Customer retention automation
The idea of acquiring new customers is exciting. But companies that have gone the way of focusing solely on customer acquisition while ignoring existing customers will tell you how bad an idea is.
Customer acquisition is necessary, but expensive. In fact, it costs up to 7 times more than getting frequent customers. This makes customer retention a valuable marketing strategy.
The goal of customer retention is to turn first-time buyers into repeat customers. You can do this by offering high quality service to your customers.
At the same time, you push yourself to stay at the forefront of their minds. Retention automation is a strategy that has been tested over time and can enhance customer retention efforts.
What is customer retention?
As a company, you have invested a lot of time and resources to acquire new customers. It is natural to do your best to retain these customers. This is all about keeping customers.
Customer retention indicates the company’s ability to retain its existing customers. The goal is to get them to continue to take care of your business rather than a competitor. This can mean different things to different companies.
If your business is working on a subscription form, keeping customers is about making customers renew. But for companies that sell goods, it’s all about getting one-time buyers back.
Gaining your customer’s trust requires policies that encourage customers to continue to deal with you. It takes a combination of a fun customer service experience and effective customer retention strategies to maintain a relationship with your customers.
Why is customer retention important?
At the basic level, customer retention makes sense from an economic point of view. The cost of keeping old customers is lower than the cost of getting new customers. So, while it’s acceptable to want to grow your company by acquiring new users, you’ll lose more if you don’t keep more customers than you lose. Also, you have a greater chance of selling a new product to replicate users than new customers.
Loyal customers are also valuable to your business in other ways. As informal ambassadors, they tell others about your brand and make referrals.
Retained customers also provide feedback on your product or services. That way, you can improve it. It would therefore be better to track the customer retention rate and the rate of change.
How do you calculate the customer retention rate?
There are several measures to measure customer retention. But the customer retention rate is the most famous. The customer retention rate (CRR) measures how many customers your company has been able to retain over a period of time.
You can measure it over a certain period as a percentage of your current customers. So if at the beginning of the month you have ten customers but you lost two of them before the end of the month, the customer retention rate will be 80%.
However, there are some nuances in this account that you should calculate. Business is not fixed. There is a good chance that you probably gained clients during the period under review as well.
In the example above, if you gain two new customers during the same period, you still have the same number of customers you started the month with. However, the customer retention rate remains 80% rather than 100% ideal. This is further confirmation that acquiring new customers does not translate into a thriving business.
So to calculate the retention rate, you have to select the time frame you calculate. This can be annually, monthly, weekly or even daily.
The three critical data you’ll need to calculate your retention rate are:
Number of existing customers at the beginning of the period under review (S)
Total number of customers at the end of time under review (E)
Number of new customers added to your business (N)
Based on these numbers, you can calculate customer retention using the formula:
[(E-N) / S] × 100 = CRR
5 Strategies to automate customer retention
When it comes to retaining customers, selling a high-quality product or providing good customer service is only half the equation. Gaining customer confidence also has to do with building a meaningful relationship with them.
This requires a lot of effort, especially in the modern world of acute marketing. You’ll need to be outstanding and consistent if you want to stand out from your competitors. Your retention efforts must be as meaningful and personal as possible. One way to maximize customer retention strategy is through automation.
With automation, consistency and customization are secured. These are essential components for building and maintaining customer relationships. Here are 5 automated customer retention strategies that you’ll find valuable.
Use chat bot in customer retention
Chat bots can be used as communication tools to answer customer queries and answer their questions in their simplest form. As simple as that, communication automation is one of the most important ways to maintain a relationship with your customers.
Chatbot services can be the first point of contact between you and your customers, ensuring that they always get a response any time they communicate. This helps your customer retention strategy by providing a valuable and quick answer to any problems your customer can encounter during critical test periods for your product.
Artificial intelligence bot chats such as WhatsApp take this to a higher level. It’s more than just a coordinated list of frequently asked questions or automated responses based on keywords.
Advanced chatbot services such as ours at WhatsLop use machine learning algorithms and natural language processing to understand conversations in context. This allows them to respond as accurately as possible. Offers a layer of customization for automated conversations that your customers will enjoy.
Chat Bot can be programmed to collect information that will help you gain more insights into your client’s behavior. The Chatbot can capture and analyze vital data points from user queries to discover patterns that may be valuable to your marketing efforts.
Collect comments that will help you keep customers
Collecting comments is one of the most important customer service strategies. Your marketing efforts can be a total waste of valuable resources if you’re not built on knowing what your customers want.
By receiving feedback from your customers and analyzing the data they provide, you can learn more about them and design your strategies about their needs. This is critical to turning them into loyal customers and even gaining new customers.
Your business will benefit greatly from automating customer feedback collection across different communication channels and contact points. Automating customer feedback will enhance interaction with your customers and encourage brand loyalty. You’ll also be able to modify and improve your business model to suit the specific needs of your customer base, thereby gaining their trust.
Exclusive offers and discounts
Customers who take care of your business often need to be rewarded. It’s one of the most effective ways to improve their loyalty to your brand. You can create a system that automatically offers favorable deals, incentives and rewards to customers. These automated trades can be based on specific parameters or run through specific customer actions.
For example, an automated bonus can be sent to customers who purchase a specific amount of goods during a certain period in their email. On the other hand, customers who have been inactive for a long time can also be motivated to make a return purchase through automated transactions. These strategies help you achieve more sales while also improving customer satisfaction.
Automated follow-up
Customers love it when you make them feel important. For example, after purchasing a product from you, the customer receives a “Thank you” email and a request for comment on the goods or services they have purchased. They’ll probably feel more satisfied and impressed with your service. Even if your initial service doesn’t make any impression on them, the follow-up service may be.
Automated follow-ups can also be set up to connect with customers again after a specific time frame. This will help keep your work at the forefront of their minds and make sure they take care of you again when needed. Automated messages such as shopping cart reminders can also be used to close purchases that would otherwise be forgotten.
Improve your customers’ preparation
The setup process is the first point of contact with your customers. Making this stage of a customer’s journey as smooth as possible may affect the likelihood that the customer will return for another purchase.
For the best customer setup experience, you must complete the process as quickly as possible. At the same time, you must provide as much value as possible in the shortest time frame. Automation lets you do this while reducing the amount of manual work your marketing team has to do to include new users.
As you can see, customer retention is a vital aspect of business management. Keeping your existing customers with new customers is the only way to grow your business. Automation can play an important role in seeing this happen.
Many companies are waiting so they can plan a major promotion or marketing campaign to win customers back. You’ll find that a simple automated marketing effort will have a greater impact. Customers will forget you if you don’t commit.
But by automating marketing with advanced chatbot with artificial intelligence, automated reward systems and comment channels, it will significantly improve customer relationships. If you’re already using automation in other aspects of your business, it’s time to start looking at how to take advantage of customer retention efforts as well.
