12 of the Best Ways to Increase Customer Retention and Repeat Purchases

Advertising and other expenses are required to convince new consumers to try your offerings with a likelihood of success as low as 5%.

Simply asking them about their well-being during tough times like these, will make a positive impact on their relationship with you and it won’t go unnoticed. Laura Hall adds, “An effective way to improve your retention rate is to simply ‘show up’ and become a helpful resource or partner that they are always pleased to hear from. Communication shouldn’t always be about selling or product updates. Now, if a customer is motivated to take part in your referral program, they will continue to stay loyal to your brand.

Finding Your Best Customers (w/ Mary Keough)

The smaller the amount of time between customer purchases, the better for customer loyalty. Regular repeat purchases indicate that customers prefer your brand to the alternatives. While converting new customers is critical for business growth, the cost of acquisition can be 5-7 times greater than the cost of retention.

Daisy Jing of Banish adds, “Immediate assistance and attention are vital to have a good customer relationship. It shows them how important their account is and they pay loyalty back in return – meaning longer customer retention. Proper assistance with respect and empathy are needed to assure our customers that we are listening and want to give them the best service possible. It is important for us to provide both good products/service in both GOOD & BAD times. Customer retention rate is the number of customers who are still using your service or products in a given time period. Churn measures the number of customers who you are losing in a given time period.

Customer Retention Strategies: Seven Ways to Keep Your Clients for Life

It’s about finding a balance that makes the most sense for your business. What you sell has a huge impact on which strategy you should focus on. A retailer selling high-end leather furniture is going to be categorically different from a store selling tea and coffee. All you have to do is enter in your order number and either a shipping ZIP code, email, or phone number into an online form and you can start and complete a return with very little fuss. A return management system helps you handle all aspects of a return for your customers. It allows your customers to initiate the return, and you to manage and track the returns, relist the items in your inventory, and monitor the financial impact to your books.

• West Path is an ethically sourced clothing brand started by surfers in San Diego.
• Customer retention cost can be calculated by taking the total amount of money spent on customer acquisition and dividing it by the number of customers retained.
• Long gone are the days of watching an Adobe Illustrator tutorial to whip up a great-looking social media post.
• Retaining customers indicates that the company’s product, service, or brand is pleasing enough to the existing customer for them to stay with the company instead of switching to a competitor.
• “Referral Programs are excellent for improving a company’s customer retention rate,” says Jack Paxton of VYPER.

By showing customers you appreciate their business, you provide them with yet another reason (besides your great product) to stick around. Aside from the ability to execute conversational sales and support https://www.xcritical.com/ strategies, it also creates a better CX for clientele. When businesses offer omnichannel support, customers can chat with a person on the platform of their choice and receive faster resolutions.

​​Purchase frequency rate

If customers know that they can count on you to treat them fairly beyond the sale, rather than disregarding them after receiving their money, they will trust you with future purchases. As we all know, losing clients is expensive, and it plays into the hands of your competitors. A well-known marketer Neil Patel https://www.xcritical.com/blog/customer-retention-for-brokers-8-tips-for-brokerage-firms/ cites that on average, losing a customer costs a company $243. Besides, according to Patel, 61% of all the customers who have left do not stop using a product but rather switch to competitors. Miinto, a fashion marketplace serving Northern Europe, uses chat capabilities to support clients in four languages.

The first involves collecting customer feedback that can give you insights into the satisfaction level of current customers. It is so important that, for a brand making $1 billion yearly, a slight increase in customer experience resulted in an increase of $823 million in revenue over 3 years. A big part is how hard it is to speak with a representative directly. For example, it might be due to an overreliance on AI chatbots and phone services, or customers cannot easily navigate to the correct department.

How do I calculate my customer retention rate?

Make your web assets and social media channels consistent so customers can get the help they need across a variety of channels. Customer loyalty, also called brand loyalty, goes beyond basic buying numbers to address the larger relationship that customers have with your brand. Consider if you can add more qualifying questions to your sales process or revise your buyer persona to better reflect the attributes of loyal, returning customers. Retail and hospitality, travel and restaurants score the lowest at 63% and 55%, respectively. Clients have many options when it comes to hotels, airlines, dining and purchasing consumer goods, which might explain the lower rates in those industries. Using the same period for the repeat purchase rate, divide your total annual revenue by the number of orders processed.

Part of knowing and understanding your customers is knowing where they spend their days using your product, and how they most want to get customer support when needed. In fact, customers are more likely to trust opinions from family, friends, and other consumers more than branded content and ads. You don’t need to charge a fee for your subscription model in order to gain customer loyalty. Providing benefits in the form of exclusive content and events is another way to leverage this approach without spending a ton.

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When customers keep coming back, they ultimately spend more—reducing the need for the company to invest in costly customer acquisition initiatives. Loyal customers are beyond ‘satisfied’ with your product, service, or experience—they are delighted. These are the customers that stick around long term, and happily tell their friends and family about you.