Every business owner understands the importance of learning as much as they can about their audience. It’s a part of every business plan to learn more about the consumer and how a business caters to a need or desire they may be lacking in their life, or a way in which they can enhance a customer’s life.
However, once you’ve gained new customers and clients, how do you retain them for life? Here are some tips to ensure you not only build your customer base but keep them coming back for more.
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Request Customer’s Feedback
As we said, your customer’s experience with your business is number one. If you’re looking for ways to improve and maintain your client retention, there is no better place to find that information than from them directly.
Sending out email surveys in return for a discount or freebie is a great way to start. Taking polls and asking questions on social media can provide a sense of community within your business.
At the end of the day, people want to feel valued. If you give them the means to contribute to your company, they’ll feel like their opinions matter and want to continue being involved. Otherwise, they’ll feel like they’re simply a walking, talking dollar sign which provides no incentive for them to stick around.
Keep Up With Digital Trends
Every client or customer is more than likely on social media. There are countless platforms for various types of individuals and businesses. LinkedIn is a professional networking platform and focuses more on B2B and recruiting. Facebook is a channel that focuses on building like-minded communities.
What many businesses fail to do, however, is keep up with digital trends. Social media and search engine algorithms are constantly changing and evolving for the sake of their audience and advertisers. So how do you stay on top of it all?
Say, for example, your company offers product labeling and you’ve been in business for several decades. Chances are, when your business first began, there wasn’t any digital platform to share your information. But now, with so much competition flooding the internet, your company will need to showcase its products and services to stand out and give yourself a competitive edge other companies may not have.
Not only can your business do this by creating a mobile and user-friendly website, but it can hyper-focus its social media attention on where its target audience is. TikTok probably wouldn’t be a great platform for managing your time as your ideal audience doesn’t spend most of their time there.
LinkedIn, however, is centered around B2B. It would be beneficial to focus your efforts on keeping up with how LinkedIn can transform your business and you can network with other companies that would need your services.
Because you are giving proper attention to the digital platforms that center around your audience, you’ll end up building better long-term relationships that can translate into returning customers.
Loyalty Programs
As your business evolves, you want to find a way to have your customers and clients evolve alongside you.
Loyalty programs provide incentives that only returning customers or members can access. This could be anything from earning points every time they make a purchase that can be used as a discount on a future purchase to grandfathering-in price points on memberships if the cost increases the following quarter.
Build a Community Through Education
Think of your company as a college. People are coming to you searching for knowledge and expertise on something they don’t know. Educational master classes or online tutorials could be an excellent way to build client retention. It not only diversifies your products and services portfolio, but also provides your customers with something long-lasting. This is the key to keep your customers coming back.
HubSpot, for example, provides online educational courses on marketing, sales, and customer service through their HubSpot Academy. These courses are incredibly useful to their clients but are generic enough that they still may need to utilize HubSpot’s paid services to give them an extra boost.
To sum it up, if you want to continue retaining clients, you have to focus on what the client wants and needs. How can you better serve them? Ask them directly how your company can improve and make them feel valued.
The longer you retain them, the more inclined they’ll be to share about your company with their networks, too.
