The importance of customer retention is well-known. Retention marketing is often more cost-effective overall than marketing focused on generating new customers. After all, satisfied customers may be inclined to do business with your company from exceptional past experiences.
You do not necessarily need to spend marketing dollars encouraging them to choose your business over others if you created an excellent customer experience. However, you will need a savvy, effective retention marketing campaign in order to generate desired results.
Today’s Challenges Associated with Retaining Customers
Retaining customers is not as straightforward as it once was. Today’s customers expect more from companies, and many of your competitors may be rising to the challenge. Consider that customers today may expect high-quality products and services at competitive prices. More than that, they expect your company to use cutting-edge technology to improve their overall experience.
Customer service should be timely and personalized. In fact, it should be intuitive to a degree thanks to expectations established by today’s technology. Despite these challenges, it nonetheless remains imperative for your company to focus on customer retention and to do so in a way that is adapted to modern expectations.
What Big Brands Are Doing to Retain Their Customers
When you are searching for smart steps to take to improve your business, a closer look at the big brands’ efforts is beneficial. Major corporations often utilize the latest techniques and strategies effectively in order to stay at the top of the mountain. They actively embrace innovation, and they may have the deep pockets necessary to finetune their efforts in a way that smaller companies may not be able to.
With this in mind, you may be wondering what steps major corporations are taking today to improve retention marketing. By learning more about their current efforts, you may be inspired to improve your retention marketing efforts.
1. Using Big Data to Learn About Customer Preferences and Behaviors
Customers increasingly expect businesses to know their likes and dislikes, and they may feel more valued when marketing is personalized according to their preferences and behaviors. Big data can now easily be collected through a wide range of sources, and it may be analyzed and processed quickly.
With this information, marketing can be refined so that it is specifically targeted to the customers’ needs and wants. This information may also be used to improve the customer’s next buying experience.
2. Create Connectedness Throughout the Customer Experience
The Internet of Things is overwhelmingly changing the business landscape by enabling connectedness throughout the customer experience. IoT describes the ability to connect everyday products to the Internet. This may include remote monitoring, immediate and proactive service when a problem is identified and more.
It begins with the customer’s first interaction with the company in the sales funnel, such as when a company customizes marketing based on anticipated behavior and needs. Through Service 4.0, the company can gather data to serve the customer’s current needs as well as refine marketing messages going forward.
3. Use Technology to Automatically Learn and Improve
Because data is being collected and analyzed throughout the process, companies can gather a tremendous amount of data about each customer. Technology is now increasingly used to quickly analyze that data instead of relying on human efforts.
More than that, technology is available to automatically adjust marketing, sales and service efforts as new information is gathered and processed about each customer. This type of artificial intelligence is becoming commonplace and may be more cost-effective than you may initially think.
4. Modernize Mobile Marketing Efforts
Mobile marketing has been an essential part of many marketing campaigns for years now, but it is still evolving. For example, after downloading the company’s mobile app, the smartphone's GPS may sense when a customer is in close proximity to the company’s retail location.
It may be triggered to send a text message or a notification to the customer announcing current sales and promotions. In some cases, specials may be tailored specifically to customers who are in close proximity rather than to the general public. This is only one of many ways to modernize mobile marketing efforts.
The Benefits of Improved Retention Marketing Strategies
As you might expect, a major investment of time, energy and money may be necessary to revamp your customer retention marketing efforts. While you may be inclined to maintain the status quo rather than to make expensive and potentially challenging improvements, this can eventually set your company back. Your customers are increasingly expecting better and more personalized experiences.
If you fail to meet their expectations, they may feel let down after their experience with your company. At the same time, your competition may already be moving in this direction. Ultimately, if your company does not adjust to the times and take advantage of modern technology to meet customers’ needs, it may fall behind and even become irrelevant.
Final Thoughts
Now is the right time to analyze your current retention marketing efforts and to research more about what your major competitors are doing to improve in this area. Keep in mind that you should at least be doing what the competition is doing.
However, you also do not want to be in a position of constantly playing catch-up to the competition. Therefore, focus on stepping ahead of the curve and using technology in bold ways in the future so that you are one of the first in your industry to benefit from technological advances.