How to Improve Customer Retention Rates

Growth is something that every company must experience in order to become a successful business. However, it’s much easier said than done. It can be hard to grow your company if you’re finding that most customers just make a single purchase without becoming a repeat customer. In order to properly grow your business, you need to keep customers shopping at your business, rather than at a competitor’s. 

Luckily, there are many different strategies that can make a big difference in improving your customer retention rates. Some of these strategies include:

Customer loyalty programs usually come in the form of offering points based on the customer’s past purchases. For example, some companies might offer one point for each dollar spent on their website. They can then set rewards at certain point levels to incentivize their customers to continue to shop at their business, rather than a competitor’s. Maybe they’ll give a $10 discount when a customer reaches 200 points, or perhaps a free product when they’ve reached 1,000 points. 

Whatever the structure of the customer loyalty program is, they’re a great way to give customers an incentive to consistently shop at the same company, rather than spreading their business out amongst multiple companies.

Customers are much more likely to become repeat customers if they feel that you, as a business, truly care about their individual needs. A great way to do this is to encourage customers to sign up for an account on your website by offering an incentive to do so. For example, offer a 10% discount on a purchase for signing up for email notifications about sales and new product releases.

When you get customers to enter their email address, name, and birthday on the form, you’ll can personalize their experience, while also improving your email marketing. From sending Happy Birthday emails to recommending products that they might like based on previous purchases, personalizing your buyers’ experiences can make them much more likely to return to your website again in the future.

None of us like to find ourselves with a question about a company’s products and services, just to find out that they only have automated responses to basic questions on their website. We’d all much rather do business with a company that offers quick and honest communication to their customers. 

A great way to show your customers that you have responsive communication channels available to them is to simply make them easy to find. Don’t make your customers go hunting through your website to try to find your communication page. Instead, include at least one way they can reach your business at the footer of your website. Doing this will make it simple for them to find a way to effectively reach your company.

Going right to the source of why your customers decided not to make another purchase at your business is a great way to improve customer retention rate. If customers haven’t made a purchase in a significant amount of time, or they’ve perhaps terminated their account with your business, send them an email and ask them for any potential feedback they could give you about why they decided to leave.

There’s no better way to learn why your customer retention rate is falling than going straight to your past customers to receive their feedback. Consider the feedback that you are given and, if the feedback is fixable, implement changes to correct the problem and re-gauge your retention rates. Chances are if one customer finds a problem with your service, other customers have the same problem.