Customer retention is the company’s ability to retain its customers. Every day the market is replenished with all new competitors who are ready to make any efforts to win back part of the clients from other players. Therefore, customer retention is one of the key business objectives.

Customer Retention is real art, which is as important for business as attracting new customers. If you make every effort to expand the customer base but do not work with retention, the entire business process will resemble an attempt to fill the sieve with water. That is, it will still remain empty. You may find out more about customer retention here!

How to Measure Customer Retention Simply!

In order to measure customer retention, there is no need to understand complex technical processes and use dozens of indicators. It is enough to analyze five key categories, such as:

  • registration;
  • frequency;
  • conversions;
  • advocacy;

Now let’s look at each category and how you can contribute to the improvement of each of them.

Register Your Customers on the Site

This is the most important step since it is impossible to interact with your users and develop trusting relationships if they remain unknown. When registering, you will receive the contact information of your users, which will further allow you to create personalization of the client and on the basis of this increase the level of interest in your product.

You can force customers to register:

  • Calls for registration in order to get special offers.
  • Popup with registration benefits. This can be set up for free and without special knowledge through free plugins.

Frequency

By measuring the frequency of visits to your site, it is possible to establish the basic level of interaction that is needed to determine the level of customer retention. You can discover frequency by:

  • Constant content filling, using only the necessary information for customers.
  • Gamification to encourage interest in your site.
  • Email notifications of your database.

Conversions

The contributing writer for SupremeDissertations and IsAccurate, Neightan White marks the following: “You should always try and bring yourself in the position of your potential followers. If you see something that speaks directly to you, then it’s far more likely to catch your eye.” And this is one of the ways to increase conversions.

Conversion is the action of a visitor who carries the value of your company. There is a conversion based on revenue and on the basis of interaction, which will contribute to measuring customer loyalty. To contribute to an increase in conversion, you can:

  • Monitor Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).
  • Continuous monitoring of the effectiveness of CTA.
  • Simplify the site interface and simplify navigation.

Advocacy

Most marketers do not pay attention to brand advocacy and moreover, they do not encourage it. However, this is an important indicator for measuring customer retention. You can increase brand protection by:

  • creation of a referral program and advocacy program;
  • interaction with those who support your company.

Reward System

Rewards are any additional bonuses that you give to consumers. Your company can do this with tangible rewards like discounts. You need to assess how often customers use your proposed rewards. To increase the reward, you can:

  • Develop of actual rewards.
  • Frequent updating of rewards to attract customers.
  • Actively demonstrate rewards in prominent places of the site. You can use pop-ups.

Easy Tips to Improve Customer Retention

After you have learned how to measure customer retention by means of categories and increase them, feel free to analyze the following ideas. It should be noted that they do not require special technical skills and costs. However, they can be quite effective for your business!

Your Customers Should Be Aware of Your Updates!

Every time your product gets a little better (new features are added, design changes, prices become more affordable), the team is aware of this and happy with the changes. However, this joy is necessary and important to share with customers.

Show your users and customers what updates mean to them and how they will make their life/work better, easier, and more convenient! Create video reviews and share them on YouTube, because many people like to watch videos!

Do Your Customers Know How to Effectively Use Your Product?

A large number of customers have a positive attitude towards advice, help on the products and services they use. This once again confirms the good old method of increasing the degree of loyalty: do not concentrate only on sales, teach customers to use your product/service.

This interaction has two strong positive effects: it gives you the opportunity to increase the number of “touches” that lead to positive emotions, and, most importantly, allows customers to get satisfaction from using the product, rather than suffering from trying to master a new and incomprehensible tool.

A New Approach to Thank

Show the customers that you are grateful for their loyalty and trust. Some companies (large and small) are still not shy about sending out handwritten analog postcards that have a chic effect in the digital era. MailChimp, for example, offers parcel posting services along with email-mailing services.

Create your own sticker pack! For example, a special icon or animation on a common trigger. Give your client a userpic made only for him. You do not need to try to impress with creativity. The commonplace thing will work as needed if you submit it at the right moment and make the gift unexpected.

Create a Minimum before You Surprise and Anticipate

Before you surprise and conquer with a uniquely individual approach, make sure that the client’s basic service needs are 100% closed. A birthday cake delivered to the customer’s doors on behalf of your company will not cost a penny if solving daily issues and problems takes a ton of time and effort from a customer.

Configure support so that agents can respond to customers quickly and efficiently, and build a self-service system so that the client can resolve issues on their own.

Quality Is Always More Important Than Speed

Correct, competent and working support answers that solve a client’s question matter more than the speed of these answers. Choosing between “fast, but somehow” and “longer, but qualitatively”, choose the second. And only after you hone the skill of the agents, proceed to their acceleration. Read why the customer service is so important in this post!

Make Every Customer Special

Give customers the opportunity to be “VIP” and “Gold” users and other honorary units. We love and appreciate ourselves in this capacity, and the product that gives us such a title (consoles, increases self-esteem) automatically becomes more valuable. To part with valuable products is not so easy.

One important point: it only works if there is more than one class in rank. “Gold” will give the desired effect only in the presence of “Silver” status.

Despite the fact that many tactics, none of them will become a universal weapon for winning customer love and loyalty. Let it be more of a set of ideas than a direct guide to action. The reason to experiment and test all these hypotheses.

As you can see, you can increase customer retention without special costs and knowledge of technology. It is enough to pay due attention to the proposed ideas and spend some of your time!

About the Author:
Diana Nadim is a writer and editor who has a Master degree in Marketing. She combines her passion for writing with her interest in research and creates thought-provoking content in various fields. Besides working as a contributor writer for Studicus and WOWGrade, Diana also runs her own 3to5Marketing blog. What inspires her the most in her writing is traveling and meeting new people. Follow her on Twitter.