8 Ways To Use Digital Marketing To Improve Customer Retention

Your customer acquisition could be off the charts and you’re very pleased with how your digital marketing strategy is turning out in that respect. After all, who doesn’t want more customers for their business, right? That’s a good thing and a positive reflection of the work you and your team are putting in; but you’re a business, and like any business that wants to continue to grow, one-time purchases aren’t enough. You’ll need as many return customers as you can. You’re looking to do more than sell an item—you’re looking to build relationships that sell your products and retain them. Customer retention doesn’t happen by accident; it needs a strategy. In this article, you’ll learn how digital marketing can improve how you keep customers coming back to you.

• Retarget Your Customers

There are a number of tools that can help you achieve this. These include social media platforms such as Facebook, search engines such as Google, and other digital platforms. By retargeting your customers, you can focus on the reasons why you’re their only choice in the long run. They’ve already bought it from you and your product is obviously great and they most probably love it. But that isn’t enough to entice them back to you. The market is a very competitive place, and you need to remind your customers to come back. You can have dedicated customer pages on your website where you can target people who have already visited your page or you can upload to Google Adwords or Facebook a list of your customers and you’ll be able to do just about the same thing.

• Use Direct Mail

Having a direct mail strategy as part of your efforts will give you a broader reach and effectiveness than focusing on purely online methods.  With the increasing use of email as a marketing tool, its effectiveness has also become affected. Companies spam their clients, and people now tend to not open a huge number of promotional emails. Yet direct access to a client is still needed. On the other hand, direct mail, despite the evolution in technology, has retained most of its effectiveness. It’s even more effective because not everyone still uses it. Companies are moving on, and as such your client isn’t going to have as much marketing material coming in as part of their mail. If your mail does reach your client through such an intimate route while they’re getting important bank statements, bills, subscriptions, etc., that they can’t help but open, then the odds of your mail being opened go up considerably. It’s precise because of its great open rate that you shouldn’t neglect creating a direct mail strategy as you plan your customer retention methods.

• Create Content Exclusive To Your Clients

People aren’t just going to line up to buy your product simply because you asked them to. They’re going to line up for value and most of them need that value explained to them. It’s really easier to sell to those you’ve already sold to or those who have expressed a level of interest in your product, so retargeting should be your focus. Use your content to speak directly about the value your products offer and offer some tutorials or insights on industry trends. Your customers will sooner or later look at you like the industry guru that you are, and industry gurus sell top of the range products too, don’t they? You’ll love the long-term results of this strategy!

• Your Digital Customer Service Should Be Exceptional

To be honest, customer service is at its core just an opportunity to solve problems. Approach it like that—with the mindset that you want your customer service to solve as many problems in your industry as possible. So be ready for any and all questions from customers and do this as quickly as you can. This is one of the smartest if not easiest ways of turning onetime clients into brand loyalists. Most of your queries might be directed to your social media platforms, so give them special attention. On your site, open up a live chat tool to make your customer service delivery even more convenient. You can guess the amazing benefit of good reviews for your business, especially if you’re a local business.

• Build Retention Email Workflows

Most people will associate automated emails with lead nurturing, but that’s not it. At least, that’s not its only function. You can use automated emails for customer retention as well. You’ll just need to set up an effective workflow that kick starts the minute your customer buys from you. It can start with some emails thanking them for the purchase, then provide any relevant additional resources before you invite them to your brand’s community. If you have the benefit of knowing the times your customers might be in need of your product, then you can send emails reminding them to buy from you.

• Provide Incentives For Retention

Probably nothing can make a customer stay as much as an incentive to do so. Create loyalty programs if they will help. (They usually do.) To top it off, it can appeal to the much sought-after generation Z customer base most businesses need. You’ll notice that a huge percentage of your customers will want to be part of your loyalty program. So get it rolling!

• Map Your Customer Journey

This should go without saying, but it’s a big deal, so there’s no harm in emphasizing it. You should create a map that clearly details the entire customer journey. What stages does the customer go through from the first interaction with your content until they become a brand advocate? This will help you improve the customer’s experience on the platforms. An improved customer experience will be reflected in increased second purchases from customers.

• Track Your Retention Metrics

Just retaining clients isn’t enough, you’ll need to track the progress—or lack of it. This will help you get better, as you can clearly see in your metrics what’s working and what’s not. Important metrics to look out for include:

• Attrition rate refers to the number of customers who are lost over time who aren’t replaced. This is also referred to as the ‘churn rate.’

• Repeat customer rate helps you gauge the number of customers who have more purchases from you.
• Customer lifetime value will show you the amounts your clients are spending at varied points of their lifecycle as customers.

Keeping track of your metrics will help point you to the parts of your retention strategy that still need some more work while also showing the parts you need to maximize on. As soon as you start knowing that your clients are responding well too, you can begin crafting an engagement plan to match. This will save you loads of time and money you’d have spent shooting in the dark and estimating. Conclusion Your digital marketing strategy isn’t complete until it has a corresponding strategy for retention. Experts estimated that companies that prioritize customer retention in their digital marketing improve their chances of increasing their market share by around 200%. That’s, give or take, double your current retention rates. That just goes to show how necessary it is for your business to come up with its own strategy in this area.