Aren’t sales and customers the biggest drivers of growth for any business? To build a thriving company, you need to generate leads, pitch, and sell to them, convert them into customers and ensure that they retain with you. 

Customer retention in 2020 with the COVID-19 outbreak is especially important. Businesses will want to retain customers in the state of financial insecurity and potential economic plummeting. Acquiring new customers in 2020 is going to be tough and hence retaining existing customers is important. Nearly href=”https://www.simplecrm.com.sg/blog/7-tips-to-improve-customer-retention/”>68 percent of sales comes from existing customers which shows how essential they are for the company. 

The href=”https://brandongaille.com/25-surprising-customer-loyalty-statistics/”>12- 15 percent of customers who love a company represent 55-70 percent of sales, according to Brandongaille. href=”http://www.incite-group.com/brand-management/how-social-media-amplifies-power-word-mouth”>91 percent of B2B buyers are influenced by what customers say while buying. 

Having a customer retention plan is necessary to keep your customers happy. Give your customers help and attention to maintain an effective long-term relationship. With customer retention, you can prevent customer churn and maximise sales. 

What is a Customer Retention Plan?

Customer retention plan is creating a strategy that will keep your customers, increase profitability, reduce churn rate, and increase revenue. Companies can grow by close to 95 percent by retaining ad little as 5 percent clients. With a customer retention plan, you can build momentum. A customer retention plan will make retaining customers a routine. 

A customer retention plan mentions how exactly customers can be retained. The ways to retain them and the strategy the company wants to follow to keep customers. 

5 Elements in a Customer Retention Plan for 2020

Customer Onboarding Program 

The first step of a customer retention plan is having a customer onboarding program. Customer onboarding is getting a customer to use product or service in the best manner possible to achieve the goals with product. A good onboarding plan will help customers understand the value of the product from the beginning. Creating a long-lasting relationship with your customer starts here. Making customers feel welcome is important and that’s what onboarding does. Making the customer feel excited and not having a “buyer remorse” is important. 

• Discuss goals and align them with expectations 
• Offer immediate support 
• Make sure customer has all the resources like videos, webinars, and blogs. 
• Send a personal welcome mail 

Customer Follow up programs 

Taking care of your customers specially in this COVID-19 era can be important. It is cheaper to work on them to acquire new customer, as per statistics. Its much like the href=”http://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/80-20-rule.asp”>Pareto principle where 20 percent of your customer database can generate 80 percent of revenue. 

Dividing customers to groups will be helpful in making sure they get a specific follow-up. Sending newsletters and emails is a great way to reach customers and keep in touch with them. Segmenting email lists can be helpful in getting the best returns from campaigns. Following up with customers is important to understand what they like and love about the product. 

Get Feedback from both Current and Past customers 

Getting feedback any not always be comfortable. You might hear something harsh and it may not be what you like. But it is important. So, customer feedback is important. The best way to do that is to ask the customers themselves. Ask them what they want and what they feel. Send an email asking for response, or have a survey, or a poll to determine what they feel. Note what they say and get that done in the best manner. With customer feedback tools, you can get reviews and predict customer behaviour. NPS is a great tool to understand both the qualitative and quantitative data regarding customer experience. 

Get Vocal 

Forums are the oldest solutions to get feedback. Include some questions on forums to get an idea of what customer retention strategies worked in a certain company and implement them. You can get some amazing ideas which you can include as part of your customer retention plan. And since these ideas are from the public, the connect is more when materialised. In the HubSpot Ideas forum, customers can submit their opinions and ideas to improve certain aspects and features. Ask customers their opinions and include them in your plan. 

Customer Service 

Proactive customer service by offering good help to customers. Timely personalised solutions can help them get ahead with the whole customer retention strategy. Customer service is the core of your customer service plan and on this depends the future of the company. Assigning customer service reps to customers who are unhappy can be important.  Proactive customer service requires a knowledge base. A knowledge base is one that provides customers resources to solve their own problems. 

Loyalty Programs 

Having a loyalty program is important. Starting one with your loyal and frequent customers is great to check what works for them. It is centred on customer values and belief in the company as opposed to revenue. Customers said they are loyal to beliefs, not to companies. Making sure the company loyalty program is what they want is important. A point-based program where loyal customers get points when they make a purchase is great. These points can be redeemed to get discounts or incentives. The top one percent of loyal customers put in five times more than the rest of customers. Nearly 70 percent of consumers said they will recommend a brand if they like your customer loyalty program. 

Bottom Line: Customer Retention is Important 

60% of customers will stop doing business with a company after a single bad customer service experience. Retaining your customers is not easy but can be simple if you have a long-term strategy. Implement customer retention programs in your long-term strategy to get the best results. 92 percent of customers read reviews first, so that’s important. Regardless of the size of company, customer retention plans are important. The strategy is essentially long-term and not a single day wonder. Personalisation is important to retain customers. Retaining customers specially in 2020 is important. So, keeping your customers at the core of your business strategy will yield powerful results. 

Author Bio: Niyathi Rao

Niyathi Rao is a content creating specialist at Smartkarrot Inc., a customer success software platform. She worked for Univariety and OpenText previously. She majorly writes for SaaS tech products. She is a bibliophile and listens to podcasts and music when she isn’t doing any of these. She is majorly active on Twitter and LinkedIn