It’s so easy for retailers to invest all of their time, money and efforts on attracting new customers, rather than focusing on serving their existing customer base. While a business needs new customers, retaining and building lasting relationships with existing customers is just as important. Customer retention strategies can help you maximize the value of the existing customers you worked so hard to acquire.
What is Retail Customer Retention?
Customer retention in retail is the process of engaging existing customers to continue buying your products or services, and ultimately turn them into loyal customers. A good customer retention rate indicates healthy business practices, from your marketing strategy to the quality of your offerings. By implementing customer retention strategies, you can turn first-time customers into repeat customers and extract more value from your existing customer base.
Customer Retention Strategies
Besides providing unique offerings and exceptional customer service, here are five retention strategies for customers that you can start applying to your retail business today!
Customer Feedback
It’s difficult to improve your business when you don’t know how your customers feel about your brand and products or services. Start making customer feedback a priority to find out how you can upgrade your customer experience and keep customers coming back for more. There are plenty of ways you can collect customer feedback, including surveys, suggestion boards, transactional emails and focus groups. Then, be sure to share it with the employees that will benefit from the feedback most!
Proactive Communication
Communication is key when it comes to customer retention. It’s important that you’re proactively engaging with your customers beyond their in-store or online experience if you want them to stick around. Keep your customers informed and up-to-date on new product lines, partnerships, community involvement or exciting company milestones through social media, blog posts, email newsletters or text messaging campaigns!
Personalized Messages
The more personalized your customer journey is, the more likely your customers are to interact with your brand and continue buying your products or services. Leverage relevant personal information (with your customers’ consent) to engage with them on a deeper level. By encouraging them to sign up for a customer account with you, you can implement contextualized interactions through email marketing, social media or ads. You can also utilize remarketing techniques to provide product recommendations based on customer behavior.
Subscriptions and Loyalty Programs
Loyalty programs reward your customers for their continued commitment to your brand. The more they shop and interact with your business, the more they are rewarded and the more they are getting out of their experience with your brand. Subscription models can also increase customer retention by providing a convenient incentive for customers using your services, whether that’s faster delivery or access to exclusive content and events.
Customer Support
Provide your customers with support where and when they need it. It’s crucial that you offer resources that make it easy for customers to learn how to use your products or understand your services. You can offer customer support through online chatbots, one-on-one training sessions, product tutorials or by creating an online library of resources.
