There’s a lot of pressure in the business world on making sales and finding new customers. Even though it has been proven that keeping existing customers is much cheaper than acquiring new ones, customer retention still remains a secondary goal.
But preventing customer churn is key to improving your revenue. And if your company is not investing in a customer retention strategy, your business is at risk.
In fact, a SaaS Capital study revealed that a 1% decrease in customer churn can increase a company valuation by 12% in 5 years.
In order to prevent customer inactivity and churn, you need to analyze why customers are losing interest and take measures to address those issues.
Let’s dive into 5 ways to re-engage and retain more customers.
1. Understand What Causes Customer Churn
The key to successfully re-engaging inactive customers is finding out why they lost interest. There could be many reasons for poor customer satisfaction, including bad initial experience, poor customer service, inability to understand product benefits and many others.
Knowing your problem areas will make it much easier to eliminate or fix them. One of the easiest and cost effective ways to understand your customers are email surveys. Carefully prepare your questions and send them around to understand what customers dislike about your product or customer experience and how you address the issue.
2. Address the Customer Needs
Once you know what causes customer dissatisfaction or confusion, you need to craft a re-engagement strategy tailored to customer pain points. You might want to have a specific approach for customers who don’t get the value of your product or service and a different one for those who don’t find the customer service helpful.
So make sure to listen to customer feedback and adjust your offers accordingly and resolve the problem issues before they result in customer churn.
3. Get Proactive with Customer Support
Being there when customers need you is great. But if you really want to make a great impression and stand out, build your team around proactive with customer support.
A significant percentage of customers won’t even issue a complaint and will leave directly after having a negative customer experience.
To prevent this, offer customers help before they even ask for it. It could be as simple as reaching out to inactive customers and reminding them you are there if they need any help.
4. Use Incentives Based on Previous Activity
Making a personal connection really makes a difference. Instead of providing untargeted discounts and promotions, draw on customer purchase history and tie the incentives with products and services that matter to them. Providing a link with customer favorite products will not only strengthen the customer engagement, but will also show customers you have done your research and made an extra effort to renew the connection with your brand.
5. Introduce a Loyalty Program
Introducing a loyalty program gives customers a new opportunity to benefit from your brand. And while a win-back incentive might not work for all, long-term loyalty initiatives might be the key to keeping customers on board.
You can invite customers with an email campaign, on site, via social media or through mobile messaging. By enrolling customers into a loyalty program, you encourage them to visit more often, explore your products and services and engage with your brand in exchange for valuable rewards.
To sum up, these are some of the non-intrusive ways to re-engage customers and win back their attention. Invest the effort to re-engage your customers and watch your profits grow. And even if you don’t manage to keep them all, remember to seek customer opining about what went wrong. You might be surprised about the level of product feedback they provide.
