In an article for Harvard Business Review, Amy Gallo explains that customer acquisition is at least five times costlier than customer retention. Yet this (rather self-evident) fact is entirely neglected by nearly 44% of companies.
Congratulations. You just closed a sale.
What now? You just made a customer happy and gave her something she is going to enjoy using, which puts her in a state of positive anticipation. Now’s a great time to get this customer more engaged with you, by either viewing other relevant products on your site or reading more about your brand, potentially turning her into a loyal, repeat customer.
That’s right, the sales funnel doesn’t end at the checkout page. With the right post-purchase thank you page, you can actually extend the funnel and use it to nurture leads and promote brand loyalty. Once a customer has decided to buy from you, it is clear that they trust you and are likely to buy more from you.
Also, they’ve already gone through the checkout process and entered their payment information, so they will readily add another product if it adds value to the purchase they just made. That is why thank you pages are the perfect post-conversion conversion strategy, letting you create a steady stream of repeat customers, as well as increasing your retention rate.
And you want that steady stream of loyal, repeat customers. After all, it’s fairly well known that the cost of acquiring a new customer is 5 times higher than the cost of retaining a current one. Not only that, but repeatcustomers spend 67% more per order according to a study by Bain and Co.
For most business owners, growth seems to be getting more sign-ups from new people, but the process that turns a subscriber into a customer is longer and costlier than it is to retain an existing customer.
Successful businesses know the value of current customers and invest a lot in preserving them. They are using some customer retention techniques that have been working for them for years.
In this article, you’re going to learn about four of the best ways to increase customer retention!
1) Ensure an Overall Pleasant Customer Journey
As AdAge explains:
“We are loyal to the companies and retailers who show us they understand us through the products they offer and the customer experiences they create.”
Most companies fall short of identifying the real pain points in their customers’ journey. They might provide a satisfying experience at some touchpoints, but the overall customer experience is forgettable at best and downright unpleasant at worst.
Let’s say that you own a company that receives a lot of phone calls and online messages from your customers who ask for guidance, and imagine that you are very responsive to their queries. You might wonder why, in spite of all your efforts to satisfy your customers, you still have a pretty high churn rate.
Although you’re doing a good job answering all those customer queries, your customers’ overall journey is still unpleasant: they need to frequently contact you for guidance on different issues from installation to maintenance to updating.
In order to provide a pleasant customer experience, some comprehensive research into your customers’ buying journey is required. You’ll need to:
- Map out the exact journey that your customers go through (awareness, assurance, purchase, installation, usage, updating, etc.) and provide a frictionless and pleasant experience in all of them.
- Communicate more frequently with your sales and technical representatives to figure out the recurrent pain points that your customers are dealing with.
- Understand your buyer persona, or customers’ demographic (age, gender, income, etc.), and psychographic features (interests, preferences, hobbies, fears, etc.). People’s personality types make a huge difference in their decision making process.
- Gather information on people’s actual experience of using your products by analyzing their queries and complaints, using surveys, asking for reviews, etc.
2) Gather Precious Personal Data
If you care about the fact that personalization is the key to getting customers’ attention, then you understand that data is the new currency.
Knowing just what your customers like and expect allows you to create an individually personalized marketing strategy and develop offers that are hard to pass up. You need to know what they like and what they don’t like. You need to know when a good time to call them is and just how often they shop online. You need to know much, much more about your customers.
But just how do you get this data? It is a known fact that nobody likes filling out marketing surveys.
Thank you pages are one fantastic opportunity to gather extremely useful data about your customers. Since they have just engaged with you positively, either by buying from you or subscribing to your newsletter or downloading your course, they are in a very positive state of mind and will readily engage with you a little further.
So use your thank you page as an opportunity to ask some very specific questions that will help you craft a better experience for them in the future. Be careful, though, as to how far you can push your luck. One question too many may push them away. Be concise and relevant.
Further Reading:
* Attract the Right Prospects With Buyer Personas (Includes Step-by-Step Templates!)
* Buyer’s Journey 101: What Your Email Data Says About Your Customers
* How to Optimize Your Content Strategy with the Buyer’s Journey
3) Predict Future Needs of Your Customers
A typical business only hears from 4% of its dissatisfied customers, so to deal with the 96% of your customers who are unhappy but not complaining, you’ll need to go deeper than the surface.
Forbes contributor Carmine Gallo makes a great point about this when he discusses the ability of “5-star brands” to earn their customers’ loyalty by anticipating and acting on what they “don’t say.” He brings up the case of some big names, such as Apple and The Grand Del Mar, and how they have outpaced their competition by looking into the future needs of their customers.
For Apple, it is obvious enough that their Mac buyers have trouble migrating from PC and adapting to the new environment, so their sales and technical representatives are trained to recommend services and tools before customers even ask.
For Grand Del Mar hotel, their customers’ comfort in any situation should be guaranteed even if they don’t ask for it. For example, if the kids have discovered a new sand area near the beach, they probably need toys to have a great time. Or if their customers are in need of a special service due to an unexpected situation, the hotel servants are ready to offer it before being asked.
Getting to know the customers, their personalities and behavior, and the nature of the activities and services offered by the hotel could help their employees predict the future needs of the guests.
Another way to get informed of your customers’ unexpressed needs, pain points, and complaints is to do a good competitive analysis.
By analyzing the features and functionalities of your competitors (with a tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs) and seeing if people like them, you can gain insight into which new features or functionalities you should add to your products. Additionally, any complaints about a competitor’s product or service that is posted on social media or any other public outlet (e.g. magazines, review sites) can inform you of the existence of a potential problem in your own business.
Competitor analysis is a great way to acquire new customers as well. For example, Closio could land a well-paying client simply by monitoring mentions of their competitor. Upon realizing that their competitor was acquired by SalesForce and no longer supported some countries, they stepped in and offered their platform:
Tapping into the unexpressed concerns and needs of your customers sends a strong signal: “We care about the values that our customers get from our services or products!” And as Consulting explains, the real value that customers get is being transformed from their current self to a desired self, especially when they themselves have no idea how to do it.
4) Provide a Personalized Experience
The standard example of a business that gets its customers to buy more by providing a personalized buying experience is Amazon. This company has a name for timely personalized product recommendations both on-site and through emails: it uses an AI engine that considers the customers’ and their segment’s browsing history to recommend the most relevant products.
The result of providing such a personalized buying experience was a whopping 29% increase in quarterly sales in 2012 compared to the same time over the previous year.
This level of personalization is never out of reach for your business. Whether you’re a B2B or B2C company, automation platforms such as Pardot can help you personalize your customer’s buying experience.
Good automation software can help you segment your (prospective) customers and show them relevant messages. This could include emailing timely offers based on the browsing history of your customers in combination with other factors such as time and relevance or, more interestingly, showing personalized on-page content to different customer segments.
This last possibility has always been a big dream for me. What if I knew what my customers were interested in so that I could show them the relevant content (articles, images, features, pop-ups, forms, CTAs, offers, coupons, etc.) when they visited my website? Dynamic content can provide a personalized buying experience for your customers.
Optimizely was able to personalize its homepage to show specific elements that suit a particular audience. For example, when employees from a travel agency enter the website, they see this homepage:
Visitors from Adidas, on the other hand, will see this homepage:
And personalization is not limited to the hero image, header or CTA; ALL the elements of a page can be personalized for specific audiences. 
The concept of “dynamic content” on Pardot has quite the same function. Using this feature, you can easily show personalized forms, landing pages, emails, and homepages to your prospects. You can define your prospects based on the criteria they have chosen when submitting their contact information.
Last Thoughts on Mastering Customer Retention for Long-Term Success
Implementing these four customer retention strategies can significantly boost your business’s growth and profitability. By ensuring a pleasant customer journey, gathering valuable personal data, predicting future needs, and providing personalized experiences, you’re not just keeping customers – you’re creating brand advocates.
Retaining customers is more cost-effective than acquiring new ones. As you focus on these retention techniques, you’ll likely see an increase in customer lifetime value, positive word-of-mouth marketing, and overall sales. The key is to consistently deliver value and show your customers that you understand and care about their needs.
Start by analyzing your current customer retention efforts and identify areas for improvement. Whether it’s enhancing your overall customer experience, leveraging data for personalization, or investing in predictive analytics, each step you take towards better retention will contribute to your business’s long-term success.
By prioritizing customer retention, you’re not just increasing sales – you’re building a sustainable, customer-centric business that can thrive in today’s competitive marketplace. So, take action today and watch as your customer loyalty and sales grow hand in hand!
