Customer Retention:

Harvard Business Review reveals that a five percent increase in customer retention translates to anywhere between a 25 and 95 percent increase in profits

Retained customers (loyal customers) are more profitable – they have a higher lifetime value

Customers you have retained successfully over the years:

• Visit your website more

• Visit your store more

• Spend more than the average customer

• Stay with you during adverse times

A two percent increase in customer retention will roughly have the same effect as a 10 percent reduction in selling price. Source: “Leading on the Edge of Chaos”, Emmet Murphy & Mark Murphy

Retaining customers lowers your total customer acquisition costs and is in fact, six to seven times cheaper than acquiring a new customer. Source: Bain & Company

Your chances of selling to an existing customer is anywhere between 60 and 70 percent, whereas that of selling to a newly acquired customer is typically between five and 20 percent. Source: Marketing Metrics

The success of your customer retention strategies will depend heavily upon three key factors, which are essentially the pillars of stellar customer retention.

These include your ability to:

• Make (and keep) customers happy

• Reduce customer effort

• Delivery of quality customer service; first time, every time

7 Steps to More Customer Retention

• Step #1: Recognize customers as nothing short of valuable assets

• Step #2: Build a relationship that’s larger than your business

• Step #3: Stay in touch constantly

• Step #4: Talk to the ones that got away

• Step #5: Talk to the ones that chose to stay

• Step #6: Invest in key areas that make customers’ lives easy

• Step #7: Remember to reward loyalty

Member Retention

Much like customer retention, membership retention stands upon three pillars:

• Making and keeping members happy

• Reducing their efforts

• Delivering quality service to them time and again

• Understand the reasons why people (may) abandon your membership site

• Start thinking retention from the get go

• Focus on making networking easy for members

• Keep meaningful activities flowing

• Be proactive about membership renewals

• Reward loyalty

• Compare with and stay abreast of competition

List Retention

• Email marketing is one of the oldest channels of digital marketing. It is also one of the most profitable

• According to the Email Marketing Industry Census published by E Consultancy in association with Adestra, email marketing revenue witnessed a 28 percent hike in one year

• 68 percent of the participating organizations of the Econsultancy study rated email as ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ in terms of marketing return on investment

Steps for Successful List Retention

• Quit selling all the time

• Quit sending all the time

• Offer personalization of content

• Display a permission reminder and unsubscribe link in all mails

• Target members who seem to be falling out of love