Shiv Singh, a business leader and author of many books, said: “The purpose of a business is to create a customer who creates customers.”
If you increase customer loyalty, you will simultaneously improve customer retention and customer lifetime value and acquire new customers by word-of-mouth recommendations from your happy clients. Isn’t it a dream scenario?
Although it sounds easy, it’s not. In today’s competitive business landscape, brands must change their approach and start implementing innovative ideas to motivate customers to become loyal to their brand.
PassKit, our digital loyalty platform, is one such solution. With PassKit, you can create your digital loyalty program, distribute it on multiple marketing channels and track redemption rates. Since it integrates with Google Pay and Apple Wallet, you don’t need to develop your app – you can use your user’s familiarity and trust in these mobile wallets.
With PassKit, you can create digital loyalty cards, membership cards, or coupons and reward your loyal customers for their repeat purchases. They can collect points on their mobile devices and redeem them for discounts, special offers, or prizes at your store.
Since 54% of consumers say they would consider doing more business with a company for loyalty rewards, you should follow the trend and sign up for PassKit to create your loyalty program. You can test all features during our 45-day free trial.
If you need more customer retention examples, continue reading our article, as we have prepared a comprehensive list of customer retention strategies that work. Let’s start with some basics.
What is customer retention?
Customer retention keeps customers from leaving your business in favor of competitors or switching to a different product or service.
Many factors affect retention, such as:
- How well your company treats its customers
- The user experience on your website
- The quality of content on your site
- Customer service
- Ease of ordering
- Pricing
- Communication and response time
- Shipping and delivery time
- Value for money
To increase retention rates, you should focus on customer satisfaction and loyalty, improving customer experience, and reducing customer churn.
Why is retaining existing customers important
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Keeping existing customers is less expensive than acquiring new ones. But that’s not the only reason customer retention is worth focusing on.
Retaining customers brings more profit in the long run. Since they already trust your brand, they are 50% more likely to try new products. Also, they spend 31% more than new customers.
Still not convinced about the importance of customer retention? Hardly possible, but we will show you some more stats, just in case.
Customer retention stats in 2022
When it comes to customer success, nothing speaks stronger than statistics. Let’s look at some of them to ensure that customer retention strategies are worth your focus and effort.
- The customer retention rate is below 20% for most industries
- 69% of people recognize consistent customer service as the main reason to shop more frequently
- According to Zinrelo, 80% of the company’s profits come from 20% of customers
- In comparison to new clients, loyal customers spend 67% more
- American companies lose $83 billion every year because of poor customer retention strategies
- 86% of customers are ready to pay more to get a better service
Which is better – customer retention or customer acquisition?
After all that we have said so far about customer retention, you shouldn’t have any doubts whether it is better than customer acquisition or not. While the latter is also significant, many companies mistake focusing too much time and resources on customer acquisition and neglecting implementing customer retention strategies.
How does your business benefit from retaining loyal customers?
Applying customer retention strategies will bring you several benefits, including
- Increased brand awareness and improved reputation – thanks to word-of-mouth recommendations from loyal customers.
- Profit increase – according to Harvard Business School, the rise in retention rate by five percent leads to a profit increase of 25-95 percent.
- Making general improvements – if you are willing to listen to your customers’ needs, their feedback will help you to identify flaws. Thanks to customers’ suggestions, you’ll also know how to fix these issues.
- Easier introduction of new products – studies show that loyal customers are six times more likely to experiment with a brand’s new products than new customers.
- Fewer dissatisfied customers – if customers feel loyal to you, they are more willing to forgive mistakes.
So, where do you start with the customer retention strategy? Here’s a short guide.
5 steps to create a customer retention strategy
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Keep your current customers engaged using these simple techniques.
1. Collect customer feedback with surveys
Using customer surveys, ask your customers what they think about your product or service. It will help you detect and analyze the reasons behind customer dissatisfaction and make necessary improvements. Customers will appreciate your wanting to go the extra mile and know their opinion.
2. Find the best communication channel
Use your customers’ favorite channels to maintain constant communication. Maybe your customers want to follow you on social media or prefer to hear from you by email – adjust to their preferences.
3. Leverage personalization
One of the best customer retention tactics is providing customers with a personalized experience. Customers like to feel appreciated and understood. So apply tactics like greeting customers by name, offering product recommendations based on their previous behavior, and showing recently viewed products.
4. Offer discounts and vouchers for regular customers
Show your regular customers you appreciate their loyalty by offering them discounts and vouchers. Doing this will reinforce positive associations with your brand since deals and coupons evoke good emotions.
5. Focus on quality instead of speed
Everyone is in a hurry nowadays. Try not to transfer this trend to your business since customers are more likely to engage with a brand that offers a courteous and helpful service rather than a fast one.
After implementing these steps, you’ll want to know if it was worth the effort. It leads to the following question.
What data should you collect to measure customer retention success?
Among several customer retention metrics, the most important ones include the following:
- Repeat purchase rate reflects how many customers return to repurchase your products or services.
- Customer churn rate refers to the number of customers your brand has lost over a certain period.
- Revenue churn – this metric correlates with customer churn rate. It helps you assess the situation from a different perspective: instead of reflecting the number of customers you lost, it focuses on their monetary value.
Before speaking of any success, you must create an effective customer retention program first. Here are some ideas you could consider implementing.
Customer retention examples you can start using today
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To help you start using customer retention techniques right away, we created the most comprehensive list of customer retention examples to choose from. Let’s go through each one in detail.
Offer highly personalized service
Make your customers feel valued by delivering them a personalized customer experience. You can achieve that in multiple ways like
- Addressing customers by their name – it will help you get closer to your customers and create a more personal relationship with your brand
- Using segmentation – collect data to group customers by characteristics like age, education, or purchase history. It will enable you to segment your target audience and deliver relevant offers based on their personal needs.
- Offering several customer service channels – show your customers that you recognize their preferences by providing them with several options to reach your customer support
Offer exclusive content or services for your current customers only
Exclusive content can strengthen relationships with your customers. It has several more advantages. It can:
- Increase brand awareness – access to your bonus content will make your customers feel like they are members of an exclusive club. Their connection to your brand will increase.
- Attract new customers – by offering exclusive access only to customers, you entice casual visitors to your website to sign up and keep returning.
- Support sales – as customers become more attached to your brand and more aware of your products or services thanks to the exclusive content you offer, they will also be more eager to buy from you.
- Reward loyalty – bonus content will be an extra value your loyal customers get for free.
Offering your customers exclusive services will lead to similar effects.
Send relevant product recommendations on occasion
One of the best ways of increasing customer retention rates is by sending personalized recommendations to your customers. For example, when sending an email with the receipt for the client’s order, recommend a few related products. It can lead to a 65% reduction in unsubscribe rate and increase the probability that the client will return to your site by 300%.
Provide exceptional customer service and support
Do everything to delight your customers with your service. Maintain a positive attitude, respond quickly to customer queries, seek creative solutions to customer issues, and always keep your word if you promise something.
Ask for feedback constantly with surveys
Who is better aware of the strengths and weaknesses of your offer, if not your customers? Gathering constructive feedback from people who interact with your brand is a good idea. Find out what your customers like, need, and expect from you using website feedback, post-event surveys, and short but effective customer satisfaction surveys.
Send drip marketing emails to stay in touch with your customers
Send your customers automatic emails based on their actions. Abandoned cart emails are an excellent example of a drip email campaign. When customers leave your site without purchasing items added to their cart, the system automatically sends an email encouraging them to return to the site and finalize the purchase.
Send customer service reminders to shoppers who forget to re-order
Use customer purchase history to identify repeat purchases your customers make regularly. If you ever notice they forget to reorder their favorite item, don’t be afraid to send them a kind reminder to order again. Your customers are busy and have a lot of things on their minds, so they will appreciate the reminder.
Create an exclusive program for frequent shoppers only
You should value your loyal customers since repeat buyers bring more than half of SMBs’ revenue.
That’s why a frequent shoppers’ program belongs to one of the best customer retention strategies. The program can be straightforward and include benefits such as occasional emails about exclusive promotions and discounts.
Send a post-purchase email to show appreciation
Show your customers you are grateful for choosing your product or service by sending them a thank-you email following their purchase. It’s a small gesture that doesn’t cost you any money but can leave a long-lasting positive impression on your customers.
Leverage peer-to-peer customer referrals
Your existing customers can be a great source of new leads. If they are satisfied with your products or services, there is a high probability that they will refer their family and friends to your brand.
It will pay off since referrals generate two times more sales than paid advertising. That’s because paid advertising doesn’t create as much trust as friends and family’s recommendations.
For example, Dropbox used referral marketing to grow its business. It encouraged customers to invite their friends by giving both parties 500MB of additional storage space. This strategy led to a 60% signup increase.
Provide welcome back rewards
Even though you use customer retention strategies, some of your customers will be tempted to use competitive products or services from time to time. But there’s a chance they won’t be happy with the competitive offer and will come back to you.
If you spot a customer who hasn’t ordered from you for a while but made a purchase, think about how you could reward them for their return. A small gift or a discount might be a sign they made a good decision coming back to you.
Send out surprise gifts
In everyday life, people use gifts to strengthen their mutual relationships. This approach transferred to the business world a long time ago.
Businesses know that surprise gifts are an excellent help in building strong customer relationships. Apart from making customers feel valued, surprise gifts remind them of your brand every time they look at the gift.
Send birthday greetings
Here’s another way of strengthening customer relationships – send them birthday greetings. A simple email with lovely wishes, a special offer, a gift, or a paper birthday card is an excellent opportunity to connect with your customers and let them know you’re thinking about them.
Add gamification to increase retention
Who doesn’t like games? You have to admit that games are pretty addictive. That’s why many businesses and organizations nowadays use elements found in games to increase customer engagement and improve customer retention. Elements like achievements, points, and rewards increase users’ engagement and make them feel that you recognize their progress.
Give away freebies and samples on subscription services
If customers decide to buy subscription services from you, they deserve special appreciation. Make them feel rewarded for taking this step by giving them freebies and samples of your product. It will not only be an incentive for customers to keep their subscription but also encourage them to pay the total price in the future for the products they get for free.
Provide free shipping and/or free returns
Free shipping is a strong customer retention strategy. 79% of customers admit that they are more likely to purchase online if the retailer offers free shipping. It removes the barrier of shipping costs and improves the customer experience.
Free shipping can influence your business in more ways than you could think. Not only does it increase customer loyalty and brand awareness, but it also leads to a larger order value and boosts conversion rates.
Create and promote a loyalty program
According to studies, 84% of customers are more likely to support a brand that has a loyalty program, while 49% of customers admit joining a loyalty program encourages them to spend more.
Moreover, a well-designed loyalty program can help you stand out from the crowd. Only in the US, there are 2.1 million online businesses, so competition is stiff, and you have to find a good strategy to stand out. Rewarding your loyal customers with a loyalty program can help you achieve that.
Does it encourage you to build your customer loyalty program? We have a few tips for you on how to do that.
How to create a loyalty program with PassKit
Creating a loyalty program is one of the best customer retention strategies available. Maybe you think this approach will take a lot of time and plenty of your financial resources, but you couldn’t be more wrong.
We have a solution to help you design a loyalty program cost-effectively and quickly. Starting a loyalty program with PassKit can take you only a few minutes and doesn’t require huge investments on your part – it is available at a small monthly fee.
What is PassKit
PassKit is customer loyalty software that allows you to create and launch your loyalty programs fast and easy. With templates available on our platform, you will design digital loyalty cards in a breeze. Then you can use multiple channels to promote and distribute your loyalty cards, and your customers can seamlessly add them to their mobile wallets like Apple Wallet and Google Pay. These digital loyalty cards help them collect points for their purchases and redeem them for rewards at your store. Let’s explain how it works in more detail.
How to create digital passes with PassKit
PassKit digital loyalty software is easy to use. Before you can offer your customers newly created digital passes, you need to follow a few simple steps:
- Create a free account on the PassKit platform
- Choose the type of card you want to create – a loyalty card, membership card, or coupon card – and give your project a name
- Decide about the look of your loyalty card. We ensure it complies with the newest Apple Wallet and Google Pay design standards, so you don’t have to worry about that
- Choose a barcode type if you want the card to be scannable at your POS
- Add images (your logo and hero image) and define colors
- Add basic information, useful sections, and backfield information
- Include links to your official websites, social media profiles, and other useful links
- Save your design.
When your loyalty card is ready, it’s time to distribute it among your customers.
PassKit and the multi-channel distribution
With PassKit, you can use multiple channels to distribute your loyalty cards. Your customers can download the card to their digital wallet with a single click on the link or by scanning the QR code. You can use the link and the QR code to promote the program via different online and offline channels like
- SMS marketing
- Email marketing
- Social media channels
- Receipt marketing
- In-app advertising
- Your company website
- Search marketing
- Custom targeting on Facebook and Google
- Visual merchandising on print materials in your store or near the store
You can also use your NFC payment terminal to push automatic enrolment requests to Apple Wallet and Google Pay users.
Once your loyalty program is up and running, you’ll probably wonder how effective it is. PassKit will provide you with everything you need to learn the answer.
How to measure success with PassKit
All you have to do is create your account and log in to the PassKit dashboard.
There you will be able to see how successful your loyalty program is by tracking data like the number of enrolled members, the number of digital cards your customers installed in their digital wallet, the number of cards uninstalled, and the number of cards you deleted via the web interface or API.
You can see your program’s performance by day, month, or year. You can also set custom dates to see your data for a specific period.
Wondering what digital wallet providers your customers actively use? The chart will show you everything about that.
Last but not least, you can check the percentage share that each distribution channel has in bringing you new loyalty program members.
Easy thing, isn’t it? Now that you know how PassKit can help you provide an excellent customer experience and increase customer retention, it’s time to wrap things up.
Customer retention examples: Wrapping up
While acquiring customers might seem more intuitive to growing your business, an overwhelming number of stats prove that customer retention strategies are worth your time and effort.
Customer retention boosts brand awareness, helps you stand out from the crowd, and increases the customer lifetime value and company profits.
Creating a loyalty program is a simple and cost-effective retention technique, and PassKit makes it even easier and more affordable. Create an account today to start designing your own custom retention programs – the process is short and simple. Enjoy our 45-day trial period and see how high customer retention rates your business can achieve thanks to loyalty programs created with PassKit.
