Customer Retention Strategies

Everyone knows that customer retention is important, on an instinctive level. Even those who have never really given a thought to what “customer retention” is know that company success is built upon a customer base. And it isn’t just a case of “the more customers the better.” Customers are expensive to acquire, yet cheaper to retain. A company’s churn rate depicts its overall health.

But while the importance of customer retention may be obvious, the strategies by which it’s achieved are more complex.

Companies need in-depth customer retention strategies if they’re going to be successful at developing greater levels of retention. For one, customer acquisition and retention strategies differ significantly; what keeps a customer is different from what acquires one. For another, customers often leave for different reasons. A customer retention strategies PDF or customer retention strategies PPT is going to be vastly different depending on the company and its industry.

Consider eCommerce companies: They tend to lose customers simply because the competition is cheaper. Meanwhile, professional services companies usually won’t lose their customers unless their services have been found to be unsatisfactory.

Customer retention strategies in CRM solutions primarily focus on in-depth analysis regarding customer behavior. B2B customer retention strategies also differ from B2C customer retention strategies; B2C markets tend to experience less churn. Negative customer retention strategies and positive customer retention strategies will highlight different approaches altogether, but the importance is the intentionality of the strategy.

Some strategies include: spending more time on customers at risk, spending more time with customers with a renewal date coming up, holding training sessions to address customer retention, and reaching out to customers who have not been retained but have instead left. With more intentional customer touch points, organizations are able to better gauge how they feel about a service, and they are able to plan ahead for happier customers who are more likely to stay.

Since every organization needs to devise its own customer retention strategy, the core of the strategy is going to relate to the amount of data the organization keeps and is able to analyze.

Customer Retention Examples

What are some customer retention examples? What customer retention tactics work, and which only annoy? Resources such as a customer retention case study PDF, customer acquisition and retention PPT, or just general customer retention company examples can help in understanding how a strategy is formed. But, as mentioned, every strategy is going to be different: a one-size-fits-all customer retention PPT download isn’t going to be applicable to everyone.

• Sending out coupons to former customers in eCommerce. This is one of the most direct and easily understood forms of customer retention, and one that’s seen in many customer retention strategies case studies. Companies already know that former customers have been interested in their products in the past. With some prompting, the customer may come back.
• Collecting rating and review information from customers. Another way to improve customer retention is to first identify why customers are not being retained. By collecting ratings and other information from customers, companies can find out why displeased customers were leaving, and address the problem head-on.
• Tracking customer “touch points.” The more a customer engages with a brand, the more likely they are to remain loyal to that brand. Today, many companies are using customer relationship management suites to track customer touch points much like they would track the buyer journey. Reduced customer interaction can indicate that a customer is about to leave.

If you want to know how to retain customers who are leaving you first need to understand why they are leaving. While the above customer retention strategies case studies may help you build your strategy, your strategy is going to need to be based on your own personal analysis.

B2B customer retention examples show how customers generally react to brands, and literature review on customer retention PDF and customer retention strategies slideshare can help in gaining additional knowledge and understanding.

Even if your customer retention is already in good standing, it never hurts to start improving on it. It can build revenue significantly, as the cost of retaining a customer is far less than the cost of acquiring a new customer.

Customer Service Retention

Customer service plays a very dominant role in customer retention, and therefore has to be a large part of a customer retention strategy. Customer service retention will directly relate to how well customers have been served. Even if customers have had negative experiences, they may stay with a company because they enjoyed their customer service interactions.

Customer retention strategies in service marketing differ from customer retention strategies for telecom industry or customer retention strategies in automobile sector, due to the differences in products and the way the brands interact with the customer. Despite this, customer service still remains a link between all industries.

Consider the telecom industry. If a company is looking into how to reduce churn in telecom industry companies, they should look towards the Vodafone customer retention strategy. The Vodafone customer retention strategy is an excellent example.

Vodafone has been able to become a leading player within the telecom industry by pumping in large amounts of money directly towards its customer service and support. Even if there are issues (which is commonplace in the telecom market), customers feel as though they will be able to get helpful, useful customer service and support. Other customer service retention strategies include offering perks from other partnered companies, and offering cash back on bills. These are services that provide value to the customer and show that the customer is valued by the company.

Customer service is always the key, and it’s the key in many professionally-oriented fields such as real estate. With these client retention strategies, real estate teams deal a lot with communication, and with reaching out to clients who may be on the way out. Importantly, it’s often easy to alleviate churn simply by talking to clients as they are about to exit. If you can address their concerns, it makes it far more likely that they will stay. Above all else, companies should attempt to show their customers that they are valued.

Benefits of Customer Retention

A business with a solid customer retention rate and strategy is a business that is doing well. If a business is able to sustain its customer base and maintain its health, it will be successful. (Of course, there are limits to this; Movie Pass, for instance, lost money for each customer it retained—because it didn’t have the right business model.)

Businesses with high customer retention rates are attractive to investors. They are businesses that are going to grow and remain sustainable, because they are going to be bringing in additional revenue. As long as the company continues to bring in customers at the same rate, it will have to grow, because it is retaining the customers that it already has.

The major benefits of customer retention are:

• It looks good to investors. Investors want to see companies that are doing things right. Good retention indicates that the customers are happy, and happy customers indicate that the company is fulfilling its business model.
• It stabilizes the company’s income. Companies with a lot of churn don’t necessarily know how much money they will be making from month to month because they don’t always know how many customers are leaving.
• It’s less disruptive for employees. Developing relationships with customers doesn’t just make income more stable, it also makes day-to-day operations more stable. When employees aren’t constantly learning new accounts, they can start working on the accounts that matter to them.

Want to learn more about customer retention? While you can fill out a customer retention questionnaire PDF, if you’re wondering how to write a presentation on customer retention it’s probably not going to be enough. Customer retention and its strategies are complex, and it does heavily rely upon whether you’re looking at customer retention rate B2B, customer retention rate B2C, and which industries you’re exploring. That being said, the benefits of customer retention are clear.

Customer Retention Model

Want to improve your customer retention model? You need the Terminus TEAM framework. The Terminus TEAM framework can help your organization build its customer retention process. The TEAM framework provides a customer retention strategy template. Having a client retention template makes it easier for you to get started.

As with any business strategy, it’s most important that you have a firm and tested process in place. With the right customer retention strategy template, you will be able to hit the ground running and start developing your customer retention faster. A template ensures that you don’t miss any aspects about your customer strategy, and equally that you don’t need to spend the time learning more about customer retention strategies in-depth.

The Terminus TEAM framework is built for marketers. It includes the ability to:

• Target the right accounts. Identify the accounts that are most likely to leave, as well as the accounts that are highest in value. You will be able to improve your effectiveness by focusing your efforts on the things that matter most, rather than taking a broader approach.
• Engage the entire buying center. Orchestrate multi-channel advertising on LinkedIn, email, and offline channels, to ensure that you’re able to successfully saturate your market. Multi-touch interactions are always better for engaging customers, and they serve to engage customers on the platforms that they are more receptive on.
• Measure what matters. Remarketing and retaining customers is all about ensuring that you have the right analysis and data. The TEAM framework will give you the information you need to ensure that you’re identifying the right customers to target. You’ll be able to see whether your customer retention is improving, or whether additional efforts need to be made.

As a marketer-focused platform, the Terminus TEAM Framework doesn’t require any specialized IT knowledge. Rather, it brings the power of best-in-class advertising and analysis technology to those who need it most. Exploring retention and it’s strategies gives an organization greater levels of understanding regarding how its customers are interacting with the brand, and lets an organization future proof its processes.

With a superior customer retention model, the customer retention process becomes easier. It’s only a matter of implementing the client retention strategy template, and working forward from there. Better customer retention can dramatically improve an organization’s revenue, and ultimately be the difference between a successful business and a struggling one.