Customer retention for small businesses through enterprises is an important factor in reaching your company’s goals. Since repeat buyers make up 40% of a business' revenue, companies should take advantage of the different tools that can help them increase their reach and have better relationships with their repeat customers.
Read below to learn some of the best ways to understand your customers, deliver the type of interaction and content they want to see, and help them continue to engage with your business.
If you’re curious about how to remove major obstacles in your customers’ journey, check out our blog, 2 Customer Experience Pain Points and How to Solve Them.
1. Personalize Your Customers’ Experience
72% of consumers would spend more on a brand that provides a great customer experience. Yet what that experience is will depend on the demographics and needs of each of your customers.
For in-person transactions, making sure your staff engages with customers and remembers details the customers share with them will make your business stand out. Setting small goals such as these and checking back to see results will improve customer retention for a small business.
“The key is to set realistic customer expectations, and then not to just meet them, but to exceed them—preferably in unexpected and helpful ways.” -Sir Richard Branson
You can achieve a similar result for online transactions using a customer relationship management (CRM) platform. This software allows you to use data to improve customer experiences.
A CRM platform provides data and insights on your customers so that you can understand their behavior patterns, where they are in the buyers’ journey, and control how you communicate with them. Consider implementing one in your business to help your customers use your products or solutions more effectively.
If you want to learn more about personalized marketing, watch this video with Impact’s marketing experts. In it they discuss why it’s important to customize the modern customers’ experience with your company.
Related Blog: What Are the Benefits of a CRM in Retail?
2. Clearly Define Your Business Mission
Customer satisfaction with food shot up 10% at a cafeteria when the cooks were able to see their customers, according to a Harvard Business School (HBR) study. Because the cooks had a view of the purpose of their work, they prepared the food with more care, and the patrons felt the difference.
This highlights the importance of purpose to drive performance. Workers increasingly want to find meaningful work—especially after the shift in work expectations during the pandemic. Therefore, business leaders should clearly establish the purpose behind their business, their operations, and each employee’s position. How does your business contribute to society?
If you haven’t already done so, consider taking a look at your business mission. Does it clearly describe in what way your organization will help its customers? What are the values that guide decisions and projects?
The Starbucks business mission, for example, is “To inspire and nurture the human spirit—one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.” The company famous for championing customer service has a mission that tells employees how their work affects others’ lives.
3. Develop an Email Marketing Strategy
There are more than 4 billion daily email users. This means that every day more than half of the global population is checking their email. Of course, many businesses have email communications as part of their customer service initiatives, but are these emails sent with a strategy and goal in mind?
In the context of customer retention for small business, think of emails like a sample of a product you might get at a wholesale store. You take the sample because it’s something you might enjoy. If you find the product special, you consider purchasing it. However, the brand had to give away some of their product in order to get your attention.
Therefore, for an email strategy to work, it needs to provide value to the reader. That value can be entertainment, education, or inspiration. If you are in the healthcare industry, for example, you might send an email to your patients with tips to eat healthier or to avoid getting sick during flu season. If recipients know there is value in your emails, they will be more likely to open them regularly.
This is one small but effective way to maintain communication with your customers as well as keep them engaged with your business and brand. A CRM platform, mentioned above, can also give you more control over how you deploy your email strategy.
For example, since everything is centralized, emails from customers will not get lost. Additionally, this technology lets you segment your audience based on previous information, so that each email will be better personalized for each of these segments.
4. Conduct Market Research
Over three-quarters (76%) of customers expect companies to understand what they want and to tailor their services to them. Market research will help you achieve this by gathering data and insights from a number of sources. With this information, customer retention for a small business or larger enterprise can be actively improved.
Market research insights can come from focus groups, surveys, or online research. These mediums all provide data about which type of customer your business should be focusing on.
You can use this data to build a buyer persona—a detailed profile of the ideal client—to help you better understand why customers engage with your brand and how you can best help them solve pain points.
Market research can also help you find areas to grow and expand. Since it provides you with a view of your market, you will be able to tell which opportunities competitors haven’t explored yet, giving you an advantage. Similarly, if your market is saturated, you can develop ways to stand out or change your strategy to attract and retain more customers. Some choose to conduct this in-house while others opt to go with an MSP that can provide extensive market research and analytics services.
Related Blog: What Is Behavioral Segmentation in Marketing?
5. Revamp Your Social Media Efforts
After you have fined-tuned your business mission and conducted market research, you can use the information and goals you have to improve your social media strategy. 76% of consumers have purchased a product featured in a brand's social media post. Therefore, carefully creating a social media strategy with measurable goals can help you engage regularly with customers and increase sales.
Automation tools can also be used to maintain a consistent presence in your preferred platforms with scheduled posts. Since social media is mainly a visual medium, consider using high quality graphics and short videos, which increases customer engagement.
Bottom Line
Improving customer retention for small businesses through enterprises is an achievable task with the right strategy and goals. You need to understand your audience first, so market research insights will help you develop a better email and social media strategy.
Taking advantage of automation tools will also allow you to continuously engage with your customers online so that they become more familiar with your brand and understand they can depend on you.
Take advantage of these tips to jump-start interactions and conversations with your current customers. Soon, your brand will be one they feel they can depend on.
As your engagement efforts increase, don’t forget to address common customer frustrations. Read this helpful blog on how to help your customers have a stress-free experience: 2 Customer Experience Pain Points and How to Solve Them.
