every person manually. However, it shows how much the brand values them. And that’s the only important thing.

Therefore, to make your customers stay with you and continue trusting your brand, you should go beyond the normal service. Surprises will motivate them. And you don’t have to do much more besides showing appreciation. This will make them feel like they’re part of something bigger, and that’s exactly what you want.

Offer them gifts or discounts they don’t expect. This will change the way your customers look at your business. And if you combine that with different ways to boost user engagement on your website, you will see plenty of benefits.

Build trust with relationships

Every successful business is built on trust. Now look at it this way, there are only two persons in your business – you and the customer. If there’s no trust between you, the business will die.

And when you realize how important trust is to any business, you must make attempts to promote it. So, make sure to give both your existing and new customers a chance to trust you when you initiate a relationship. You can use customer behavior data to deliver value to your product. If you do everything properly, your customers will nod and accept your recommendations. And that’s something you should stream to.

A bad experience is what scares your customers the most. If they find out you’re not trustworthy, they’ll immediately switch to your competitors. An even worse thing is that they’ll spread the news to other customers.

On the other hand, the commitment of your customers will exponentially increase with trust. Surveys show that more than 80% of the customers will recommend your brand to their friends and family if they trust it. It goes without saying that you can count on these people to stick to it as well.

Re-engage customers with automation

Automation is a good thing. It allows you to handle some of your routines automatically with software. So, it can be a useful tool when you want to engage and retain existing customers. Marketing automation is certainly the most popular example.

Trying to monitor your customers manually is a time-consuming task, and no one has time to do it. If you want to keep your brand fresh in their minds, there are many processes that you need to repeat every day. So, automation makes it a lot easier. However, there are still challenges when it comes to marketing automation.

The basic idea is to use automation to re-engage your existing customers. Of course, you can do this manually. But, with automation, you can communicate stronger, faster, and easier. And there are a few ways you can go here.

You can choose to send useful email newsletters to your customers each week, or you can decide to send an SMS to each new customer. These are things that you can’t handle manually. Another great example is to use an application like ConvertMore to convert website visits into calls. Although it still requires manual labor of talking to the customers, it gives the best results.

Use feedback surveys

We all know what surveys are, and to many of us, they may look boring. However, people seem to like them a lot. And that certainly is a good thing as they can be a powerful tool for building customer engagement.

If you decide to do an email survey, you can expect a response rate of around 25%. This is a good percentage, so we’ll list some of the benefits associated with them.

• They draw valid client interaction.
• Your customers have a chance to speak out their minds.
• Your customers get a chance to be involved and give directions for the right adjustments.
• You can alter your email campaigns according to the results.

Obviously, hearing from your customers directly gives you plenty of ”insights”. You will be able to make adjustments where needed and cement the things you’re doing correctly. Additionally, you’ll gather some vital information about creating engaging CTAs. So, you can learn a lot from them.

The important thing to remember here is not to frown when your customers complain. Be patient and hear what they have to say. With these pieces of information, you can engage and retain existing customers much easier. This is what will turn your business from mediocre to a respected brand.