5 Minutes To: Campaign Planning for Improved Customer Retention

With the beginning of a new year, many companies are looking for new ways to grow their business and maximise profits. When companies plan their marketing campaigns throughout the year, the main focus is usually on customer acquisition. However, this can be costly and can sometimes take a long period of time to execute. Many companies overlook customer retention as a method to grow their business. However, this can be one of the cheapest and most effective methods to aid growth. Here is how you can aim to improve your customer retention when planning your campaigns.

Build Trust with Your Customers

Building trust with your customers is one of the most important things to do when you look to increase your customer retention rates. Steve Jobs once said, “a brand is simply trust.”  If your customers do not trust your business, then they will not remain as customers. Below are three ways you can help build trust with your customers:

• Always keep promises - Companies overpromising and under-delivering is usually the most significant factor that decreases trust with customers. It can eventually cause the business to lose its credibility through poor reputation. The best way to ensure that promises are being kept is to review the promises made to customers regularly. If these promises are not being honoured, it is time to change the promises being made to something that the business can consistently deliver on.

• Implement feedback systems - Feedback systems can be put in place to help gauge customers’ feelings towards a company. These can range anywhere from a one-off performance survey to post-purchase surveys. When customers can provide feedback, they feel like the company is trying to understand them, which helps build trust and create long-lasting relationships.

• Create Trustworthy and Positive Content - A study in 2017 released by Conductor found that 64% of customers feel a brand is trustworthy/positive immediately after they read a piece of educational content from that brand. The full study can be seen here. Educational content can come in the form of a blog post, social post or email campaign and can be one of the easiest ways to help build trust.

Create a Customer Loyalty Programme

In today’s customer-centric landscape, it is no longer good enough just to sell a product or service if you seriously want to retain your customers’ long term. A customer loyalty programme allows customers to benefit from rewards or perks just by simply being a member of the said programme. However, this usually comes at a cost to the customer, usually in the form of a monthly or annual subscription fee.

An example of a customer loyalty programme would be Barclays’ Blue Rewards’. Barclays rewards centre around cashback offers - such as 10% cashback to your ‘Rewards Wallet’ from over 150 retailers, cashback for loans, life insurance, debit payments, etc. The rewards don’t just appear when you open an account. They also require a subscription fee to be part of the programme.  

Loyalty programmes are often set up to help increase customer retention as there is a perceived benefit to the customer by being a member of a loyalty programme. The schemes are also set up to promote account renewal. This is a fundamental part of retaining customers. It also makes the customer feel special for being a part of the loyalty programme, which feeds into the age-old marketing tactic, ‘FOMO’ - the fear of missing out.

Make Use of Case Studies

Due to the rise of the internet in the 1990s, people from all around the globe now have a digital voice and multiple online platforms to speak from. Suppose customers are unhappy with your company and decide to talk about it online. In that case, the chances are that you will lose both existing customers and also potential customers. Case studies can act as positive, extensive reviews of your company that showcase why current customers should stay with you and why prospects should want to be with you. They are established proof that the products and services you’re offering are valuable, showing your experience as a business. Case studies can be promoted across multiple channels and in a variety of ways:

• Your Website: This can be done through a separate page on your sitemap or a published blog post.

• Your Social Media Profiles: Case studies can be posted to social media in multiple ways. These can include: a pinned social post with a link to a blog or testimonial, quotes from case studies or testimonials that can be posted to social media stories (which can be saved to highlights), or a social banner used as a cover photo to highlight the case study.

• Your Email Campaigns: If your company sends a regular monthly newsletter, it could be wise to include a section for recent case studies or testimonials. This could be a brief description and could be linked to a web page or blog post with more information.   

If you’re thinking about creating a customer retention campaign or would like advice on how to improve your current marketing strategy, get in touch with Beacon at hello@beaconagency.co.uk.