According to Gartner, 80% of your future profits will come from 20% of your existing customers. Which means brands should be focusing as much (if not more) of their efforts on customer retention.
To help you increase customer retention, Vision6 agency partner, and customer lifecycle specialists, Customology, have given us these three tips.
1. Think beyond the path to purchase
Brands today spend the majority of their time (and budget) on customer attraction. But once a new customer makes a purchase, then what? Brands need to be leveraging this window of opportunity (which we refer to as the ‘moneymoon period’) to continue the conversation with the customer. Now is the time that they will be feeling positive about the brand. Don’t allow buyers remorse to set in. Make sure the first contact you have post-purchase is a thank you, not an NPS request, or a generic sale email.
2. Only communicate with your customers when you have something relevant to say – and make it personal
Assess your existing marketing communications – map out what a month in the life of your customer looks like from a comms perspective. What type of messages are they receiving, are they even relevant? For example, if a customer lives in Brisbane, they won’t be interested in learning what holidays are on sale from Perth. If they bought a new bed or mattress, that doesn’t mean they are interested in kitchenware on sale. Instead, contact them about a complimentary item. Show them that they are not simply a number on the database.
3. Reward the behaviour you want to influence
When deciding how to reward customer loyalty and engagement, you need to consider how the customer’s behaviour can help you grow your brand – that’s the behaviour you should be rewarding. You don’t necessarily need a loyalty program for this. It could be as simple as rewarding a customer for taking the time to complete an in-store/online feedback form about their experience, a mention on social media, a thank you for visiting the website. If you want to drive frequency, consider an initiative that will reward the customer for making continuous purchases, but make it worth their while. A good example here is The Coffee Club’s ‘gift a friend’, where members can buy a Coffee Club membership for a friend at half the price (high perceived value for the friend, and a new customer for the brand).
We recommend allocating at least 10% of your marketing budget to customer retention.
Three great tips and we’re inclined to take their word for it because Customology were able to help Bridgestone Australia increase their customer retention by 30% with a communications program that targeted the right customer at the right time through their preferred channel.
They implemented a marketing automation program, driven by member behaviours to maintain the relationship during the long tyre repurchase cycle. Bridgestone benefits members come into stores 30% more and spend on average 16% more than non-members.
But that’s what they do.
Customology specialises in helping brands grow by understanding their customers and keeping them coming back. They help brands design, build and execute customer programs, customer loyalty and retention programs, path to repurchase programs, reward and recognition programs.
Customology also provides on-demand campaigns as a self-service. They will sync your customers, build your audiences and campaigns in Vision6, and then let you send campaigns when you’re ready.
We recently sat down with Customology to ask them why they chose Vision6.
Transcript of VideoName of Person, Title, and Business Name:Michael Barnard – General Manager & Customologist – Customology Tell me a little bit about the company & what you do:We help businesses understand their customers, and keep them coming back. Really working out how they transact and how they engage with the business and the ways to influence those behaviours. Finding out ways to get them to come back, and continue the path to repurchase inside the business, and to stop them from churning and going to the competition. How does Vision6 make life easier for you:For us Vision6 is a great tool for our clients to be able to jump in without having huge technical expertise, where they can find their audience, build a template out, and send a campaign. It’s an easy tool for them to come and use. It’s really intuitive. What do you like best about Vision6:It’s a really good tool for our clients where we can help them do on-demand campaigns as a self-service. We sync their customers, we build their audiences inside there, we help them build their templates, then we can get out of the way and let them send campaign on demand for national promos, LAM (Local Area Marketing) messages and communications to their staff. It makes it easier for letting our clients do all the things themselves. What would you say to someone thinking about implementing Vision6:The benefit of Vision6 is that it is housed in Australia, so for our clients who are concerned about where their data is, having the data be stored in Australia is a really big concern of theirs, and Vision6 ticks that box for us. How would you describe your interactions with our Support Team:The support team at Vision6 is really proactive, they help us find out when campaigns aren’t working as best from a technical level, and they come and tell us about ways we can help improve that, and also when we have asked them for support, they are really active in getting back to us, and helping us diagnose the problems, or finding a solution. |
A big thank you to Customology for sharing their expertise with us. Now, go grow your customer retention with these tips.
