6 proven customer retention strategies to reduce churn
When customers leave your company for another, it’s called churn. Successful retention strategies reduce customer churn rates and encourage repeat business from existing customers.
Here are six ways to retain customers and improve your business’s long-term prospects.
1. Exceed customer expectations with world-class service
Customers invest in your product or service to solve specific problems. To retain customers and turn them into loyalists, you must exceed their expectations by providing exceptional value for the money.
Surprise your customers with bonuses and additional value on top of everything you had promised at the time of sale. Make them feel special and show them you’re fully committed to their success.
No discount offer or customer service experience can compensate for a bad product. So make sure your product delivers on its promise.
2. Invest in a CRM system to track customer satisfaction
You can only create memorable customer experiences when you understand customer behaviour and engagement patterns with your product.
This is why it is critical to invest in an integrated customer relationship management (CRM) system like Act!
Act! helps you handle everything from lead generation to communication, and customer data management by giving you a singular dashboard view of your customer’s engagement with your product and customer support teams.
It tracks the complete customer journey, shows how clients use your product and helps you understand their challenges.
It also helps you identify dormant users and customers who’ve lost interest in your product, which is a strong indicator of dissatisfaction.
Without such a system, you won’t have the required insights to find or resolve customer issues.
3. Prioritise customer success through education
Customer success is a critical part of any client retention strategy. It simply means that instead of focusing solely on your product’s performance, you do everything you can to ensure your customers achieve their business goals with your product.
This is where customer education comes in.
You must create helpful onboarding content, product tutorials, and business strategy guides that not only show your customers how to use your product to its full potential but also share different strategies to achieve their business goals.
For example, an e-commerce email marketing company can create content about the different email sequences online stores and e-commerce brands should use to engage their customers and drive sales.
You can automate this process with Act! by scheduling emails that cover various aspects of your product and sharing business tips throughout the customer lifecycle.
4. Use automation to proactively approach dormant users
Ignoring dormant users and reaching out to them only at the time of service renewal is a common business mistake.
Don’t leave your customers helpless after they give you their money. Help them use your product to its full potential, and proactively reach out to anyone who disengages. For instance, you can use Act! to schedule automated emails for anyone who doesn’t sign in or contact you for a specified period.
You can also manually identify such users from your Act! CRM dashboard with different search filters, ensuring no customer is left unattended.
5. Personalise your customer experience
Personalisation helps customers use your product more effectively and achieve their business goals faster.
For example, a freelance writer’s requirements from a project management tool are drastically different from those of a design agency owner. By learning about the user’s goals, you can recommend the most relevant methodology, templates, and content.
With Act! You can personalise customer education by segmenting your users according to their industries and sending them the most relevant content.
6. Listen to customer feedback
Listening to customer feedback helps you improve your product, increase user satisfaction, and boost retention.
Research shows that 83 percent of customers feel more loyal to a brand that listens to their feedback and resolves their issues.
Act! does more than just help you gather customer feedback through forms and various touchpoints; it gives you a centralised system to ensure no customer query remains unanswered.
Act! CRM provides a 360-degree view of customer issues and empowers your support teams with the context to offer the best solutions.