The Effective Customer Retention Strategies

Large or small, your business needs clients and is driven by customer demand. Managing the customer relationship is a delicate balance of satisfying their wants and needs without losing your shirt. Your clients are the lifeblood of your business and repeat business and referrals are key to your longevity in the marketplace.

"It is easier to keep a customer, than to find a new one". This is a very true statement and your business should have it displayed above every doorway to help the organization understand the importance of the customer.

Customer Retention Strategies:  Customer retention is not only a cost effective and profitable strategy, but in today's business world it's necessary. This is especially true when you remember that 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customer and clients.It's much less costly to generate customer loyalty and Retain customers than to spend marketing money to attract new customers.
Many customer retention strategies have been formulated, applied, and reviewed to get that much coveted high customer retention rate. What are these strategies?

• Membership cards and membership programs
• Welcome and thank you communications
• Beefed up customer service, empowered to solve problems
• Enhanced technical support with follow up satisfaction calls
• Frequent buyer programs which permit customers to build up equity
• Event driven communications that are meaningful to the customers’ lives
• Databases that keep track of customer’s purchases, preferences, complements and complaints, which are used to carry out loyalty building services and dialogs.
• Integrated marketing programs where the advertising, direct communications, customer service, database marketing and sales programs are all orchestrated together and designed to build loyalty. 
• Satisfaction surveys, followed up by phone calls and letters

One strategy that is effective is using client surveys because they provide an easy way to find problems in the services and products provided by the company. Some common problems include lack of proper service and high price of products and services. It is necessary to analyze these customer surveys in order to understand customers who are not satisfied with the services and products offered by the company. Understanding will enable you to apply preventive actions to prevent or at least resolve these problems.

If companies are able to identify their clients who are thinking about shopping somewhere else then they are also in the position to be able to implement actions in order to prevent the customers leaving. Some ways to do this include analyzing customer segments, developing customer profiles, and building models that will predict the possible problems that may arise.