Customer Retention 101: How to Create a Business People Love

Enthusiastic passion propels many small businesses into existence. You‘re confident you’ve got something excellent to offer and might envision buyers swooning at first sight with credit cards in hand. If only it were that simple to make a sale, right? Instead, it can be an uphill battle convincing wary strangers to indulge in their first purchase, and for good reason.

While impulse purchases can occur, often your potential customers are looking for incentives to choose you over other tantalizing options. New customer conversion takes time, effort, money, and a solid strategy. Your reward for these investments doesn’t need to be limited to a single sale, however.

Establishing a customer retention program will help you generate ongoing transactions from the same customers. In fact, a BIA/Kelsey survey found that 61% of small businesses claim half their annual revenue can be attributed to repeat customers. Furthermore, those returning customers are spending 67% more than new customers. 

This means that staying on the radar of existing customers can lead to startling profits you’ll definitely want on the books. Ready to find out how to meet customer expectations so you can improve their lifetime value?

6 Tips to Create a Business People Can’t Get Enough Of

You might ask, customer retention programs are based on what concept? Successful customer retention encourages your customers to make you their go-to for whatever you specialize in. You should be the first business that springs to mind when they’re looking to make a purchase you can fulfill. 

Increasing customer retention is kind of a big deal. Econsultancy’s research found that 83% of companies say it’s far less costly to retain customers than gain new ones. Repeat business is never a given and you often have to put some effort into creating loyal customers who can’t get enough. That means that you need to not only provide quality products and services but also excellent value, customer service, and convenience.

Below are a handful of strategies that help brands stand out among the competition and improve customer retention.

Join the Customer Journey

What’s going on in your customer’s mind as they embark on the customer journey? A good way to find out is to take an active role throughout the process. As your customer ventures from awareness to consideration to decision, be prepared to interact along the way. 

This means targeting the right platforms for advertising, opening communication channels, and providing educational information. Show window shoppers how your brand can impact their lives in positive ways that can’t be ignored.

Then, when your customer has converted, stick around and listen to their feedback, too. Find out what would bring them back around again and attempt to fulfill those needs.

Focus on Providing Consistent Value

Many small businesses begin with optimism and dedication. But that excitement needs to transfer to your prospective customers in order to succeed. You need to provide something valuable, something that solves your audience’s problems. 

• Why should other people care about what you’re marketing? 
• What makes your product or service more enticing than competitors? 
• How will you get your brand in front of the right audience and convey its value?
• Do you offer something that encourages previous customers to return?

If the value of your business isn’t immediately apparent, you’ll fail to make the sale. So gaining and keeping customers means figuring out how to make your brand matter to someone other than yourself with a solid customer retention strategy. When you become valuable to your customers, they’ll rely on you again and again.

Make it Easy to Do Business with You 

Prioritizing convenience is absolutely vital for businesses of every size. Most consumers embrace modern technology and incorporate it into their shopping habits. Your audience is seeking platforms that make it easy to get things done, whether that’s shopping, communicating, or paying bills.

It may seem a bit intimidating, but even smaller businesses can compete in this arena. There are plenty of platforms that specialize in supporting the relationship between businesses and customers. For example, Podium simplifies conversation with tools to improve text, email, and phone communication.

Smooth checkout processes and flexible payments are another way to keep customers coming back. Customer experience is important, alongside providing plenty of desirable options that cater to your target audience’s lifestyles.

Craft Your Image in an Authentic Way

Your public image matters more than ever before. If someone has an unpleasant experience with your company or hears something controversial, that news travels fast on the internet. But it’s not enough to carefully curate your brand perception. You need to choose your core values and truly practice them internally and externally.

Showing everyone what’s important to your company does influence buyers. A Stackla survey noted that 88% of customers place importance on brand authenticity when deciding where to spend their cash. Younger audiences are especially cognizant of whether a business aligns with their principles and sticks to their story.

This requires showing some personality and celebrating what makes your business unique while staying honest with your audience. By maintaining a recognizable voice across emails, social media, and advertisements, you’ll come across as more human and relatable. And on top of distinguishing identifiers, if you remain true to your beliefs, your regular customers will know they can trust you.

Create an Active Online Community

Excitement is contagious, which is a good reason to foster a lively community around your brand. Profitable customer retention models prioritize active social media accounts on the platforms their target audience enjoys the most. For some brands that might mean catchy how-it’s-made clips on TikTok, while for others, it means creating a helpful community group on Facebook.

Not only will these efforts allow your brand to interact with your customers, but they also bring together like-minded people who can inspire one another. A collective of your ideal customers makes it easy to show off what’s happening at your brand, and will provide plenty of insight into what your customers hope is on the horizon.

The Customer Comes First, Always

Putting your customers first is crucial to a positive customer experience. Without them, your company’s longevity is in peril. Besides creating products and services that tend to your customer needs, you need to show them why their patronage is so valuable to you. Make them feel like the center of your universe.

Here’s something to consider. One of the best ways to entice a crush or forge new friendships is to pause talking about yourself and direct the conversation toward your companion instead. Who is this person? What do they care about? How do they spend their time?

People like talking about themselves, and when you invite them to open up, it shows that you’re interested in what they have to say. Listening also develops empathy and understanding, which are more necessary in marketing than you may realize.

According to Salesforce, 66% of customers count on companies to understand what they need and how to meet their expectations. By actively tuning into customer conversations, you’ll learn what they need and expect while also forging a genuine relationship. 

Bonus Tip: Create Your Own Customer Retention Program

Now that you’ve evaluated the ideas above, it’s time to work them into your own customer retention program. This means putting together a solid strategy that increases customer satisfaction so they’ll keep coming back to your business. You’ll want to focus on the factors that match your company and the customers you want to keep attracting.

For example, a makeup company’s customer retention strategies might build a community through tutorials and loyalty incentives, while a local dentist opens communication channels via newsletters and social media stories. If you’re unsure what works best for your brand, experiment with the possibilities while remaining customer-centric.

Minimum requirements to incorporate:

• Get involved in the customer journey
• Provide genuine value to your customers
• Make it easy for customers to do business
• Create an authentic brand personality
• Establish a customer-centric approach
• Show gratitude on a regular basis

Pick a few more customer relationship strategies:

• Foster online communities around your brand
• Educate your customers without being pushy
• Create customer loyalty and referral programs
• Collect customer feedback and reviews
• Send personalized newsletters and emails

You might even come up with more if you brainstorm different ways to connect with your audience. Perhaps there’s something you can do locally that speaks to potential customers in the neighborhood, such as special events, collaborations, and customer appreciation gifts.

Each effort you make can increase customer retention rates by captivating current customers.

Podium Can Be a Part of Your Customer Retention Strategy

Thanks to Podium, connecting with a promising audience and developing an effective customer retention model has never been easier, even if you’re just starting out. 

Podium’s powerful platform gathers all your customer interactions into one place with a variety of communication methods, flexible payment options, and other goodies that keep the conversation going so your business revenue keeps flowing.

Sign up for a free 14-day trial today, and you’ll be able to sample everything Podium offers small businesses that are eager to gain loyal customers.