Keeping your customers
Are you keeping your best customers?
Research and testing can help ensure success.
As more companies roll out efforts to retain their customers–often once results begin to falter. We’d like to offer a few observations and questions.
Does your business revolve around the customer or the company?
Even world-class firms can default to putting short-term results or “policies” ahead of keeping a customer. Losing repeat business far outweighs the short-term costs of satisfying your customers.
Quantifying the cost of acquiring a customer versus keeping a customer is an eye-opening exercise.
Do you know how customers really feel about your products and services?
Recent studies suggesting as much as a four-fold difference between your firm asking about satisfaction versus using a third party are chilling, but we believe true. Our intuitive sense is that many loyalty efforts don’t really improve your customer relationship.
If you haven’t done an independent customer audit in a few years, we’d be glad to introduce you to the experts at The Marketing Audit (www.marketingaudit.com). What customers think could be a revelation.
Have you institutionalized converting leads and keeping customers?
As consumers, we’re overwhelmed by too many irrelevant communications. But receive very few personalized acknowledgements. Do companies not realize that we all want to feel wanted?
As marketers, we’re overwhelmed at how quickly companies stop communicating after we become customers. Do companies not see the value in cultivating repeat business?
We wonder: has the contact strategy been tested and re-tested?
Because the ROI from targeted communication to leads and lapsing customers can be huge–we see great conversion even from aged “dead” customers with the right communication. And it’s easy to test–particularly in today’s wired environment.