For most businesses, the act of finding, targeting, and obtaining new customers is always going to be among its top priorities. But what many of them tend to forget is that once a buyer makes the first purchase, there is much more to be done.
Smart businesses are aware that the first purchase is merely the beginning and that the real business value lies in retention. Losing existing customers is quite expensive. After all, it costs 5 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep your existing customer base. (Source: Forrester Research)
Let’s look at what you can do to improve retention within your business.
1. Rewarding loyalty
Loyal customers should be incentivized for choosing a brand over and over. Incentives may include loyalty programs, discounts, or special offers to motivate them. Using modern marketing platforms like moLotus can be of great help in designing and managing appropriate loyalty campaigns. Such campaigns could enhance buyer experience, building rapport, and offering a tangible reason to stay connected with brands. Interestingly, moLotus has unique capabilities like mContest, mCard, milestone, etc. which can engage loyal customers, greet & reward them while improving the overall lifetime value together with retention rate.
2. Hyper-personalizing customer communication
Hyper-personalization is one of the best ways to create a connection and grow your retention rates. Customers now are more likely to interact with brands sending hyper-personalized messages to them. Leveraging technology can take personalized communications to an unprecedented level. Businesses should embrace digital marketing tools like moLotus to send highly individualized, automated, and interactive messages to their customers to improve retention rates. In fact, moLotus has made headway in the creation of personalized messages with names and other relevant information, accessing the crucial data.
3. Mapping customer journey
Mapping the buyer journey helps to identify, structure, and improve the complex interactions that buyers experience across their journey. This further makes businesses customer-centric, reducing churn. Research shows that advanced reports and analytics offered by moLotus have helped businesses to map the journey better, thus reducing churn significantly.
4. Seeking customer feedback
A vast array of feedback data is one of the most precious things that brands can have for increasing retention. But they are unlikely to get much insight unless asking their customers directly. Embracing futuristic feedback tools like SurveyMonkey, SurveyGizmo, etc. should be at the forefront of marketing strategy. The advent of the ‘Rate-it’ capability of moLotus, has made the collection of real-time ratings & feedback via mobile phones easier and superior. The unique capability exhibits robust success rates, enabling the brands to analyze and improve upon.
5. Creating customer delight
Delight has been argued as a profoundly positive emotional state, created as a result of having customer expectations exceeded in a surprising manner. Marketing wisdom says that delighted customers have higher retention value. Buyers tend to get delighted by surprises like thank you notes, birthday coupons, additional discounts, etc. Businesses should greet their buyers on special occasions and events. For instance, customized birthday greetings could be an effective way to delight them, enhancing loyalty. Since ages, traditional channels like cold calls, SMS, and printed mailers have been used for this purpose with limited or no results. The emergence of mobile advertising platforms like moLotus, with special capabilities like Milestone and mContest, has made it quite convenient to send automated personalized messages for special occasions without app or internet connection.
6. Digitizing and transforming business processes
Through the digital transformation of processes to better meet customer needs, brands can make them more satisfied and diminish the churn. New-age platforms like Marketo, moLotus, etc. are assisting brands globally in digitizing key business processes. It is worth mentioning that moLotus, having robust automation capabilities, can seamlessly onboard customers, enable fast mobile document submission, coupon/redemption tracking, and a lot more. moLotus platform has enhanced the loyalty card space by replacing bulky plastic cards with convenient Mobile Cards.
In nutshell
With well-designed client retention strategies, businesses can gauge their customer needs, improve loyalty, and transform customer engagement. The good news for them is the advent of disruptive technologies like moLotus that have completely changed how businesses operate. The smartphones and their mass usage have opened up diverse opportunities. Interact more with your customers and make them feel they are part of your business by taking their opinions. Implement their suggestions and acknowledge them to achieve stellar customer retention.