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How to boost your retention rate with customer aftercare

aftercare-blog-headerA Harvard study has found that a five per cent improvement in customer retention can lead to up to an 85 per cent increase in profits. This is proof that the relationship you have with your existing customers is important to your overall business. A company with poor retention is like a bucket with a hole in it – you can keep filling it up, but it will continue to leak until you patch it up.

The key to retaining customers is to treat your relationship with them like you would a friendship. Keep it personal, stay in contact and remember to say thank you. You’ll soon notice customers stick around for the long term. Here’s how to build this friendship with customers:

Say thank you after each purchase.

Sending a customer a humble ‘thank you’ email after they’ve made a purchase is a great way to keep the dialogue open and flowing. It also gives them a chance to provide valuable feedback on your service. This communication should let the customer know that you’re still here for them and that they haven’t been forgotten once they’ve made a purchase. While you can use this space to up-sell, cross-sell or to capture data, its more important to show the customer that you value their business, their feedback and their time. 

Keep in touch.  

Studies show that strong engagement between a business and its customers will result in higher overall retention and profit rates in the long term. This means that its important to take advantage of your mailing list of existing customers by creating engaging, helpful and consistent content that will be of interest to them. Not only will you experience less customers unsubscribing from your communications as time passes, but truly engaging your customers contributes to higher brand recognition and likeability.

Make it personal.

We live in an era of personalisation, which means its essential to make use of the data you have already have about your customers. A good way to personalise your messages is to segment customers into the groups you believe will benefit from a unique offering or proposition. Dependent on your product or service, segments could be based on anything from location, to age, gender, industry, or past purchases. By feeling like your message has been tailored specifically to them, studies show that customers are much more likely to engage with what you have to say, which could direct them to make repeat purchases.

Don’t come on too strong.

It’s hard for customers to feel genuinely valued in today’s world. They’re met with a never-ending barrage of marketing material each day in everything they do – from browsing online, to watching TV, checking their emails or even walking down the street. As a consequence, they tend to block out anything they deem too much of a sales push. By maintaining a genuine relationship, sharing useful information with them and keeping things personal, you can help stick out above competition.

Merryn Bourne Creative can help you develop a customer aftercare plan suited to your unique business. For more information, contact us.

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How to optimise your marketing funnel to generate sales

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The concept of a marketing funnel can be used to visualise the journey that consumers take from the initial point of contact with your brand to the eventual decision to purchase. Most people engaged by initial marketing efforts won’t go on to make a purchase – they’ll get trapped around edges of the funnel at some point, restricting them from making their way through. Only a small number of consumers will make it through the narrow part at the bottom of the funnel, after they’ve made a purchase.

The good news is that focusing on certain stages of the customer’s journey can give your customers the push they need to glide straight through. Here are the phases your customers will travel through on a successful funnel journey:

Attracting awareness
An optimised marketing funnel will have a wide entry point, effectively capturing the awareness of greater numbers of customers –the more customers that know about your brand, the better chance they’ll have of buying your product. To do this, you’ll need to make Search Engine Optimisation your best friend, getting very familiar with the tactics used to increase your search rankings – the higher your organic ranking, the more clicks you will get and the more exposure consumers will have to your brand. The key words used in blog content can positively affect SEO, while opening the brand to referral traffic. Combine these efforts and you’ll be leading customers to your virtual doorstep in no time!

Generating leads through interest
Once the consumer knows who a brand is, capturing their interest right away is essential for them to move onto the next phase of the funnel. Make sure your website is clear about your offering, what differentiates you from the rest and why consumers should be interested in what you have to offer them. At this stage, customers who aren’t interested will drop off pretty quickly, leaving behind the interested ones as potential leads for the business.

It’s important to remember that just having an interested customer is not enough – they’ll need to be transformed into a lead, or physical sales contact before they can make it through to the next phase. This is where a lead-optimised website is just as important to the customers’ journey as aesthetic design, function or even content. So, how do you turn your website into a lead generating machine?

  • Give customers lots of options to contact your business via phone, email or social media – a loud but also tasteful call to action.
  • Content, content, content! Create engaging, helpful and consistent blog posts that show you know really know what you’re talking about. This will make users want to sign up for your newsletter. Boom! Lead generated.

Positive evaluation of the brand and product
Consumers will shop around a little bit more before making their decision about your brand, its campaigns, social media, case studies, content marketing, email and newsletters. It’s here that consumers weigh up all the products in their consideration set and make a decision based on perceived value and quality. At this point, if they have any doubts about your brand, the customer will get stuck in the funnel and probably decide to go with someone else. If they like the personality of your brand, not just for the price or specifications of your product, you’ll have a loyal customer on your hands. They’ll glide straight through your funnel.

Commitment
At this point, your customer needs to commit – whether that’s signing a contract or getting out their credit card. It’s essential to make the purchase decision as easy and pain-free as possible here, otherwise they’ll put off their purchase decision and risk getting stuck at the end of your funnel. This is where sales efforts, like trials and demonstrations come in, to make your product or service seem irresistible to the point where they have to have it, immediately.

Sale
Success! The consumer finally makes it through the marketing funnel and the sale has been finalised.

We can optimise your marketing funnel, contact us today.