There is tremendous competition among online as well as traditional businesses to generate customer loyalty. In the present time, every business aspires to earn customer loyalty and retain it for a long time.
Moreover, One can tell a lot about a business’s performance by examining the customer market’s loyalty towards the brand. This is because a loyal customer base indicates the success of a business’s strategies. This metric is especially for most of the industries, but holds a special significance for e-commerce and on-demand service websites.
Another aspect of customer loyalty is customer retention, which is a popular concept. Retaining customers is essential for a business’s long-term survival and generating a loyal customer base. However, what exactly is customer retention? Let’s find out the answer to this question in the next section.
What Is Customer Retention?
In lay terms, customer retention is the process of retaining old customers and motivating them to make repetitive purchases from a brand. Retaining a customer is an indication that the business’s products, services, and values are at par with the market’s expectations and are being liked by the customers.
Therefore, it is safe to say that the higher the customer retention rate, the more loyal the customer base of a business is. Consequently, the customer retention rate is one of the critical KPIs (key performance indicators) of a business.
Now you must be wondering, how is customer retention rate calculated, right? Well, here is the formula for customer retention rate:
Now, before you start calculating your business’s customer retention rate, you must know that no two businesses will have the same retention rate. The average CRR rate depends from business to business and from industry to industry.
| Industry | Average Retention Rate |
| Retail | 63% |
| Banking | 75% |
| Telecom | 78% |
| IT Services | 81% |
| Insurance | 83% |
| Professional Services | 84% |
| Media | 84% |
Source: ProfitWell
As you would have realized by now, there is no ideal customer retention rate. A higher customer rate indicates better business success. If your business is based on a website, all you need to do is look into your website’s analytics to find the customer retention rate.
However, what are the benefits of retaining customers? The following section will provide an answer to this question.
5 Ways Your Business Can Benefit from Customer Retention
Loyal Customer Base
As we mentioned before, customer retention is the driving force for customer loyalty. When a business successfully motivates customers to make repetitive purchases, it is, in turn, generating customer loyalty.
A loyal customer base is essential for a business’s long-term growth and higher profitability. Moreover, these loyal customers are useful in promoting the brand through word-of-mouth publicity, further adding to a brand’s success.
Consequently, businesses work on delivering seamless services to their customers to retain them in the future. This, in turn, results in customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.
Repetitive Revenue
It is commonly understood that a loyal customer base will buy your goods/services again and again once retained. This repeated purchase results in repetitive revenue, which is essential for every business.
Speaking factually, a 5% increase in customer retention rate can boost a business’s revenue by 25% to 95%. Moreover, the cost of acquiring new customers is 6-7 times more than that of retaining old ones. Therefore, when you retain old customers, you can reduce the cost of customer acquisition and increase the value of each sale you make.
This, in turn, maximizes the revenue of your businesses without any additional investment. Therefore, it can be said that customer retention is a crucial part of revenue maximization and popular business practice.
Less Marketing Effort
A business spends a large sum of money on marketing its goods and service and attracting customers to buy them. However, a business can save on these costs by working on retaining customers.
While marketing is an effort to attract customers to buy your goods, customer retention focuses on bringing back the old customers and generating repeat sales.
Since these old customers are already aware of your brand, you will require fewer efforts and investments to market your brand to generate sales. Consequently, you can save the money, time, and human effort that goes into your business’s marketing and promotion activities. This will directly reduce your cost of sales and help in profit maximization.
Increased Brand Value
Every business aims to increase the value of its brand and gain a distinctive market position. However, with the intense competition present in the market, it is often challenging to achieve this objective.
When a business retains its customers, it can not only boost its brand value but also gain a higher position in the market. By valuing your customers and working on retaining them, you can achieve tremendous market success.
Customers who are satisfied with their purchases tend to hold a positive image of a brand and will trust it for future purchases. This makes investing in customer retention a noteworthy business idea.
Word of Mouth Marketing
Currently, people tend to ask their acquaintances and contacts for referrals and recommendations before making a purchase. These recommendations are based on brand trust and purchase satisfaction.
One of the most significant benefits of customer retention is that the retained customers are quick to recommend your brand to others. This word-of-mouth publicity is highly valued among businesses.
Therefore, when you retain your old customers, you can not only save on marketing expenses but also use your old customers to retain new ones. This is highly beneficial for business in the long term in the context of revenue and brand value.
This was it for the benefits of investing in customer retention. Now that you know why it is a good idea to retain your old customers, you must be thinking about what are the ways to retain customers.
Well, if you are a website owner, retaining customers is a piece of cake. The Admin panel of a website offers insightful information on a customer, which makes retaining them an easy task. Nevertheless, here are 10 expert tips for customer retention on your website.
10 Tips to Retain Customers on Your Website
Optimize Home Page
The home page is the first impression that a user has of your website. This is also the first interaction between the customers and the brand. Therefore, one of the best ways to retain users is to optimize the home page of your website.
An ideal home page is well designed and functional and allows the users to navigate to other pages with ease. Moreover, one of the best user retention practices is to catch the user’s attention right on the home page.
This can be achieved by showing users purchase suggestions based on their wishlist and purchase history. This will most certainly motivate the users to come back to the website again and again to buy goods.
Reduce Entry Barriers
Today, most of the users do not prefer to follow a lengthy process for signing up on a website. Consequently, one of the best ways to increase the customer retention of your website is to reduce the entry barriers and provide alternative entry methods to the users.
One way to achieve this objective is to offer a social login route to the users. This type of log-in enables users to enter a website using their social media accounts.
This will allow your customers to seamlessly log in to your website while still providing you with analytical information. Therefore, your website will have a higher retention rate resulting from this approach.
Personalize User Experience
In the present time, personalization is the key to generating a high-end user experience. This objective is easy to achieve on websites, as the business has access to detailed customer analytics and data.
For example, an e-commerce business owner can use a website to gain information on a customer’s purchase history, wishlist, items in the cart, etc. This information is useful for providing product recommendations and personalized deals.
Moreover, businesses can also use analytical information to personalize promotional offers. One of the best examples in this aspect is providing discount coupons for special occasions like birthdays. This technique is certain to create a wow factor and motivate users to make repetitive purchases.
Focus on UI Design
A good UI design is the key to generating a high-end UX. Therefore, one of the best ways to retain customers is to create an aesthetically appealing UI/UX design for your website.
Designs that are easy to navigate, functional, and visually appealing have a higher chance of attracting previous customers to a website and, therefore, increase the customer retention rate.
On the other hand, low-quality and overly complex designs are difficult to navigate through and increase the bounce rate of your website. Therefore, UI/UX is a key factor in customer retention and should be carefully looked upon to ensure business success.
Use Feedbacks
User feedback and reviews are essential to understand the customer experience and enhance it in the long run. Moreover, users that feel heard by a brand tend to have a more satisfying shopping experience.
A business can use this feedback to understand whether its goods/ services are being liked by the target market and are fulfilling their requirements. This will enable a business to improve itself in the lagging areas and enhance its quality.
This makes user feedback a great way to retain customers and bring them back to your brand. Moreover, you can use these customer feedbacks to enhance the quality of your services and add value to your business.
Enhance Your Content
The content on your website is what attracts your users and enables them to understand what you are offering to them. Therefore, by enhancing the quality of your website’s content, you can add value to your website’s user experience and retain customers.
Content is available on the website in the form of text and images. Our suggestion is to optimize the quality of these elements to deliver a seamless shopping experience.
You must use SEO-friendly text content with high-resolution images to get a higher rank on the search engine. This will not only retain the old customers but will ensure high brand visibility and attract new buyers.
Communicate with Customers
Thorough and transparent communication is essential to deliver a high-end customer experience. This is because communication is not only useful for enhancing customer experience but is also a promotion tool.
By communicating with your customers, you can build your brand’s market trust and increase its creditability. This is a factor that customers look for while making a decision to purchase from a brand.
A few ways to communicate with customers are SMS marketing, sales call, and feedback request. All of these methods aim to connect the brand directly with the customers and retain them to generate business.
Be Reachable
Customers prefer brands that are reachable and have an accessible communication channel. Moreover, these kinds of brands are known to have higher market trust.
One way to be reachable to the customers is to listen to their queries and work on resolving them. This will enable you to increase the value of your brand and retain customers for repetitive purchases.
Some of the most popular ways to communicate with customers using a website are contact options, chat feature, FAQs, etc. This will enable the users to find an answer to their queries, resulting in customer satisfaction.
Moreover, customers can connect with the brand in case of dissatisfaction and resolve their disputes. This directly adds to the shopping experience and aids customer loyalty of the target consumers.
Offer a Loyalty Program
Being appreciated for their loyalty is a factor that customers look for while choosing a brand to shop from. Moreover, the more a brand appreciates a customer, the more the customer’s loyalty will increase.
Providing loyalty programs is one of the most efficient ways to achieve this objective. These loyalty programs are designed to appreciate customers who have been loyal to the brand and have repeatedly availed its goods/ services from it.
By offering a loyalty program, you can motivate your customers to make repeated purchases and, therefore, retain them. This aspect of customer retention is mutually beneficial for businesses and customers.
Use E-mail Marketing
E-mail marketing is one of the most prominent ways for a business to connect with its customers. This business-customer connection is what aids customer retention and develops a loyal customer base.
A business can use e-mail marketing to communicate promotional offers, new product launches, updates on product restocking, and a lot more.
This will motivate the customers to return to your website, make purchases, and keep a constant connection with your business. However, it should be noted that too much e-mail marketing can hinder the customer experience and can lead to the customers abandoning the brand.
These were the top 10 tips and tricks to retain customers in a business. By following these tips, you can generate a loyal customer base and maximize your revenue in the long term.
Summing It Up
We have covered all the important topics on customer retention in this blog and have provided a complete solution for businesses. We hope that by now, you are clear on the importance and benefits of customer retention and are planning to implement customer retention strategies on your website.
By following the tips given in the blog, you are certain to create a website with high customer retention and deliver a top-notch shopping experience to your target market. This will not only increase your business’s profitability but will also benefit your business in numerous other aspects.
This proves that customer retention is essential for a business’s success and is a driving factor for customer loyalty.