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How to Improve Customer Retention and What Are the Benefits

Tag: customer retention

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Mohab Customer Experience 0

How to Improve Customer Retention and What Are the Benefits

Customer retention is highly important for any business as relying solely on new clientele for growth may prove to be a myopic approach. There are several approaches which may be undertaken to ensure that the firm is able to generate repeat business from its set client base. The main benefit of customer retention is that it takes considerably lower expenditure to generate revenue from established customers than from new clients. Higher Revenue: when a business is able to retain its client, it helps in achieving higher revenue as well. As your clients already trust your business practices and products, you are not required to plan any expensive marketing plan. This feature ensures that your profit margin is more robust than ever. Here are some of the benefits of a loyal customer base.

  • Improved Business Image: apart from offering pecuniary benefits, customer retention also helps a firm in generating goodwill in the market. Having a loyal customer base gives a stamp of approval to your products and services. It sends a message to the market and to the prospective clients that your business is trustworthy.
  • Lower Marketing Costs: acquiring new clients is an expensive affair as you need to spend a lot of money on collecting data about them, designing appropriate policies and executing them. However, in the case of existing clients, these expenses are reduced considerably. Lower costs mean that you are either able to provide your goods and services at cheaper rate to your clients or able to add to your profit margin. Both the situations are conducive to solid business growth.
  • Data Collection: in today’s world, data is king as it is used for making analysis and creating policies. When a business has large customer base, they are able to generate big data sets which are required for proper analysis. It is also a lot easier and less expensive to collect data from existing clients than looking for new people for this purpose. In case of loyal customer base, the frequency of collecting data and analysis may also be kept lower, which further helps in rationalizing the associated costs.

Creating customer following need not be a daunting task. Here are some of the main ways you can ensure that your customers keep coming back for more.

  • Know Your Client Base: it is important that you understand the requirements and features of your clients. It will help you in customizing your offerings, motivating clients to keep coming back. Providing customized products to best meet your clients’ requirements is the key to build a loyal customer base.
  • Take Extra Care: for generating repeat business, it is imperative that you provide robust customer care. This step ensures that as and when there is any grievance, it is properly handled. The speedy resolution of the issues is also important as any delay may lead the customers to look for alternatives, eroding your client base.
  • Offer Incentives: it is always helpful to start loyalty program, where you offer incentives to your clients for making repeat purchases. Such incentives may be in the cash form or non-cash form. The monetary incentives may be introduced through discounts and cash backs while the main examples of non monetary incentives are freebies, early access to new products and free shipping among other features. However, it is ideal to offer a judicious mix of cash and non cash incentives to ensure that the requirements of your client base are adequately met.
  • Remain in Touch: it is important that you maintain constant touch with your clients, even when they are not making purchase. This is especially important in the areas where the demand is seasonal. During the lean season, you can remain acquainted with your clients by sending them newsletters about latest developments in your business. However, you should ensure that such communiqué is appropriately customized and is able to pique customers’ interest.

It needs to be noted that offering high quality goods and services is of paramount importance for creating a loyal customer base. However, you also need to undertake the above given strategies to ensure that you are able to generate repeat business from your clients.

4 years ago
Top Tips to keep your Customers Engaged
Mohab Customer Experience 0

Top Tips to keep your Customers Engaged

Customer engagement is a critical function for any enterprise and is required for taking the business to a new level. It defines the relationship between your clients and your company. With increasing consumer awareness, the businesses are now required to be more proactive in engaging their customers. A successful business needs to anticipate its customers’ requirement and provide them with an appropriate experience. However, it is important to not only engage customers once, but also to keep them engaged for long, so as to build a loyal client base. Here are the top tips to help you achieve this target.

  • Know your Market: In order to create a memorable experience for your clients, it is vital that you know your target market inside out. You need to identify the defining features of your clients, so as to design customer oriented engagement strategy. You can use analytics for this purpose as the thorough analysis of traffic to your website may provide deep insights. The key is to know the factors which motivate your target market to make a purchase decision. Once you have identified your desired client segment and their features, you can modify your existing strategies or design new ones to attract these clients. It also helps to personalize the experience for clients so as to give them a sense of exclusivity.

 

  • Use Social Media: The advent of social media has been both a blessing and a challenge for businesses. But with just a little attention and careful administration, you can use social media to create meaningful experience for your clients. Social media is one of the best channels to share your story with your target market. This strategy comes with an added human touch and thus is able to have a deeper impact. Make sure you are using relevant images and videos to further reinforce your message. Social media websites and apps may also act as a platform for your clients to interact with each other. As word of mouth is one of the best kinds of promotional strategies, do not overlook this opportunity.

 

  • Personalize the Experience: Personalized interactions help businesses build more a sustainable relationship with their clients. While it is vital to understand the entire market, it is equally important to strive and provide a unique experience to individual customers as well. You can do this by adding more dynamic content to your messages. For example, the messages may be coded in such a way that they are addressed to individual clients by their names. Businesses may also approach their clients at a more personal level by sending them auto generated birthday or other relevant anniversary mails. Such interactions may also provide you with valuable data which may be mined for providing better products and services to your clients.

 

  • Make the Entire Team Work: Customer engagement is not a task that can be solely entrusted to your marketing team. In fact, for providing a holistic experience to your customers, it is advisable to engage your entire team. The team may include people from diverse departments including customer care section. The strategy for engaging customers should move beyond mere selling or marketing of goods and services. The businesses need to adopt customer centric approach so that they are in tune with ever changing customer preferences. Once you have your finger on your customers’ pulse, you can design an immersive experience for them.

 

  • Use Analytics: While businesses should aim to create a human bond with their customers, the use of new technologies may also enhance the overall performance of strategies. Analytics will help you mine the data in a more structured manner and may provide you with information which may otherwise not be collected. There is a wide range of analytics tools available these days, which can meet all your budget constraints. These tools can help you in building dashboards and generating reports. You should also note that analytic tools are not only quantitative in nature but may also be qualitative.

Customer engagement is all about creating new ways to remain in touch with your client base. This may require creative thinking and substantial investment in resources. However, properly designed customer engagement strategies can provide a substantial boost to your top line growth.

5 years ago
Increase your revenue from existing customers
Mohab Customer Experience 0

Increase your revenue from existing customers

Strategies to boost sales from existing customers

Merchants are often faced with the problem of stagnant or worse, diminishing revenues from existing customers. Constantly reinventing and innovating one’s service offerings, cross selling and reducing the customers’ pain points are key strategies to enhance revenue realisation from existing clients. We shall look into some of the winning strategies that can help merchants improve sales conversion from their existing customer base:

  1. Customer engagement: Interactions with the e-commerce merchant influence client perceptions. Superior post purchase support and FAQs on the website about the products are some examples. It is also a good idea to have a payment gateway process that includes easy grievance redressal for chargebacks. The feature should ideally ensure that the customer can provide the necessary documentation and the complete transaction details available with the merchant are also accessible. This would facilitate transparency and improve the credibility of the merchant.
  2. Winning customers’ loyalty: Merchants often face declined payments in case the customer fails to update his/her card data, resulting in card expiration issues. The payment solutions company can ensure smooth transaction processing with automatic data updating facility.This would also go a long way in improving customer experience and reduce order cancellation.
  3. Omnichannel payment option: Merchants can allow multiple payment options including digital payments via mobile applications, thus enabling 24*7 transactions. Thus, time and space will no more be limiting factors in online purchases.
  4. Quick authentication: A BCG survey estimates that the average e-commerce website requires shoppers to click 23 times before a purchase is completed. Merchants need to revamp the shopping experience and enable a one-click checkout with secure online payment systems. This would drastically reduce cart abandonment and revenue losses.
  5. Local payment solutions: Some customers would prefer to pay with familiar, local payment modes. Thus, the merchant should integrate a payment platform that supports alternative payment methods in local currency as well. This would help retain local customers, who might not be aware of global digital payment trends.
  6. Product differentiation: Merchants and payment providers can offer personalised recommendations to customers based on the data repository of past transactions. For example, in case of multiple saved cards, the website could suggest one of them as the primary card option based on the historical usage. Further merchants could also enable better site selection options, so that the customer undergoes minimum navigation through the website before purchase completion.
  7. Cross selling: One can also offer innovative payment features like instant financing, and flexible payback terms to encourage big ticket and frequent purchases
  8. Rewarding customers’ loyalty: A loyalty program with item discounts or freebies would positively impact website visits and sales size. The merchants can promote the benefits program by sending targeted -mail campaigns to existing customers with details of customized rewards and points status.
  9. Low cost payment option: A charge for using the payment gateway is often a big put-off for customers. Thus, merchants should integrate a convenient ‘plug and use’ payment portal, which is free of charge for the customer.
  10. Secure payment option: This is a critical aspect to ensure return customers. Merchants must ensure that the payment gateway and the e-commerce portal can securely store card tokens and confidential customer information. This would speed up the transaction time as the customer would not have to re-enter all the details each time before a purchase transaction.
  11. Expert advice: To further enhance customer appeal, one may also consider the inclusion of a knowledge section or blog with practical information on the transaction steps and the payment process. An educated customer would be more willing to return again for additional purchases.
  12. Keeping one’s ear to the ground: It might be a good idea to include an optional pop-up survey or a quick questionnaire to extract customer opinions or reviews on the ease of online operations and the product experience. This way one could address any shortfalls and win customers’ confidence.

With growing competition in the digital space, it is imperative that along with new customer acquisition, merchants devise innovative and strong strategies to grow business from existing customers. Providing excellent quality of payment experience, fostering customer trust through improved ease of online purchases, and winning a higher share of the customers’ wallet with quality products and service offerings are crucial for higher sales conversion from repeat customers.

5 years ago
4 brand strategies to acquire and retain customers
Mohab Growth Hacks 0

4 brand strategies to acquire and retain customers

Growing a business in today’s competitive environment is not easy. While a globalized market provides a larger market base, it also presents a plethora of challenges, including global competition, higher costs of operations, complex business licensing among other issues. However, you can still gain a competitive edge in your industry through a clear-cut strategy for customer acquisition and retention. Most business owners focus primarily on customer acquisition while overlooking customer retention, which leads to poor performance. There are some unique brand strategies that can help you to acquire customers while at the same time reducing churn rates. This article explores some of these strategies. Read on.

  1. Providing flexible payment options

For your business to survive in this competitive environment, you must provide an excellent user experience. The way potential customers interact with your business from the beginning to the end determines whether they will shop from you or walk away. From the moment a customer lands on your online store to the moment they complete payment, the experience should be seamless.

It is advisable to partner with a payment solutions company to enable online payments for your customers. The payment gateway you use should allow for safe, flexible, and secure payments and this will win you, customers while building loyalty among existing ones.

  1. Be authentic and consistent

When starting a business, every entrepreneur has an objective and to achieve this; there is a need to provide a consistent user experience. To acquire customers, your brand must prove over time that it can provide exquisite services. Potential customers must feel the need to associate with your brand and you achieve this by not only providing outstanding products and services but by being authentic and consistent. Make sure you have an authentic voice and provide a seamless user experience always as this will help you acquire new customers and retain the existing ones.

  1. Provide value to your customers

Anyone can start a business, but the only enterprise that can survive is the one that offers value to the customer. Whatever your business idea, make sure it adds value to your potential customers. In a world where consumers are lost for choice, there is a need to distinguish yourself by creating an impact in the life of your customers. Don’t push your products or services in the face of potential customers, but instead, show how these can impact positively on their lives. This is a branding strategy that not only attracts new customers but also helps retain existing ones.

  1. Incentivize customer referrals

As your business grows, you need to boost loyalty by creating a loyalty program. This is a great customer retention strategy. However, you can also use this as a branding strategy to acquire new customers by incentivizing customers for their referrals. Customers love rewards and they will spread the good word about your brand by word of mouth. This is a creative way of making the most out of your loyalty program. You will not only boost customer retention through this strategy, but you will also interest existing customers to stick around longer.

When you take payments online, incentivize customers for their referrals, provide a consistent user experience, and add value to your customer’s life, you will easily acquire and retain your customers. These are just a few of the branding strategies which help you to acquire and retain customers at the same time. These two-prong strategies will not only promote brand loyalty, but also increase sales conversion, enhance ROI, improve customer satisfaction rating, and much more. It is important to review and evaluate these strategies constantly to ensure they meet the set objectives.

5 years ago
Five Tips to Increase Customer Retention
Mohab Customer Experience 0

Five Tips to Increase Customer Retention

If your company’s focus is solely on customer acquisition, you need to pause and reconsider your strategy. A study by Bain & Company in collaboration with Earl Sasser of the Harvard Business School shows that a 5% increase in customer retention rates increases profits by 25% to 95%. That should be enough motivation to focus on customer retention for your business.

Let’s first understand the “why” of Customer Retention –  

Some of the reasons to invest more in customer retention include:

  • Customer retention is cheaper than acquisition.
  • Loyal customers are more profitable than new customers.
  • Long-term customer relations boost your brand reputation
  • Repeat purchases from repeat customers translate to repeat profit especially when you accept payments online
  • Loyal customers are less price-conscious than new customers
  • Loyal customers stand by your brand even in tough times
  • Loyal customers offer free word-of-mouth advertising
  • Retained customers offer valuable feedback

Now that we have established why you must have a customer retention strategy, here are some tips which can help you build that plan.

Tips to increase customer retention

Like with any other business strategy, you have to be proactive and innovative to increase customer retention. The following are customer retention ideas you can implement for your business:

  1. Create a VIP program for your customers

The status an individual achieves in life can motivate them to act in a particular way.  When you accord your loyal customers an elevated status and give them exclusive offers, they become motivated to stick with your brand. They feel honored and their new status creates a sense of belonging and they will continue shopping with you.

  1. Target customers with special offers

The best CRM tools will also provide a lot of data about your customers. A customer’s purchase history comes in handy when you want to create specially targeted offers for them. Targeted marketing not only increases conversion but also builds a strong bond between your brand and the customer.

  1. Be where your customers are

If you want to compete in your industry, you have to keep up-to-date with consumer behavior and be present where they are available. If your data shows most customers are on social media, make sure you invest in a social media strategy and interact with your customers here. You have to provide a consistent and seamless experience on all channels if you expect to retain customers.

  1. Go big on feedback and act on the information

If you don’t understand your customers, there is no way you will improve customer retention. If for instance, you have installed a new feature on your site, you need to get reactions from your loyal customers and act fast on the information. Don’t believe your team alone but ask for regular customer feedback and leverage it to increase customer retention.

  1. Build a consistent customer experience

To build trust with your customers, you need to provide a consistent user experience.  For this reason, map out a consistent customer experience such that your customers can rely on you to always come through. Don’t offer nasty surprises thinking that it is a revolutionary move.

In essence, customer retention requires a clear-cut strategy touching all areas of your business. From your free payment gateway for website to the customer service support, use these tips to increase customer retention.

 

6 years ago