Customer Retention Strategies

Here are nine ways to make customer retention the linchpin of your marketing strategy.

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Customer Retention Strategies

At this point, you know customer retention is important. You know WHY it's important. You know how to measure it. And, you know how to increase it — with retention marketing.

But when it comes to putting theory into practice, what does retention marketing really mean? It's time to talk about some of the tactics you can use to build your retention marketing approach.

As we previewed in the previous chapter, "retention marketing" isn't just one thing. You can use a variety of different types of campaigns and channels to customize it to unique parts of your brand.

Here are nine ways to make customer retention the linchpin of your marketing strategy.

1. Customer Service Excellence

The first step to rock-solid retention marketing is itself peripheral to marketing, at best. But — you can't market successfully without a solid foundation of customer relations. The reason for this is simple: before you can foster the brand loyalty that leads to customer retention, you have to create satisfied customers.

Any interaction with a customer in a service setting is naturally going to be weighty. When customers interact with customer service tools, it's because they need help. They're counting on you to provide answers, which can be a make-or-break point in the customer experience. That's why you can't afford to lose focus on customer service for just one second.

Indulge the complaints of dissatisfied customers, even when you feel that they're wrong. Offer free shipments and refunds easily to avoid friction. Make every customer service action as painless for your customers as possible so that even if they didn't end up having a good experience with one of your products, they can never say the same about your brand.

2. Boost Customer Engagement

Interacting with your customers only when you're actively trying to drive sales is not the best way to retain them. In fact, customer engagement often takes place in the spaces between sales-oriented campaigns.

Social Media

The first step to maximizing engagement is to give your brand a strong presence and personality on social media. Make your customers familiar with your brand's voice, and they'll start to see the relationship as personal instead of transactional.

Nurture Relationships

Use this more personal approach to nurture customer relationships. Reveal new products coming soon. Ask for honest feedback on their experience. Understand what resonates with them. For example, if your customer audience is comprised of members of younger generations, they will respond more to campaigns that support charitable causes.

Content Personalization

Once you've built a relationship with your audience and learned about your customers, pay them back with relevant content that provides value. Write a blog about some common pain points members of your audience deal with or release a sneak peek of an upcoming seasonal line to a small group of customers.

Together, these engagement techniques will reward you with a customer base that feels goodwill toward your brand and will be less motivated to look elsewhere for comparable products.

3. Build Trust With a Solid Review Management Strategy

Business owners often (wrongly) assume that enacting a review management strategy is only good for bringing in new customers. While it can be incredibly positive as a means to customer acquisition, review management also provides plenty of opportunities to engage current customers and keep them in the fold.

Customers Are Still Looking at Your Overall Reputation

We've mentioned in previous chapters that loyal customers are more likely to recommend your brand to their friends, family members, and colleagues. Your reputation often plays a role in that. If you have a low reputation or frequent negative reviews on your products, your customers will think twice before advocating for your brand.

Customers Will Respond Well to Seeing Themselves Featured

Platforms like Stamped.io give eCommerce businesses a range of options in terms of featuring photo and video reviews on their sites, as well as pulling user-generated content from other places. Even if a customer makes a single purchase, when their experience is featured on your website in one of these formats, they'll instantly begin to feel like they're associated with your brand.

4. Delight Customers With Free Gifts

Although they represent a loss of profit in the short term, free gifts can be a boon to your bottom line over time. This is because they show customers that you value them. Now, there's an exchange of goodwill instead of a one-sided, fully transactional relationship.

Here's the thing about free gifts, though: they have to be well thought out. Customers won't respond to cheap, thoughtless gifts — you have to offer perks that they actually want. Read these ten clever ways to leverage free gifts to kickstart improvement in customer retention.

5. Gamification

In marketing, gamification means to deploy elements of game-playing — scoring points, a competitive leaderboard, etc. — as a marketing technique as a way of encouraging engagement with a product or service.

People are competitive by nature, and your customers are no exception. When they're given ways to subtly compare their own progress with other customers, they will respond.

Studies show that brands who successfully engage customers with gamification techniques will see 63% percent lower attrition on averageEffectively engaging your customers' competitive instincts directly leads to customer retention.

One way to make customers competitive about doing business with your store is with a creative Customer Loyalty Program. You can create leaderboards, leverage achievement badges, and activate rewards to the highest performers, incentivizing more customers to stay with your brand and keep spending money at your eCommerce store.

You can also run event-based promotions like Instagram hashtag contests or competitions to name new products — customers are often eager to showcase their own creativity, and when executed well, these types of campaigns can also net you free, crowd-sourced brand awareness!

6. Optimize Fulfillment Strategy

This goes back to establishing trust and never letting it falter. As your brand grows and you begin making more sales, shipping more product, and handling more customer requests, you'll need to maintain a solid fulfillment strategy.

Why? Because customers depend on your word when it comes to things like delivery estimates and shipping security. In fact, fulfillment issues are a leading reason why people stop doing business with a brand. Adopting better communication with an end-to-end tracking system and efficient order management can significantly increase the chance of a customer sticking around and maintaining that trust that's so difficult to establish but so easy to waste.

7. Use Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing is largely known to be the highest ROI digital marketing channel — sometimes, by a large margin. There's a simple reason for this, and it all comes back to the age-old discussion of retention v. acquisition.

Email marketing campaigns are so successful because they're almost always targeted at people who have already engaged with your brand — customers, or at least warm prospects. This makes email almost exclusively a channel for retention marketing, with channels aimed at bringing in cold traffic like Google and Facebook PPC making up the majority of acquisition marketing campaigns.

Because of this, you shouldn't hesitate to leverage email with your customers. Running a new sale, promoting an event, or simply announcing a new development or new hire within the business — reach out to your customers on a regular basis to strengthen the relationship.

8. Use Data to Communicate With Customers at the Right Time

You can further sophisticate your messaging by personalizing it to your customers' preferred times and channels of communication. Your text and email software will record open and click rates at different times of day, different days of the week — even different devices, giving you the insight needed to personalize your communications to your audience or segment your customer base into different groups that prefer to receive communications in different ways or at different times.

This way, you can practically guarantee customer engagement with everything you send.

9. Adopt an Omnichannel Strategy

omnichannel illustration

Omnichannel marketing involves the combination of multiple tactics to optimize marketing touchpoints and use run multiple campaigns concurrently aimed at one goal — getting the target to convert.

Most marketing campaigns define a conversion as a sale, but in retention marketing, a conversion looks slightly different. Thus, the goal of an omnichannel campaign in this setting is a customer base that's more engaged, more trusting of your brand, and ready to become loyal advocates and high-value buyers.

This is where eCommerce entrepreneurs get to showcase their creative side. Which tactics best fit your business? The foundational ones like solid customer service and a reliable fulfillment process fit the vast majority of businesses, but what works for some may not work as well for others. One of the best parts of retention marketing is getting the chance to look at your customer metrics and use that insight to build an omnichannel approach, track performance over time, and then fine-tune that approach to continue to be more effective.

And, a great way to combine these tactics is with a proven method — a standout Customer Loyalty Program. Sixty-four percent of retailers say their Customer Loyalty Program is their chosen method of engaging customers — with the help of Stamped Customer Loyalty software. Stamped offers one of the most sophisticated Customer Loyalty Programs in the industry, with fully customized rewards, VIP tiers, landing pages, and more.

Stamped.io Loyalty & Rewards: Customer Loyalty Software to maximize customer retention and engagement

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