User Review
( votes)We all know marketing is the lifeblood of the enterprise. It’s how we get business, after all.
But, in our mad scramble to get as many customers as possible, we often forget to nurture the existing ones.
That’s just too big a mistake to ignore. Did you know that 91% of customers prefer to shop from brands that recognize them?
Also, 65% of your business is likely to come from existing clients. And, let’s not forget that acquiring a new customer is 5 times more expensive than selling to an existing one.
Your current client base can be your most valuable asset. But, getting the most out of those repeat buyers is easier said than done.
What are their problems, tastes, and preferences? What digital mediums do they prefer? What’s the best time to reach out to them?
You will need to answer all of these questions and many more if you want to take your customer relationship to the next level.
Below, we’ve highlighted five ways to do just that.
1. Install a Good Website Analytics System
Let’s start with the basics. Your website should have a good analytics system running behind it. Google Analytics is the most widely used tool here. But, there’s also Kissmetrics, Amplitude, and Big Picture that have a good following.
We recommend Google Analytics, as it has the most support and publicly available knowledge. While the suite has many features, it’s customer journey visualization will prove most useful here.
A customer journey tells you how your customers are acting when on your website. Over time, you should begin to see trends emerge.
For example, some of your content and/or products may be more popular than others. You should also see common pathways users take from entering your website to leaving it.
Have a ChatBot or Chat Box on Your Site
Customers often spend time on your site but leave without doing much. This adversely affects your website bounce rate, which can in turn hurt your online standing.
The most common reason customers leave is that they didn’t get the information they were looking for. There are a bunch of ways you can make sure this never happens.
The best and most foolproof method here is to add a chatbot or chatbox to your website. This ensures that a customer can always ask specific questions directly instead of searching for answers.
Chatbots can be especially useful for online retailers. Shoppers will have many questions that text descriptions can’t answer. A chatbot can help you out there.
Here’s how Agiftpersonalized does it:
Notice how inconspicuous the chat box is. Not to mention how it naturally blends in with the rest of the site. That’s important. Your chat boxes should never get in the way of your users.
Ideally, you want someone to open the chat box after they have exhausted regular site-based options.
2. Use Data to Personalize Customer Experience
You should have a ton of data about your existing customers. But, how can you use that data to improve customer retention?
Here are a few ideas:
The first order of business will be to segment your users. Segmenting customers allows you to organize them by shared aspects. This, in turn, helps you create more targeted content to give a better, more personalized service.
Personalization comes in many flavors. Here are some examples:
| SEGMENTATION MODEL | INCLUDES |
| Demographics segmentation | Age, gender, income, education, marital status |
| Geographic segmentation | Country, state, city, town. |
| Need-based segmentation | Features used, products bought, and any other needs expressed. |
| Psychological segmentation | Personality type, attitudes, values, and interests. |
| Technological segmentation | Desktop-user, laptop-user, mobile-user, apps used, etc. |
| Behavioral segmentation | Repeated actions taken, feature preferences. |
| Value-based segmentation | Financial value added by customers to the company. |
While all seven models may seem relevant, you’ll need to decide which are the most relevant to your business.
A SaaS company may consider technological, need, behavioral, and value-based segmentation. But, laundry service will find geographical segmentation far more important.
For example, credit repair companies can use customer segmentation to decide what kind of service to offer each client.
A company may segment their user base by:
- Where their customers shop,
- Where purchases were made,
- Their customers’ preferred social media networks
Similarly, an investment firm like Earlybird uses customer data to personalize the user experience. They can recommend personalized ETF-based portfolios made up of both securities and bonds.
3. Use Customer Data To Refine Your Web-Experience
A website’s role in customer relationships is easily one of the most important. It’s also one of the easiest to mess up.
On the one hand, your site has to look good. But, it must also help your customers find the answer they’re looking for in as few steps as possible.
The best way to make sure your website stays a tool for enhancing customer satisfaction is to let your clients tell you what they want. Your customers are already telling you this all the time. You just have to know where to look.
Primarily, you’ll want to know the following:
- Where your visitors are looking and clicking?
- What content are they consuming?
- What are the peculiarities of the pages they view the most?
- What pages are they avoiding?
- Are there different answers to each of the above questions for each of your customer segments?
You can start with a traffic analysis through Google Analytics. The customer journey map should give you a good idea of what content your customers are consuming.
Next, you can use a heatmap to figure out what your users do on each page. A heatmap either tracks the eye (under test conditions) or uses mouse movement to detect where someone is looking.
Google Analytics has an in-page analytic feature that kind-of acts as a heat map.
Use these answers to create a more tailored experience for your customers. For example, you may find that a landing page with a red header is better suited for two of your customer segments. A particular page layout may be a better hit than others.
If you’ve tried everything and nothing seems to work, consider asking your customers what they’d like to see. You can issue an email survey asking for feedback. Alternatively, you can ask for feedback directly on your website.
While the link in the screenshot above from Solution Scout leads to a regular “Contact Us” page, you can create customized feedback forms there as well.
4. Use it to Understand What they Think of You
Usually, companies like to send customer satisfaction surveys to get a better understanding of what their customers think. But, you can use existing customer data to passively know what your patrons think as well.
There are a few metrics you’ll need to track, including:
Customer Churn Rate: This is the number of customers that leave you. You determine churn rate by dividing the number of customers lost by the total number of customers.
So, let’s say you have 100 new customers at the beginning of the month. By the end of that same month, five customers left. Your churn rate is then 5%.
You can also calculate your overall churn rate by using the total number of customers you’ve had since starting your company. Obviously, the lower your churn rate, the better your clients think of you.
Customer Loyalty: This is defined as how long a customer stays with you. The longer they do business with you, the more loyal they are. You can use a Net Promoter Score (NPS) to track customer loyalty.
NPS uses a survey asking how likely a customer is to recommend your brand to their peers on a scale of one to 10. Those who answer nine or 10 are promoters. Those who answer seven or eight are passives. Those who report six or less are detractors.
Other metrics you can track here are:
Customer Lifetime Value: The total revenue generated by a customer. The higher the number, the better the relationship.
Repurchase Ratio: This is defined as the number of customers who have made repeat purchases from you as opposed to the number of single purchasers. A higher ratio means more of your customers are giving you repeat business.
Renewal Rate: Renewal rate is defined as the number of customers who have renewed their subscription vs. those who haven’t. This ratio is best used by subscription services such as SaaS, VOD, and streaming brands.
Upselling Success Rate: This statistic is calculated by dividing the number of successful up-sells by the number of up-selling attempts and multiplying by 100.
Finally, it’s always a good idea to include customer reviews on your site.
Reviews give your customers a voice and help build trust with new prospects. While most websites use customer reviews on product pages, you can include them on the home page, too.
Here’s how Runnersathletics does it:
When we click on Reviews, a sub-page opens up:
Notice how detailed these reviews are. They come with pictures of the customer, along with a star rating. Adding more information builds the review’s credibility, and by extension, the site’s.
Concluding Thoughts
Analysis paralysis invariably follows sufficiently large data sets. The sheer amount of information that brands have on their customers can nudge them into inaction.
The problem usually lies in companies spending way too much time combing through analytics for patterns. It’s far better to let the goals do the talking here.
Since the overarching goal of any organization is to keep its customers happy, all metrics related to it are what they need to follow.
