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Customer Retention

Written by: Ryan Allis September 16th, 2008
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A few weeks ago, I discussed the importance of building great customer relationships. In this blog post, I would like to expand on the topic and focus in on how to keep customers within your reach, while steadily increasing your return on investment.

According to this year’s Email Marketing Census by e-consultancy.com, retention makes up a higher percentage of email marketing budgets than acquisition (52% compared to 46% for acquisition). In other words, email marketers are conscientiously tracking the strength of their customer base by acquiring less marketing channels. This in turn reduces overall cost of each beginning sales transaction.

Keeping continuous relationships with customers can be a hard task. Here are a few things to keep in mind when focusing on customer retention in your email marketing campaigns:

  • Business to customer communication is vital. E-mail is the most relevant tool that companies use to communicate with their customers (more than blogs, commenting on websites, etc.).
  • Listen and understand customer feedback.Today, customers are more empowered than ever to influence a business. Customers have the option to leave negative comments on related blogs or websites or mark your material as Spam. Positive and negative feedback can affect your company’s reputation.
  • Pay attention to customer focus. There are many different reasons why customers discontinue service or fail to follow through with additional purchases. These reasons include: the customer moves, they are introduced or referred to another company, or there is no customer contact from the business. Be sure to define your customer focus and stick with a concrete relationship strategy.

In summary, the best customer is the customer that you already have. I will be back later in the week to discuss more topics on email marketing.

Cheers,

Ryan Allis

Posted in Running a Business
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Comments

  1. Alan Underkofler - Follow Up Success     Says:
    September 17th, 2008 at 2:29 am

    Ryan, Great reminder on customer retention! So many customers are lost after the first sale simply from lack of any follow up. My experience has shown over and over the best way to increase sales in any company is to create stronger relationships with the current customers and let those customers buy more and refer you to others.

  2. Shannon Cherry     Says:
    September 18th, 2008 at 12:03 pm

    As a small business owner myself, I like building relationships with my clients. This allows me to target what it is they need or want and allows for referrals of people who possibly are in the same boat as that particular customer. Nice article on customer retention. Also, during economic downturns, building a stronger relationship with current customers is less costly.