3 Tips for Retaining Your Most Valuable Asset – Your Customer
It’s way cheaper to hang on to your current customers—and even to sell them more—than it is to acquire new customers. While we are not suggesting you halt all growth efforts, we do think you should pay even more attention to retention.
To that end, here are three of our top customer retention tips guaranteed to keep your clients coming back for more and helping to boost your business, your brand and your bottom line.
- Set Appropriate Expectations With Customers
Of course you always deliver the best, and you deliver it as quickly as possible. You want your customers to have high expectations, and you aim to exceed them. Some deadlines, budgets, and deliverables simply aren’t possible in the combinations customers want, though, and you shouldn’t promise if you can’t deliver.
Set realistic expectations for your customers. Keep it positive, but keep it grounded. You’ll have a lot more success with customer retention telling customers at the outset that things might take a little longer than they hoped, then delivering on (or ahead of) schedule, than if you promise a certain timeline and end up needing to ask for an extension.
- Stay in Contact With Clients
If the only time you communicate with your customers is when they approach you, you’re missing out on some golden retention-boosting opportunities. The more frequently your customers think of you in a positive light, the more likely they are to stay away from your competitors and to use your products and services more often. Send an email, make the occasional phone call when appropriate, and let your customers know you’re keeping them in mind—they’ll return the favor.
- Create More Value
When it comes to staying in touch with customers, and indeed every customer interaction, there’s another maxim you need to live by: always work towards creating more value. If your emails are seen as pointless or just plain spammy, you aren’t creating value. Offer incentives, deals, and information your customers will truly appreciate, and remember there might be a little trial and error involved.
When it comes to your actual product and service offerings—the true core of your business—get feedback from customers about how to improve, additional features or parallel services they’d like to see, and other ways you can make the things they already purchase even more valuable to them. They’ll have to keep coming back just to see what new stuff you have in store!
