As a business owner, you should always be looking for ways to improve your customer retention rate. This is the number of customers you turn into loyal repeat buyers! Repeat customers can be a huge part of increasing your sales and growing your business! In this article, we’re going to outline five different ways you can improve your customer retention rate.
Let’s get started.
Welcome customer feedback and put it to good use
The first step to improving your customer retention rate is to determine why people may decide not to come back to your business. The easiest and most effective way to learn more about this is by speaking directly to the people who’ve previously shopped with you! This can help you improve your customer experience. This will help you improve your business overall, so you can give both existing and new customers a better shopping experience, which will improve your retention rate.
One way you can get customer feedback is through surveys. Websites like Google Forms and SurveyMonkey can help you create surveys with short-form and long-form questions for your customers to provide you with helpful feedback. You can ask them questions about their experience with your brand, how they heard about you, what would make them want to purchase from you again, and more.
Send your survey to past customers by email, and you could even offer them a small discount in exchange for filling it out, which will further incentivize them to shop with you. Once you have your survey results, look for common trends and consider implementing their suggestions where possible.
Put effort into helping your customers make informed purchases
If you can help your customers to make the best purchasing decisions to suit their needs, they’ll be more likely to come back again and again. If you can publish content that helps people make more informed decisions, you can ultimately grow your sales!
Here are a few different examples of content types that are great for helping customers make more informed purchasing decisions:
- Buying guides outline all of the factors a reader needs to consider before spending money on a product or service
- Comparison pieces outline the pros, cons, features, and prices of similar products or services
- Product demonstrations showcase how your products work or the different ways they can be used
Let’s take a look at a few examples of companies that help their customers make informed purchasing decisions with content for inspiration.
AuraCloud 3D, a retailer of aura cameras and software, has a great article that outlines how their products and services work. This guide outlines what auras are, how their software program works, who can benefit from these programs, and more. This is a great informational article for people who are trying to decide whether or not the company’s products are right for them. By outlining everything about their services and explaining exactly who can benefit from them, AuraCloud 3D will help their website visitors to make more informed purchasing decisions, improving their customer retention rate down the line.
Consider creating similar content for your website. Outline how your products or services work, what they can do, and who should use them. This will help your website visitors make informed purchasing decisions, which will make them happier customers. This will improve your customer retention rate!
REI, an outdoor sports retailer, has a buying guide to downhill skis that does a great job at helping their prospective customers make an informed purchase. The guide covers the different types of downhill skis, ski lengths, binding types, and more. For people unsure about the differences between skis, this is a great buying guide that can help a customer make a more informed purchase. This will help ensure that REI’s customers are happier with their ski purchases, leading to a higher customer retention rate.
If you write a buying guide for your website, be sure that your guide is thorough like REI’s. Include everything a prospective customer will want to know about a product or service! This will help them make the purchase that suits their needs, leading to happier customers and a higher customer retention rate.
Ensure you’re always providing top-tier customer service
In order to earn your customers’ loyalty, you want to make it as easy as possible for people to get in touch if they have questions, concerns, or complaints. And people like to communicate in different ways so, to cater to as many people as possible, you need to offer different communication channels.
Test out a few different communication channels and see which ones are the most popular. You might find, for instance, that older customers prefer email and phone customer service, while younger customers prefer to contact you through live chat and social media DMs.
Here are some tips you can pass on to your employees to ensure they are providing great customer service:
- Always be friendly
- Respond to queries as quickly as possible
- Know your products, services, and industry inside and out
- Listen to your customers and validate their concerns
- Ask them for feedback
If you provide top-notch customer service, you can improve your customers’ loyalty and increase your retention rate. Be sure to train your customer service team regularly and monitor their performance to see how adequately they’re handling your customers’ needs.
Create valuable content so customers come back for more
If you want people to make repeat purchases, you need to give them a reason to visit your website time and time again. One of the most effective ways to do this is by publishing expert content for every stage of the customer journey. Write informative content that your target audience will be interested in!
Not sure how to come up with content ideas? Not to worry. Start by seeing what your competitors are doing. You could cover similar topics more thoroughly or write articles on subjects that other people in your field aren’t discussing yet.
You can also get ideas by conducting some keyword research. Keywords are the phrases that your ideal customers typically type into search engines when they’re looking for products, services, or in this case content just like yours. To discover these keywords, head to a tool like Google Keyword Planner with a list of words and phrases related to your business. Plug them into the tool, and Google will provide you with a list of keywords based on their competitiveness, or how hard they are to rank for, and their average monthly search volumes.
By allowing these keywords to inform the content you write, you can ensure you’re actually discussing topics that your audience genuinely wants to read about. Weave your primary keyword into the headers, title, and body copy of your content. This will help you draw the right people to your website. And, once they see that you consistently publish content that is valuable to them, they’ll want to keep coming back to read more. This, in turn, can help to boost your customer retention rate.
Let’s take a look at a few examples of businesses that have great content on their websites for inspiration.
Sarah S. Shepard, LLC, an estate planning and business law firm, consistently publishes genuinely helpful content on its website. They have articles on estate planning, business protection, and more. By continuously publishing content that addresses their target clients’ questions and pain points, they prove that they are a knowledgeable source of helpful information. This will not only encourage prospective clients to come back to the company’s website to read more, but will also help to ensure that they become loyal customers of Sarah S. Shepard, LLC and return to the firm whenever they require legal assistance.
In their article on trademarks, they cover who needs trademarks, what they are, how to get them, and more. This article is very thorough and helpful for anyone needing legal information if they don’t yet have access to their own lawyer. People who read this article and find it helpful will likely want to come back to the website for more information on different law subjects, which will encourage them to become clients. This will also help them to trust Sarah S. Shepard, LLC and their expertise more, improving the firm’s customer retention rate as a result.
Publish helpful content on your website to encourage people to come back and learn from you time and time again. This will help you build trust with your website visitors and customers, helping you to improve your customer retention rate.
At Loganix, we consistently publish helpful content on our website, as well. In addition to our blog content, we have a variety of helpful tools that can encourage our customers to come back for more help and knowledge.
Our free domain authority checker tool, for instance, helps a user with backlink building. Backlink building is the process of acquiring links from other high-quality, authoritative websites back to your own. When this happens, Google takes it as a vote of confidence in your work and will rank you higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs). This tool helps determine a website’s domain authority, which shows how likely a link from any given website will help you rank higher on relevant SERPs. A user can plug in the name of the website they are trying to build backlinks on and work out whether it’s actually worth the effort.
People who find this tool helpful will realize that they can rely on Loganix for helpful tools and content. Not only will this encourage them to become Loganix customers in the first place, but it also helps us to earn our clients’ loyalty and improve our customer retention rate.
On your website, consider providing helpful tools in addition to your blog content. These tools can help your customers and bring them back to your website time and time again, building trust with them! This is another strategy that will improve your customer retention rate.
Provide incentives to encourage repeat purchases
Once people make a purchase with your company, you will want to give them a reason to return and spend more money. For instance, you could reward them for every purchase with loyalty points that add up and give them discounts or free products.
You could also send your customers discount codes that they can use within a limited time period. Think about sending “we miss you” codes, birthday discounts, or even just sale reminders. This will help encourage people to come back to your website and make another purchase, improving your customer retention rate.
Summary
Improving your customer retention rate is a very important part of running a business today. In this article, we outlined how you can improve yours through helpful content, post-purchase incentives, customer surveys, and more.
Need more help? Check out what the Webku blog has to offer. They can help you improve your marketing strategy and grow your business!
Author bio
Aaron Haynes is CEO and co-founder of Loganix. The company is an SEO fulfillment partner for digital marketing agencies and professionals, which provides the services businesses need to improve their online visibility and grow. If you liked this article, check out the Loganix blog, where you’ll find more SEO guides full of expert advice.
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