We all know that keeping customers is way cheaper than finding new ones, but let’s face it, manually keeping track of every customer interaction can be a real pain in the you-know-what. And if you’re still using spreadsheets and sticky notes to manage your customer retention strategy, it’s time to join us in the 21st century (we have robots now, people!).
So grab a water, open your notepad and let’s talk about why automating your customer retention efforts is the secret weapon to keeping your customers coming back for more. And who knows, maybe we’ll even throw in a joke or two to keep you on your toes.
Customer retention is a real issue! It is significant, costly and often one of the most ignored areas of business.
And it is most certainly rarely measured.
We’ll cover the most important customer retention metrics in another article, but suffice it to say that investing some time and energy into building strong Service Systems will pay dividends.
That’s somewhere between a quarter and a third of the business you work to earn will leave you each year.
Largely because of something that can be avoided!
If you look at your revenue over the last 2-3 years and add 25% to 30% to your annual revenue, where could you have been? What would your business and growth look like? How would your profit be different than it is today?
The good news is that customer retention is absolutely something you can increase. And you can increase it through powerful automated systems that will make your business money and will not cost your team additional time!
Now, you know I love email marketing! And I love automated email even more.
But it’s not just me that has a love affair with email. As far as strategies that are proven to work the most for customer retention, email marketing is 56% more effective than any other method, making it the most effective approach.
And if it’s effective at customer retention, then I believe we should use it there as well as in our marketing efforts!
You can pair email marketing with other systems and automations to create some truly powerful Service Systems to increase your revenue and maximize your customer’s lifetime value.
Ok, let’s dive in and take a look at some of the most powerful and effective systems you can build to increase customer loyalty and retention.
Customer Loyalty Program
58% of customers belonging to a brand’s loyalty program buy from that brand at least once per month
In our eyes, anything that can get more than half of our clients to buy from us more often gets a top spot on the list of things to automate.
Building a customer loyalty program doesn’t have to be a huge, laborious process nor does it have to be complicated.
It just has to work.
Ok, so how do you build a system to make it work? There are a few pieces it must have in order to be effective and get people to come back to earn and redeem rewards.
Your customer loyalty system must be easy to set up and maintain, and most importantly, easy for your clients to understand.
You could give “credits” for each month they are a member, for every X dollars spent, for every month of the year they make a purchase or any number of other reasons.
The key here is to make sure they are getting some sort of measured acknowledgement for repeat business, and that there is a way for them to “cash in” on that credit.
67% of customers enjoy getting surprise gifts from their loyalty programs and consider it a make or break factor
Celebrations
Everyone loves a celebration. And the only thing better than a celebration is a celebration about you!
Everyone loves to be celebrated, and that’s what this system is all about.
You can set up celebrations for any number of things.
Birthdays, anniversaries, holidays that are important to your audience, celebrations within your company, your birthdays…
Anything you can think of to celebrate can be set up and automated.
Perhaps it’s an annual gift certificate offered on your customer’s birthdays (I think my favorite is my gift from Texas Roadhouse every year at my birthday…the free appetizer gets me in the door and I, of course, get dinner while I’m there!) or a freebie when they’ve been with you a year or two.
Whatever it is, invite your clients and customers to celebrate with you.
And let them know you are thinking about them and want to celebrate them.
Surprise Goodies
Everyone loves a celebration. And the only thing better than a celebration is a celebration about you!
Everyone loves to be celebrated, and that’s what this system is all about.
You can set up celebrations for any number of things.
Birthdays, anniversaries, holidays that are important to your audience, celebrations within your company, your birthdays…
Anything you can think of to celebrate can be set up and automated.
Perhaps it’s an annual gift certificate offered on your customer’s birthdays (I think my favorite is my gift from Texas Roadhouse every year at my birthday…the free appetizer gets me in the door and I, of course, get dinner while I’m there!) or a freebie when they’ve been with you a year or two.
Whatever it is, invite your clients and customers to celebrate with you.
And let them know you are thinking about them and want to celebrate them.
Customer Support Ticketing & Tracking
Providing great customer care is of paramount importance when running a business. We’ve all heard that people will share great service with 1 or 2 people, but people will share horror stories about businesses with 20 people.
And that’s not even the whole story. Check these stats out:
Since 2016, customer retention loss has risen by 37% due to poor customer service.
The cost of customers feeling like nobody is listening to them is a 75 billion dollar problem for industries around the U.S
14% of customers leave because the business doesn’t know how to handle their complaints
As you can see, customer experience, particularly during times of needing support, is critical to the success of any business.
There are a ton of things you can do to automate parts of the support journey and improve the manual parts, both for your team and for your clients.
You can implement a ticketing system, ask them for feedback after their support inquiry and use that feedback to train your team. You can send related gifts/resources after a support question to let them know you’ve heard them.
You can set up automated follow up when your team saves a customer. So the customer will get a reach out 14 days after their request to ensure their concerns were resolved to their satisfaction.
You can create follow up tasks for your team to check on them, to reach out if they haven’t responded to an email.
You could also create tasks if your members don’t log into their membership area, or course, after a certain number of days.
The best thing to do here is to think about your customers and clients. Who are they? What did they come to you for?
And, if you were them, how would you like to be treated if you had an issue?
Then create a system to do that.
Personalized Shopping Experiences
You know when you walk into an upscale store and the well dressed associate offers to help you? Then you share just a little about what you are looking for and they grab the ball and run with it?
They make very specific suggestions, tell you why they think you’ll love them, reassure you about how others before you have fallen in love with the item, and offer to wrap it up for you?
Imagine offering that kind of service to your customers and clients.
You can totally automate offering that kind of an experience to your clients, and they will never know it’s done through automation!
Based on links they click, time on list, products and services they have purchased or conversations you’ve had with them you can make offers to your list that will feel very personal. They will wonder if you’ve been listening to their private conversations!
What you’ll need in order to set this up is to figure out how you gather information about them. Is it through lead magnets they have downloaded? Offers they have clicked on? Things they have said in sales calls? Webinars they’ve attended? Products or services they have purchased?
There are a million ways to learn about your customers. What matters here is how you use that information.
Behavior or Time Based Offers
Now, I’m not a huge fan of discounts. I think they can be hard to come back from, and if your service is worth $7 today, why is it worth $47 next week?
What I am a fan of are time based or behavior based offers.
What’s the difference? Easy.
You know what a discount is. An offer is simply about putting together some additional “bundled” items, or bonuses, that can make an offer unique and will speak directly to the audience based on either their previous behaviors and interests or what stage they are at in the customer journey.
It’s a very powerful thing to be a customer, have clicked on articles about a particular topic, or clicked on new products like skirts or bracelets, and then have a limited time offer show up in your inbox that you can’t find on the site.
Not only does it feel personalized. Because it is based on the customer’s prior behaviors it is more likely to get the click and, ultimately, the purchase.
Collect Customer Feedback
I saved this for last because, even though it seems so simple, it is one of the most often overlooked Service Systems that has little to no cost but offers incredible value.
It can be scary to ask for feedback. What if people make personal attacks? What if they talk about things they don’t like, or they say your product or system is useless?
What if they don’t like it? Or worse…what if they don’t like you?
My answer is this…asking them won’t change any of that. What it will do is let them know you care and give you an opportunity to learn and change.
And hey, just because someone doesn’t like you or your program, it doesn’t mean they have to change!
But having the knowledge gives you the choice to decide if you want to change or not.
Information is powerful. Information arms you. Information casts light into the shadows of your business and allows you to see clearly what you are dealing with.
And it lets your customers know you are open to listening.
Because they are saying all of these things anyway. It’s best to know what’s being said. And to be at choice about changing things.
Ok, there you go. 7 of the most powerful and effective Service Systems you can implement in your business to reduce churn and increase revenues in your business.
None of these are particularly advanced technology wise, they don’t require huge teams to implement, and they have the potential, based on what you do with them, to make a huge impact on the revenues and profits of your business. I’d love to hear what your favorite service systems are and how they have impacted your business.
