By Daniel Murray

First impressions count and when your customer has a great onboarding experience, they’ll be back. Discover Val Geisler’s retention marketing strategies.

Val is Customer Advocacy Lead at Klaviyo. She’s also a CustomerX award nominee and speaker.

Daniel and Val get into how a background in theater was the perfect fit for a career in marketing, how customer acquisition relies on onboarding, and how to distribute data insights in a meaningful way to your marketing team.

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lovevalgeisler/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/lovevalgeisler

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Customer Retention: Effective Marketing Strategies

How do you boost customer retention? Develop a marketing strategy that focuses on keeping your customers happy so they don’t churn.

Sounds simple, right? The problem is, many companies are terrible at it. Without a strong retention marketing strategy in place, drip marketing and other tactics are not enough to keep customers from leaving.

Instead of focusing on acquiring new customers, you need to make sure you’re giving them a reason to stay. When executed correctly, customer retention marketing strategies can help you drive loyalty and reduce churn rate by focusing on your top customers first. Read on to learn more about the ins and outs of this effective strategy for keeping customers from leaving.

What Constitutes a Good Customer Retention Marketing Strategy?

A good customer retention marketing strategy is one that solves problems for your customers and is executed consistently over time. It’s a strategic focus on reducing churn rate and strengthening customer relationships through retention. If you want to build a strong retention marketing strategy you need to answer the following questions: What can your company do to solve retention challenges for customers?

You can’t solve a problem you don’t know exists, so you first need to put yourself in your customers’ shoes and understand what’s driving them to leave. What retention challenges do your customers face? Next, you’ll want to get specific and understand the most common challenges customers face and how often they occur.

For example, if you’re in ecommerce, you might find that customers who spend more than $500 have a higher rate of churn. How does your company plan to address those challenges? The last step is to decide how you’ll address your customers’ challenges. You can either offer customers something (like a gift, a refund, etc.) or you can solve their problems for them. For example, let’s say you notice a significant number of customers are churning because they don’t receive their orders in time. You can address that issue by offering customers a refund or a discount for their next purchase.

How to Build a Strong Retention Marketing Strategy

Retention marketing is all about keeping your customers happy. In order to do that, you need to understand what is driving them to leave in the first place. Here are 5 critical components to a strong retention marketing strategy:

– Customer Segmentation – A strong retention marketing strategy starts with segmenting your customers into groups based on their needs and behaviors. You’ll want to identify your top customers and then segment them based on the following factors

. – Customer Profiling – Customers who have been with you for a long time have formed habits and expectations about your brand. Profiling your customers helps you understand their pain points so you can better solve their challenges and keep them happy.

– Retention Metrics – What are your top customers looking for when they interact with your brand? What are they expecting? You’ll want to track retention metrics like the number of sales, return rates, and average order value to get an idea of how satisfied customers are with your brand.

Define Your Customer Retention Marketing Objectives

What are your top customers looking for when they interact with your brand? What are they expecting? You’ll want to define your retention marketing objectives based on what you’ve uncovered in the previous steps. For example, let’s say you notice a significant number of customers are asking for a refund for the product they ordered.

Your objective could be to offer a refund to all customers who request one. This way, you’re solving the problem for your customers without having to lose money on each refund.

Create Segmented Retention Campaigns

Retention marketing campaigns are designed to strengthen customer relationships and reduce churn rates. They can focus on offering gifts, discounts, or even solving problems for customers. With each retention campaign, you’ll want to make sure it is segmented. That means you should target specific segments of customers with retention tactics that meet their specific needs. Your retention marketing campaigns should be focused on giving your customers more reasons to stay with your brand.

Provide Exceptional Customer Experiences

The thing that keeps customers coming back is a positive experience. You want to make sure every customer is taken care of, no matter how small their request. If customers are looking for a specific type of experience, you want to make sure they get it. For example, if customers prefer one shipping option over another you want to make sure they know that. You can do this by emailing your customers regularly to let them know about new products, sales, and other promotions.

Email marketing is a great way to keep customers informed without bothering them too often.