Actionable Strategies You Can Start Implementing Today

Retaining a current customer is up to ten times more valuable than acquiring a new customer. We take a look at some of the most effective ways of keeping your customer loyal to your brand.

So, you are running a SaaS business, things are going well. You are getting a steady flow of customers coming in. Your site traffic is building every month and you are finding that your reach is being extended more and more.

These are all good things. New customers are great for business. Brand recognition is vital this day and age, especially in this highly competitive environment. Knowing that you are getting yourself out there is a great sign for your business.

But what about your current customers?

As much as you are getting new customers on board, are you actually looking after your existing clients? Are you making sure they stick with you and even upgrade their subscriptions with you?

Acquiring a new customer actually costs six to seven times more than it does to hold onto your current customers.

If you think about it carefully, it is actually these existing customers that are your most loyal and at the end of the day, your bread and butter. While a high majority of new customers could drop after the free trial ends, existing customers are subscribed to you and are paying a monthly fee to you.

Keep in mind what we have discussed previously with revenue and customer churn. Sometimes losing one big customer could have a huge dent on your revenue compared to losing a few new ones.

Before we delve into how to make sure that your customers don’t drop like flies, we take a quick look at just what churn is and how it affects your customer retainment strategies.

What is Churn?

Churn is essentially a customer unsubscribing or cancelling your product or service. Although it is unfortunate, it is something that every organisation has to get used to. Churn is a factor that you are going to have to come to terms with in your organisation. Not all customers are forever. In fact, most customers will eventually drop off at some point.

They say that first impressions last. Not only is this true in interpersonal relationships, but it is true for a brand too. You experience it on a daily basis. If you have a bad experience at a restaurant, chances are, you probably simply won’t go back. But what was the problem? Was it the food? The service? The management? Or the overall environment of the place?

Now, lets relate this to your organisation. A customer clicks onto your site after searching your product or service. If your site is not smooth, streamlined, easy to use and visually appealing, chances are, you won’t be hosting a lot of return customers.

Should they go ahead with the product or the service and it is not up to standard or doesn’t meet the expectation, you can expect another churn very soon. The same goes with the service they receive from your employees as well as the management.

New customers needed to be wowed. From the minute they seek out your product or service, you need to ensure from the start, that they will be coming back for more.

Don’t Just Forget About Your Customer

So, you bagged the customer and they have just moved from the free trial to your paid service. You are now getting a monthly amount from them and providing them with the product or service they have subscribed for.

But it doesn’t end here.

Just because they have signed up, doesn’t mean they are there to last. Why don’t you go out of your way to make sure that they stick with you? You could even convince them to upgrade a level.

Surprise and Delight

The easiest way to keep your customer is by keeping them delighted.

If you are wanting to set yourself apart from the rest, keep giving the a little bit more. Don’t just stop at the services you have offered. Every now and then, extend a free trial to something new that you are offering. Give them an extra 10% of what they are purchasing during their peak periods.

The fact that you are even paying attention to something like that will be the difference to your customer and will develop a trust in your brand.

Some successful brands have, on the anniversary of the customer's subscription, offered them the upgrade for free for the month, with 10% usability for the next three months. Not only does that keep the client delighted and loyal, but it also promotes them to start thinking about an upgrade.

Go Through Your Own Customer Journey

This is a vital exercise that most companies actually forget to do on a regular basis. Make sure that you are going through exactly what the customer is through every entry point and making sure you test out every touch point.

From your website, your call center, your social media, even walking into your own building, is your customer experiencing the best that you have to offer?

Getting the Most out of Every Touchpoint

Where does your customer interact the most with your organisation? Who are the people they are speaking to? Who are they posing their important questions to or troubleshooting their challenges with? These are the touchpoints that you need to be looking at.

Every time your customer reaches out to your organisation, they should receive the best experience you can give them.

If you, personally, go through your own site, and are met with a barrage of frustrations, or if something is not working correctly, imagine how your customer feels.

If the initial stage is smooth and streamlined, but the customer service, once they are on board, is slow and frustrating, that customer is bound to churn.

Stay Ahead of Your Competitors

Be that person. Scratch that, be that company. Continuously shop around with your competitors. Find out what they are offering. Go through their sites and see how they are creating their own customer journey.

Keep in mind, that they are doing the same to you, so the key is to make sure that you are always one step ahead.

If you are going through their full customer journey and matching it up to yours, you could perhaps pinpoint where you are not matching up. Use the journey as if you were a buying customer and see what you would want from the journey and the experience. You can always translate onto your own site and within your organisation.

Be warned though, don’t simply replicate what your competitor is doing. Customers lose trust in organisations that copy and paste ideas from existing companies. Innovation is key.

Stay on Top of Developments

Speaking of innovation.

Keep your eye on all kinds of developments, whether it be in your industry or not. At the end of the day, something that might work in a totally different industry might actually take off in yours. If you think out of the box a bit and use some innovation, you would be surprised how a concept that is working for a totally different organisation could work for you.

Innovation is one of the keys to keeping your client constantly looking for more. If you have offered them a one-stop-shop, you are almost sure not to lose that customer.

If you have gone further and are offering them something they didn’t even know they needed, you will have a customer for life.

In today’s age, the customer is usually evolving quicker than you are. Life today is all about instant gratification. You will therefore, be needing to think ahead of your customer at all times. Keeping your finger on the pulse of industry developments is one part, but tracking your customers needs and trends is another. Here, engagement is key!

Take A Different Approach to Your Customer

As mentioned above, things are evolving so quickly these days that it is tough for any organisation to keep up. Even if innovation is not your strongest point, or even achievable in your setting, look at it from a different perspective.

If you can’t be wowing your customers with the latest and greatest in apps and AI, rather reach them on a personal level.

Engagement is one of the easiest ways of developing a deep seated brand loyalty with your customer. Engagement can come in various different ways, whether social, personalized messages or experiential marketing experiences.

Reaching out to your customer every now and then is a fool-proof way of making them feel like they are important to you. It will develop a sense of trust and loyalty. Knowing that they are not just a number to your organisation will create a solid foundation between you that will have long lasting effects.

Building Trust is Vital

Trust is built on certain aspects in your organisation and the way you and your staff handle various circumstances.

Social media has expanded in leaps and bounds over the last few years and at this time, content is king. Making sure that your content that is going out is accurate, helpful and interesting does wonders to develop the trust between your customer and yourself.

If your customer feels like the content that you put out is viable information that they can rely on, they are more likely to use your services again.

Hand in hand with trust is accountability. If everything goes wrong, will they still be able to respect you after the way you handle the mistake?

Handling it When Something Has Gone Wrong

Ok, no need to panic. It happens, we are all human, and there is no reason to try and cover it up. In fact, that is possibly the worst you can do.

Generally, people understand that people make mistakes. Sure, there are a few out there who just don’t. But a personalized message is the best way of being transparent. Never blame the mistake on anyone else. Don’t blame a new employee, don’t blame your competitor. Accept it and admit it.

With information being spread so quickly these days on social media, the last thing you need is for your mishap to be publicly broadcasted due to the way you handled it.

Educate your Customer

Nothing screams trust and accountability like information and education. Be as informative as you can with your customer. Talk through everything. Insert practical hints on your site, discuss the industry.

One trend that most online businesses are taking at the moment is by including a blog on the site. The blog acts as pure useful, helpful content related to your organisation.

Never mind the fact that it assists in heightening your SEO score, your customers will be drawn to your content and helpful information that they can actually take something away from. This sets you aside from your competitors and makes you accountable and customer- centric.

Some organisations take it even further. We have come across an organisation that displays their financial standings on their site. Their entire vision is centered around transparency, and they believe that whatever their auditors and shareholders can see, their customers should see.

Another company has gone as far as listing their competitor on their site and listing the differences between the competitor and themselves. Accountability is important to this organisation and they would rather have all of the facts listed for their customer to make independent decisions rather than find that the customer is disappointed and churns down the line.

It is risky, but it works for them.

Ask Your Customer What They Want

It seems too good to be true these days. We can reach out to our customers and ask them what their personal needs are that need to be met.

Whether it be through social media, a personalized email or even a survey, getting basic information from your customer can do wonders for your organisation.

A great tactic is to partner up with another company, offer an incentive and pose a series of questions that would entice a customer to answer. Not only will that double your marketing budget and reach, but it could be a great lead generation technique for both of your companies.

Another option is to provide a “Rate Me” option on your site or at a touchpoint. Let your customer know that their opinions are valued at every stage. If they are finding that something is frustrating or not up to their expectation, and they can’t verbalise it, they will lose trust in your organisation.

Don’t Forget About Your Staff

Customer experiences rely very heavily on their experiences with those they interact with within your organisation. At each point of contact, the customer will experience your personified brand and if your staff are not essentially living your brand, your entire organisation will be let down. Many organizations forget or even forgo regular training and developing employees to be brand conscious.

Customer journey mapping puts a special focus on this. It states that any employee who comes in contact with your brand should undergo specialized and regular training to ensure that the customer receives the experience that they are expecting with your organisation.

Call centers and customer support are usually highlighted and have a high priority in most organisations. These are customer facing staff members who are the direct line of support for your organisation.

The fact is, no-one likes calling customer support. You will agree that you would do anything to avoid the dreaded time spent on a phone trying to troubleshoot a problem with an unmotivated and underpaid employee.

Why not make the process more durable and ensure that your staff are knowledgeable, efficient, helpful and friendly. Taking surprise and delight to an all new level would be for your customers to get through to an agent who is competent and pleasant to speak to.

Predict Your Customers Behavior

This is, in fact, not as difficult as it sounds. Data is your best friend here to continuously monitor your customer, their behaviour and their patterns.

You can firstly start by doing a full analysis of your customer base. Examine current as well as past clients in order to get a general overview of your customer demographic.

The next step is to ascertain why past clients canceled. Understanding why clients cancel is one of your biggest steps in creating a strategy to retain your current and future.

Then, look at their behaviour right before cancelling. Did their frequency of use decrease, did the way they communicate you alter at all, was there a change in their payment frequencies?

All of these points can be considered and mapped out for current customers.

Should you start noticing an unusual pattern therefore with a current customer, you will be able to address it prior to the client churning.

It’s All In The Numbers

This is the part where you need to start digging down into the data and the numbers. In order to start predicting churn, you will need to work out your current churn. Keep in mind here, there are various different churn rates that can be measured. Customer churn and revenue churn are the two most popular.

Using the results of you can then move on to setting up metrics and key performance indicators to monitor current customers.

Once you start setting metrics for customer churn, you will be in a better position to be able to predict your customer churn for the month and even the year. Keep in mind though, in order to start setting metrics, you will need to first gather data, which takes time.

Data can usually be gathered over a full sales cycle, so if you are starting out, you will need to be patient.

In Conclusion

At the end of the day, customer retention is not only easier and more cost effective for your organisation, but it does wonders for your brand’s reputation. High customer churn simply leads to a whole lot of unhappy customers that can take to any platform to slate your services.

Using only a few of these methods, you can start creating happier and more loyal customers today and start focussing on growing your brand.