A Simple Guide to Retaining Your Customers

Customer retention is the ability of the organization/brand to attach its existing customers to a specific goal/action. This could increase the time of the customers staying in touch with the company and be satisfied with the other offerings the brand is willing to provide.

There are several ways to actually retain your existing customers/clients but one that is under-utilized by most companies today is email marketing.

Email marketing requires a strategy and user-based actions to yield good results – high open and conversion rates. It doesn’t have to make every action complex and advanced, but simply be good with the basics.

In this post I’d like to share a few basic tips on how you can make your customers stick to your brand for the longest time you want.

Provide your customers with what they want

Sending newsletters that are not of interest to your existing subscribers is only a waste of time. The reason they stay and subscribe to your blog/product/offerings is because they want something from you and to get them become your brand evangelists, you have to satisfy that need.

Create a landing page that explains a specific action you want your user to take. It could be getting them to download your ebook, subscribe to your blog updates or get a free coupon from your brand.

Set the following elements perfect in your landing page first:

• Clear offer and an image of it.
• Text copy that describes your offer
• Additional descriptions (features, testimonials, etc.)
• Emphasized call to action (use complementary colors)

These are simple details that can be added and designed to your website by using landing page softwares such as Get Response and Unbounce.

Ensuring that your conversion-oriented pages match with the intent and need of your visitors could make the value of your content and offerings clear to them.

Provide user-targeted and readable newsletters

Newsletters are personal tool of the brand that is used to interact with its audience. Its enabling power to quickly share the brand’s content assets to the existing subscribers allows the brand to have an effective content promotion activity.

However, sending newsletters should be handled with care. One mistake in design, format and quality of content could result to many unsubscriptions (since some of your users would not be satisfied with the content contained in your newsletter).

Here are a few examples of newsletters that you can get insights from:

Insights from this newsletter:

• A simple description about the blog post shared could give your readers a brief overview of the article.
• A short overview of your next content piece could give your subscribers an idea of the quality and blogging frequency of your brand (daily or weekly posting).

Insights from this newsletter:

• Allowing your existing subscribers to participate in generating topic ideas for your blog will ensure that your next content piece would get some good traction.
• Initiating conversations with your users could help you identify things that you need to work out on your content and on your customer/user relationship in general.

Insights from this newsletter:

• If you’re publishing several blog posts every week, then a single round up newsletter could help your readers know about the latest blog updates.
• Provide social opportunities to your blog’s guest contributors by including their Twitter handles in your newsletter.

Insights from this newsletter:

• Update your existing product users of your upcoming maintenance to get them ready with it. Otherwise, you’ll end up receiving bad feedbacks in your support email.
• Use social profiles for customer service interaction to easily answer product-related questions from your customers.

Make it easy for your users to access your content

Free content should be made accessible to download/consume for the users. This will not only serve as good assets for your brand but could also open doors of opportunities for link building, brand strengthening and social sharing. Since the more you provide useful and expertly-made content in your industry, the more it showcases your authority and expertise in your particular field

Few tips to make your content freely accessible to the public:

• Make it visible by linking to it from the most important areas of your website (header, sidebar, footer, end of the post/page, etc.)
• Remove unnecessary element forms in your landing pages (e.g. phone number and company address for an ebook download page).
• Promote your asset on relevant community discussions (forums, blogs, Q&A, etc.)
• Link to it from your content distribution platforms (guest blogs, news sites, brand interviews, curated lists, etc.)

You can also create premium content available only for those who’ve access to your website, for existing subscribers or  for your brand’s current customers/clients. Providing this type of content could make your customers/clients/subscribers feel important and the chances of them sticking to your brand are higher.

Final thoughts:

Customer retention should not be made complex to any brands of any sizes. It would always boils down to providing the best experience for your users/customers/clients in terms of product use, website’s user behavior and offline interaction.