Why customer retention should form the basis of your marketing strategy

Why customer retention should form the basis of your marketing strategy

Most businesses understand the importance of excellent SEO strategies to attract new visitors to their website. Aiming for a high placing on the search engine results pages can lead to excellent visitor numbers, which is the goal of every effective website.

But are you perhaps missing a trick with your customer base?

Customer retention and why it matters

Consider the following statistics: a brand new visitor to your website has just a 20 percent likelihood of making a purchase. Yet, a returning customer has a 60 percent likelihood of making a further purchase.

The majority of online businesses favour targeting the new customer, yet the statistics show that chasing after customers who have already interacted with your website is likely to be far more profitable in the long run. That’s not to say that you should deflect the focus away from new visitors – of course you need to make sure that the right people get to see your website in the first place, but if you’re not taking care of your current customer base, you’re missing out on potential sales that could have a significant impact on your company’s growth.

Delight your customers

When they’re not hard at work creating beautiful and effective web design in Teddington, local companies are focussing their attention on marketing their clients’ websites. Over the years they will have become experts in understanding what customers want from the sites that they visit. And the one standout feature that customers really respond to is their own delight. That means paying attention to the entire purchasing process and going that extra mile to make your customers feel special, so that they’ll want to return, and better still, tell all their friends and family about their great experience too.

A mistake that we see far too many companies making is to focus all of their attention on attracting new visitors at the expense of those who have already made a purchase. But just look online at the number of ‘unboxing’ experiences that people post, where people video themselves opening their packages. Add value at this stage, and your customers feel obliged to revisit your site and make a further purchase. Your goal is to find out what it takes to make them return.

A good service begins with great web design in Teddington, but once your site is up and running and attracting visitors, the service should still have much to offer. You need to be guided through the process of retaining those hard-won customers, by offering email follow-ups after a purchase, for example, or by throwing a little freebie into the package just before you mail it out. It may only cost you pennies, but psychologically it makes your customer feel under obligation to return and make another purchase.

Asking customers for testimonials, offering them discounts and inviting them to register for a newsletter all help to keep them on board, guaranteeing further business from them in the future and capitalizing on your investment.