It takes a lot of effort to gain a customer’s loyalty. And once you’ve brought someone into your company’s ecosystem, you don’t want to lose them. As a result, customer retention management is a critical key performance indicator (KPI) for all businesses to track and improve.
It takes a lot of effort to gain a customer’s loyalty. And once you’ve brought someone into your company’s ecosystem, you don’t want to lose them. As a result, customer retention is a critical key performance indicator (KPI) for all businesses to track and improve.
Why is customer retention important?
Nobody likes to lose a customer, but how critical is a high customer retention rate?
According to data compiled by Harvard Business Review, onboarding a new customer is 5x to 25x more expensive than retaining an existing customer. Profits can be increased by 25 to 95 percent with a simple 5% increase in retention rates.
These data points make a lot of sense when you think about it. When you have a high retention rate, you don’t have to spend nearly as much money on marketing, sales, customer training (depending on the company), and all of the other onboarding costs.
Customer retention management for B2B businesses
Customer retention management is a formal and structured process by which organizations manage their existing customer relationships in order to encourage them to stay longer and spend more.
In B2B, it’s typically managed by a customer success team that cultivates close relationships with individual accounts and customers, collaborating with them to retain and grow the account over time.
Boost Your Sales and Generate Revenue
Here are the most common strategies of customer retention management that will help you boost sales and generate more revenue by retaining the existing customers and keeping them satisfied.
A smooth onboarding process will help you retain customers.
First impressions are crucial. Most customers will return to their first experience with your brand after the initial excitement of receiving a new product or service. If it was positive, they’d be far more likely to stay.
A good onboarding process can set you up for long-term success. It should be personalized (to the greatest extent possible), hands-on, and aimed at removing as much friction as possible.
Close the feedback loop with customers.
Knowing how customers feel is one of the most important aspects of customer retention. Understanding customer sentiment and what they like/dislike allows you to fine-tune your approach and better meet their needs.
When gathering feedback, there are numerous customer survey templates to choose from, but the most popular brand-loyalty metric is known as the Net Promoter Score.
It’s worth noting that not only is gathering feedback beneficial to your retention strategies but so is closing the loop with your customers. Consider personalizing your survey’s Thank you message and responding directly to customer feedback to demonstrate that you’re paying attention and using their feedback to improve.
Reward promoters and returning customers
If a customer does not feel valued, it only takes one mistake or a “better opportunity” with a competitor for them to abandon the ship. It’s critical not to take your loyal customers for granted. Reward them for sticking with you.
Loyalty can be rewarded by grandfathering in prices when rates rise or by sending bonuses and unexpected events when a customer has placed their tenth or twentieth order. If you measure loyalty by how long a customer has been with you, consider sending bonus gifts at key intervals, such as six months and a year. Setting up a loyalty program is another option.
Email newsletters and tailored offers
When a customer gives you their email address and opts into marketing messages, it’s a strong indication that they already like your brand and your cue to start building relationships. By being a consistent presence in their inbox, you can build on this and keep them onboard for a longer period of time. Because email is a free channel, it is a low-cost way of improving customer retention.
That does not, however, imply sending out generic marketing messages. Use your CRM data to personalize emails to loyal customers and celebrate their relationship with the brand, focusing on key milestones for the best results.
Customer retention management with SubscriptionFlow
SubscriptionFlow is a subscription management platform and customer success platform that provides its features and solutions to businesses for growth and scalability.
SubscriptionFlow has recently launched an in-app named as RetentionFlow. RetentionFlow App is solely designed for customer retention management and helps businesses keep a look at the customers to manage their customer retention rate. Schedule a demo with SubscriptionFlow and increase your customer retention management seamlessly.
