Customer Retention Automation: How to Effectively Manage Your Strategy

Customer retention can be a breeze if you have the right customer retention management and automation strategy. Here are some ways to automate your customer retention efforts and reduce churn.

As a small business owner, you know that customer retention is cheaper and more effective than customer acquisition. However, what you may not know is that it’s still a big effort for many businesses and can drain your resources if you don’t strategize correctly to avoid churn. So how do you retain the most customers with the least amount of effort and cost? Automation.

Automation can help you get far more done with less effort which makes for happy customers and employees. Read on to learn about the magic of customer retention management software and eight ways you can use customer retention management software to get results.

Elements of a Good Customer Retention Strategy

A good customer retention strategy doesn’t simply rest on having an incredible product. Think about the businesses you patronize and continue to go back to—the ones you can’t get enough of. What do they do or have? With some exceptions, they’ve probably built a long-lasting, personal relationship with you. This means that on top of having an addictive product, they likely personalize your experience every time, keep in touch, follow up, and deliver consistently amazing service. And they don’t let things fall through the cracks anywhere in the customer journey or customer experience.

That takes a lot of work. How do they make it look so easy?

Customer retention technology takes care of everything so you don’t have to think about all the details of a good customer retention rate. It prioritizes your existing customers by putting their needs first, and it prioritizes you by decreasing the time and energy your customers have to spend on the phone. In this way, it allows you to optimize customer lifetime value while minimizing costs in a significant way.

3 Benefits of Effective Customer Retention Automation

1. Provides Personalized Experiences to Customers

By using a customer retention automation platform, you can send targeted messages and offerings that cater to individual preferences and buying patterns. This product analytics strategy can help with customer satisfaction, reduce churn, and promote longevity since the customer feels seen, is valued, and doesn’t just feel like a part of the aggregate.

2. Helps Increase Customer Loyalty

Personalization efforts, by way of a tool for customer retention, can bring about a culture of customer loyalty. Customer retention software like Zendesk and Yotpo makes it easy to keep customers engaged with timely and relevant campaigns. Think of product recommendations, special offers, and birthday discounts when you want to increase customer loyalty.

3. Helps Decrease Customer Churn

Losing customers is expensive, but customer relationship management software like Zendesk or Yotpo can help you get in front of issues before they become insurmountable. For instance, this software can produce reports of customers who are likely to churn if you don’t act proactively to salvage the relationship. Acting proactively might mean actively working on targeted communications or using discounts to nurture the customer relationship.

8 Ways To Automate Your Customer Retention Strategy

Automating customer retention can make or break your retention strategy. But it’s important to remember that not all types of customer relationship automation work for you, and some can hamper rather than strengthen relationships. So, how can you leverage So, how can you leverage sales automation tools and a customer retention strategy effectively? Here are six ways you can set yourself (and your customers) up for consistent success and optimal customer loyalty and satisfaction.

1. Send Personalized Rewards

A healthy customer relationship is the sum of all your customer retention efforts. There’s nothing better than getting a coupon for a restaurant you go to often, a service you need, or a product you order frequently. Sending personalized rewards can increase customer retention because not only does it speak directly to customers’ needs (by anticipating their desires), but it also shows them that you know them, prioritize their business, and understand their history with you. Approximately 91% of consumers are more likely to buy from brands that have recommendations and offers that are relevant to them.

2. Send a Thank You After a Purchase

After every transaction with your customer, it’s time to say thanks and strengthen the customer relationship. Following each purchase, send customers a personalized thank you for doing business with you. This can be an email, or better yet, a text. Make sure to always address customers by name, mention the product or service they purchased (if possible), and leave an open end that invites inquiry and commentary. The right template and tool for customer feedback and retention can help you get all these elements right to curb churn.

3. Automate Data Collection and Leverage Product Usage Data

A tool for customer retention makes sourcing key information about customers within reach. Your website, email marketing campaigns, and social media channels can feed you relevant data about customer trends and preferences you can log in a CRM. By getting a clear idea of customers’ relationship with your brand, you can refine your outreach to send the right message at the right time.

4. Show Customers Products They’ll Love

Showing customers products that they’ll love can go a long way in mitigating customer churn. Using a CRM platform, you can not only predict what products will resonate based on algorithms and purchase history but also automatically send these recommendations along to the right people. This type of personalization, at the right times, is a recipe for customer loyalty. Consider sending recommendations around times when customers are most likely to buy.

5. Abandoned Cart Reminders

The infamous abandoned cart. We’ve all been there. How do you get your customers to follow through with their transactions? Here are a few ideas to cut down on churn using marketing automation. You can start with a text or email (scheduled through Zendesk) a few hours after the cart is left. Then a follow-up missive a few days later if the transaction still hasn’t gone through. If all else fails, a promotional discount can do just the trick.

You should remind customers of what’s in their cart and offer a call to action. Pro Tip: A quarter of customers will abandon their cart if their preferred payment methods aren’t offered. Make sure your check-out system is convenient and simple to use so that there are no barriers to entry for customers.

6. Send Renewal Reminders

More often than not, if you’re delivering great service and high-quality products that add value for your customers, they need to be reminded instead of convinced to renew. When sending a renewal reminder via a customer retention platform like Yotpo, make sure to emphasize the value your service or product has for the customer. Touch on your relationship, and perhaps even offer a promotion to sweeten the deal. Also, be sure to make the process as easy as possible to maintain a quality customer experience.

7. Deliver Automated Surveys at Key Touchpoints

It’s worth your time and energy to use a retention platform like Zendesk to send surveys to customers at specific points in their buying journey. This could be after a transaction or an interaction with your customer service team or at other strategic points. The customer feedback gleaned from a survey can help business owners make better decisions that can improve customer satisfaction, address weak areas, bridge the gap between customer needs and your solutions, and inform product analytics and development.

8. Use Recurring Billing Software To Automate Payments

Tools like Profitwell can help with customer retention management because they can offer the reassurance that you always have money coming in the door through recurring services or subscriptions. You’ll save time and energy from having to worry about staying on top of manual invoicing and payment processing. Plus, you won’t have to track down late payments and you’ll have a healthier cash flow. On the customer side, they’ll likely find this setup to be convenient and efficient.

Start Automating Customer Retention With Podium

Want your customer retention efforts to go further? As you know, not every customer retention management system is the same. You only want the top automation tools to help you reduce churn and dominate your industry. The best automated customer retention platform will provide exceptional texting capabilities, hundreds of high-quality, easy-to-use templates to collect customer feedback, and ways of keeping all your messages, history, and data in the right places. Top customer retention platforms will also route incoming messages to the right people, display everything on a dashboard, and be user-friendly for every member of your company.

Podium is your one-stop shop to offer a fully automated and personalized customer relationship management system. Start a free trial today and see how Podium’s customer retention platform helps you turn customer feedback into actionable steps. Plus, marketing automation is a clear winner in that it can lighten your employees’ workload, save your time and money, and help you retain your base of loyal and new customers for life.