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Value your current customers
Clever businesses have always understood the importance of customer retention. While winning new clients is essential for growth and long term security, existing customers already have a track record of buying your products and services – they appreciate your brand. It is therefore unsurprising that it costs up to seven times more to win a new client than it does to retain one. Retaining clients for longer while maximising their spend means improving customer lifetime value.
Keeping customers happy
Excellent customer service is a given for retaining customers for longer, and improving customer lifetime value, and this means going the extra mile. In the days of traditional marketing, going the extra mile may have meant hand delivering a Christmas card with a bottle of champagne to your most loyal customers, and many companies still include similar fine touches as part of their happy client strategy. A regular phone call to ensure clients are happy with the service, to let them know what else is available and how you can help them further is also highly useful as long as it is not delivered by a hard-selling sales person.
Happy customers buy more and become your “brand advocates”
Looking after your client base makes good sense, after all. Long term clients will buy more from you, will be more open minded to other products and services that you offer, are increasingly likely to recommend you to somebody else and in doing so gradually become brand advocates. Brand loyalty takes time to win but is one of the most valuable assets a business can gain. This has always been true, long before anybody had a website or talked about producing content. The digital age has made it easier to engage with customers and retain them for longer, while improving customer lifetime value.
The power of digital
Whereas phone calls can be seen as pushy, printed mailshots intrusive and free gifts as cheesy, free content that is informative and exclusive can only really be seen in a positive way. It is a more effective way of keeping existing customers happy and updated while encouraging them to spend. Let’s look at how free content can improve customer lifetime value.
Offering more
Creating areas on your website that are exclusively available to existing customers gives you a great opportunity to make them feel valued and offer them exclusive access to useful information.
Given that they have already bought into your brand, products and services, you have an insight into their needs and requirements. Now you can share more with them. There are a variety of ways you can do this:
White papers
Giving them in-depth knowledge and insights into changes within their industry that need to know about.
Infographics
A visually attractive way of delivering content that is useful and insightful or a more user friendly, easy to digest way of sharing the contents of a white paper.
Product tips
The fast pace of technology often means that people are only taking advantage of a small percentage of features available to them. Do you know and understand every trick that your mobile has up its sleeve or how to get the most from a piece of software you are using? Help your customers get the most from the products and services you sell them. They will love you and your brand much more for it.
Heads-up
You can let customers know of issues that have been resolved, product improvements, positive company news that will have a beneficial impact on the service they receive.
Support portal
An easy and reliable way for customers to reach you and gain speedy assistance or further information
Customer surveys
Ask your clients what they think. Find out how you can improve. Let them know they are valued and being heard.
Survey Feedback
Similar to the heads-up but stronger because you are showing that you have heard the voice of your customer and that you are responding to their needs
Customer stories / testimonials
This is a great way of showing that you care about your customers while celebrating the success of your product. You are sharing a story about your customers for your customers.
Community forums
By allowing customers to talk to each other and you, you create a community of loyal clients. This is a smart move because it means that customers can share knowledge, feel a part of something special that involves your brand and may allow you to sense potential issues before they become complaints.
Offer an upgrade
Why give them a hamper when you can offer them something far more relevant to what they need and makes them appreciate you more?
Reach out to them
While there are numerous ways you can offer more to your existing clients, all the while stimulating interest in your brand and additional products or services, there are also different methods for reaching them.
Regular newsletters
A consistent, regular newsletter that is not too salesy nor too frequent, that keeps your customers updated while delivering information that is highly useful to them, you keep them interested and appreciative. There is nothing wrong with including some very gentle calls to action within this format that may help draw some of them further up the funnel.
Social media promotions
Use your social media platforms to promote special offers. There is nothing to stop you making these offers available to new customers as well as existing customers as long as you are offering a little more for those who already buy from you.
Social media engagement
Encourage your customers to be a part of the content that you promote. User generated content is a highly effective way of showing your product being appreciated, acting as a spontaneous and genuine testimonial, and allowing your happy customers to engage with you and other people.
Be human
However, you reach your existing customers be sure to interact with them in a human and genuine way. That means having a strategy for dealing with posts to your social media pages, dealing with private messages, handling enquiries on a portal.
People appreciate a prompt and helpful response but, more than anything, they want to be heard and empathised with, to engage with a brand that feels them. If you can get that right in all your online and offline communication with customers, you already stand a far stronger chance of keeping them in the long term and improving their lifetime value. Being human, empathic and useful and letting this show with the content you create is the way to improve customer lifetime value.
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