It’s not rocket science: improving your retention rates is one of the major strategies to grow your bottom line. Hostopia’s retention team achieves over 40% retention rate; learn more about our success.
Acquiring a new customer is step one, but every successful company applies equal, if not more, focus on onboarding, activation, and retention efforts. These important items result in increased loyalty and, ultimately, customer satisfaction and stickiness.
Here are five ways you can improve customer loyalty and retention:
- Don’t be silent after purchase. By providing relevant content such as ongoing educational and usage-promoting touchpoints, they are more likely to stay engaged. For instance, after purchase you should be sending helpful content like tips and tricks, email campaigns and webinars. On our end, Right-Time Engagement sends emails to your customers focused on improving their onboarding and activation steps.
- Ask for their opinion. Finding out directly from your customers about your performance can be very insightful. You can do this by contacting them by phone or surveys to ensure you’re doing your best to avoid cancellations.
- See the warning signs. Learn from customer behavior and study your data. Use it to build early warning detection systems to determine in advance when customers are most at risk of churning: renewal periods; calls into tech support; low usage rates; payment history.
- Be prepared. Own the issue and do not hand customers off to other groups. Take ownership to understand resolve the issue, and if needed, pitch special retention offers.
- Give a little bit. As a last resort, have back-pocket offers such as discounts or complementary services.
Keeping customers can be just as challenging as attracting new ones but with the right retention plan in place, you may be able to increase your chances of creating ongoing and beneficial relationships with your customers.
