June 19, 2022
Learn how to prevent customer churn with retention marketing
All businesses in the world lose customers, and every business deals with it differently: some immediately recruit new customers, and others analyze what went wrong and how to control it.
This problem is called customer churn – the number of customers who left a business during a specific period; this is why your customers’ lifetime value (LTV) is dependent on how hard you work to prevent those customers from churning.
Building an engaging customer experience with a customer-centric approach will keep your customers coming back for more. Not only that, but it will turn your biggest clients into brand ambassadors.
But remember that, It’s not enough to have great products; customers anticipate a great user experience while shopping online. And for that reason, many businesses utilize the customer retention marketing (CRM) approach to deliver a seamless customer and brand experience.
Why does CRM matter?
Customers these days have become more sophisticated and expect more from online businesses. To summarize: if you don’t provide your customers with what they want and need, they will go elsewhere. For that reason, customer retention marketing has huge advantages that can affect your business goals immediately. For example, a 5% increase in your customer retention budget can increase up to 4x more profits.
A well-planned customer retention marketing strategy will help you to:
- Build a long-lasting brand loyalty
- Increase customers’ lifetime value (LTV)
- Improve product features through personal recommendations
- Minimize customer churn rate
Types of customer retention marketing campaigns
Customer retention focuses on different lifecycle stages of the customer, delivering hyper-personalized marketing touchpoints at critical stages. And while you should pay attention to the whole customer lifecycle, retention marketing is the most important one because all centralize on it: conversion, recommendation, and reactivation.
Welcome email automation
A welcome email flow is a single email or series of emails you automatically set to send users following their signing up for your emails.
- Set up welcome email automation that triggers immediately after the user signs up. A welcome email has the highest open rate because the customers are very engaged at that point.
- Provide extra value with hyper-personalized content that is 1:1 relevant to your customers.
- Another great idea is to include a personal ‘welcome gift’; this can be done as a first purchase discount, reward program, or exclusive content.
Your customers expect to receive a welcome email, so don’t deliver long, boring emails. Instead, educate and assist customers in getting the most out of your business. Provide value, and the customers will continue opening your emails.
Conversion campaigns
Focus on converting your customer: this can be done in many ways, but email marking is one of the most efficient ways.
- Offer a higher % of discount for a first purchase
- Offer multiple offers for 1+2+3 purchased
- Make sure to time frame the offer to create a sense of urgency
Every email you create should have a dedicated goal you’d like to accomplish. You’ll want to make it as simple as possible for your users to follow by having a clear call to action (CTA) that will deliver subscribers to the right page on your website.
Promotional campaigns
Coupon codes, online discounts, and exclusive deals are a great way to grab your customers’ attention without seeming pushy. They probably weren’t thinking about your business before, but when receiving an offer for their next purchase, and once an offer is on the table, it brings the customer to buy with your business. Here are some of the most common email campaigns with discounts and sales:
- First-time shopper offer
- Abandoned cart – complete purchase offer
- Free shipping
- Birthday promotions and discounts
- Holiday and seasonal deals
- Newsletter subscription offers
- Loyalty programs
- Buy one get one (Bogo)
- Special product deals
- Referral
- Retargeting campaigns
Personalized customer experiences drive value.
One of the most difficult parts of planning a customer retention strategy is ensuring it can scale with your business growth. Email marketing and personalized marketing automation allow you to automate email marketing campaigns.
This way, you will be able to focus solely on developing the best email marketing campaigns for your customers. Customer churn is unavoidable, and this comes down to creating a great customer experience.
Therefore, take different actions to improve customer retention and decrease the churn rate. Treat your customers well, and they will likely stay loyal to your business.