Leads, customers and sales are the bread, butter and celebratory high five of anyone wanting to grow their business, and have been for centuries.

But what if there was a strategy cheaper than sourcing your next lead, and which offered a higher return? 

Enter retention. 

It costs at least four times more to secure a new customer than to retain one, so let’s look at five tactics you can add to your marketing strategy that will help grow your business.

Send unexpected surprises

Your customers expect great service at a great price, but what if you surprise them with a birthday message? Or a personalised Christmas card?

The world is moving towards personalised marketing, and here’s an opportunity to appear in your customer’s inbox with a message that tells them you care. It’s only a short message, but it adds value to the relationship and could pay dividends when it comes to repeat business.

To make the most of building relationships with any number of customers, you might want to utilise a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. They can help you keep track of all your customers and remind you when to contact them (or even do it for you), amongst a whole host of other features.

Here are a couple of our favourites: 

Hubspot: Hubspot offers a free CRM package which will hold all your contacts in one central place. It’s got everything you need to organise, track and order your leads. Users comment that the notifications and follow up reminders are really useful. The email templates are also easy to construct and distribute. All the inputting of contact information and data gathering is fully automated which will save you a vast amount of time. Hubspot is particularly good for small businesses in that you don’t pay for what you don’t use. There are no limitations in the number of users or number of contacts. There is also very good chat support

Salesforce: It offers applications for small, midsize and enterprise organisations and is known for being flexible and easy to use. You don’t need an IT expert to manage the set-up - simply log in and start connecting with your customers. The software is highly efficient too, integrates with other systems and is particularly good for marketing and sales. Some users have said that as there are so many different elements, it can be a slow learning curve but the extra functionality is worth it in the long run. It is on the expensive side and may be bigger and more sophisticated than you need if you‘re a smaller proprietor. 

Build trust with valued content

How do you get customers to trust you? We know that’s a pretty big question. But there are opportunities to communicate with customers in ways that don’t come across as being too sales-focused. For instance, you could send them a newsletter featuring educational content, latest news, or even lifestyle content such as tips on where to travel in the summer.

The more value a customer gets out of the content you send them, the more likely they are to come back to you for future business.

Use customer feedback surveys

Customer feedback gives you valuable insights to how you can improve your business and overall customer experience. Listening to what existing customers have to say, and then acting upon the recommendations, increases loyalty to your brand.

Feedback also allows you to identify the happy customers who can become advocates, whereby they might recommend you to their friends and family or share your content and business on their social media accounts.

Expand what you offer

When people trust a brand, they will consider all the purchases available from that brand. Think about how many travel companies offer the option to book flights, hotels and even taxis through one website. Adding more services offers customers the chance to yield more value from your brand. As long as offering more services is manageable, you should see an increase in revenue from loyal customers.

Apply a retention culture across the whole funnel

Inbound marketing allows you to apply a customer retention culture across the whole business so that sales, marketing and customer services work seamlessly together to create memorable customer experiences. It’s not one team’s job, instead it’s the whole business that contributes to retention.

Whereas the funnel model turns leads into customers and then forgets about them, the flywheel model (pictured right) brings customers full circle and keeps them engaged with your brand, thus building the momentum that can propel your business forward.

It might all start with a friendly birthday card, but a strong customer retention strategy for proprietors isn’t an impossible mountain to climb. See our comprehensive guide here: How proprietors can increase customer retention.

Yorkshire Building Society would like to remind proprietors to make sure that you are compliant with General Data Protection Regulation when carrying out your customer retention strategies.  

Yorkshire Building Society has worked together with a growth marketing agency, ClientsFirst, to supply this content. We hope it helps you grow your core business and you have found it of interest. Please ensure that if you apply any of these tips to your YBS agency, you comply with the specific marketing guidelines which can be found in the YBS ‘Working Together’ Agency Operations Manual. 

 YBS LI22