You’re likely aware of the importance of lead generation, but customer retention is equally as important to your business’s strategy. Although getting new customers is great, creating loyal customers that will continue to patronize your business or recommend your business to people they know will create even more value for you.
In fact, while only as few as 10-15% of customers tend to be loyal to one business within an industry, these customers produce 55-70% of all sales. This makes the value of customer retention abundantly clear.
The good news is that CRM platforms like HubSpot and SharpSpring make it easier than ever to implement and optimize your customer retention strategies. You can use these platforms to build automation into your strategy, streamlining your process.
What is Customer Retention?
In marketing, customer retention is defined as a company’s ability to retain existing customers through engagement, so that they continue using your services or continue to buy products from your business.
Your customers want to know that you’re putting time and effort into your relationship with them. Seeing this in action will delight your customers and encourage them to continue working with you. They may even begin recommending your business to their friends, becoming an ambassador for your company. Returning customers also tend to spend more and purchase more often.
In case that isn’t enough, let’s take a look at the numbers regarding customer retention. An increase in customer retention of only 5% can increase your company revenue by 25-95%, showing that even small improvements can yield huge results for your business.
In addition to this potential increase in revenue, having a strong customer retention strategy in place is simply more cost-effective than gaining new customers. In fact, it’s 5-25 times more expensive to gain new customers than it is to focus on retaining your current customers.
Now that you know why a strong customer retention strategy is a good idea, let’s talk about how you can implement customer retention strategies with the help of CRMs like SharpSpring and HubSpot.
How to Implement Customer Retention with SharpSpring & HubSpot
Establish Consistent Communication
If you haven’t already, you should consider what you have in place to create a consistent line of communication between your business and your customers. This is important because establishing steady communication with your customers from the beginning of your relationship will help build the trust needed for successful retention.
Creating a newsletter or customized email that is sent out monthly or quarterly in order to check in with your customers is a great way to do this. With a CRM like HubSpot or SharpSpring, emails like these can easily be automated and scheduled to be sent out whenever is best for you. Hubspot and Sharpspring also make segmenting your customers into lists easy, in order to send them newsletters that are tailored to their specific needs.
If a customer has communicated to you that they need education or training for a specific product or service, you can include that in your communication with them to further display your commitment to meeting their needs.
Allow Your Customers to be Self Sufficient
In addition to newsletters, you can also use email communications to provide your customers with any tools or information they may need to become more self-sufficient. Based on what your customers have communicated to you in the past, you can send them tutorials, e-books, how-to guides, infographics, or even a list of blog posts that are relevant to their business goals.
While your customers will still need to come to you for more complicated issues, being proactive and providing them with information that they’ve told you they need will show your customers that you’re listening and care about providing the help they need.
Leverage Positive Customer Experiences
Requesting feedback from customers is a great way to show them that you’re paying attention to their needs through the use of automated emails. You can set up automated emails in Sharpspring and Hubspot to request customer opinions. When you get positive feedback, you can then share this on your website, social channels, or anywhere else potential customers may see.
People generally trust word of mouth more or testimonials from real customers more than anything else, so broadcasting the things your happy customers have to say about your business will likely bring in more customers as well as make your current customers even happier by proving that you listen to their feedback.
Keep a Record of Customers’ Needs
Both HubSpot and SharpSpring provide you with the ability to keep notes and records of your past interactions with your customers. This will allow you to track any ongoing issues, personal preferences, or any other important information. Using these notes, you can take better care of your customer and personalize your communication to their needs.
Keeping a record of your customers’ needs will also allow anyone on your team to become an expert on any particular customer quickly. This will ensure that any employee will be able to successfully take over customer accounts without having to spend time getting to know their needs all over again, as that can be a long process that your customers likely don’t want to go through every time someone new takes over their account.
Create a Multi-Channel Service System to Address Customer Needs
Providing multiple channels for your customers to have their needs addressed will allow you to better address their needs while making it easier for your customers to get help when they need it. This will make your business’s customer service a much better experience for your customers.
This can be accomplished through the use of a help desk or chat tools, such as a chatbot. Using SharpSpring or HubSpot, you can create automation workflows for these tools so you can make things easier for yourself as well as your customers.
RESULTS ARE VITAL
If you are looking for your first CRM, a new CRM, or just aren’t making the most of your current CRM, Vital Digital can help! We provide digital marketing services including, but not limited to content marketing, search engine optimization, and website development. We also provide HubSpot, SharpSpring, and Zapier consulting to ensure that your business is running as efficiently as possible. Contact us and let us know how we can help.