Improving Customer Retention via Social Media

For any brand’s success, it is important to boost your customers’ retention, such that engagement and satisfaction are raised through various high-quality service providers and social hearing/listening.

When it comes to marketing, you must create awareness amongst people regarding your product to create demand for it and get new customers on board. Nonetheless, some businesses feel this unnecessary move and may ignore it until the last minute when it becomes a problem for them.

In simpler words, retention strategies are built in such a manner that they keep your customers loyal through various mechanisms. They help restrain them from going to other competing companies or completely ceasing the purchase of the products that your company sells. One of the major benefits stemming from this exercise is the maintenance of great user experience and customer service.

Importance of Customer Retention

As per the research conducted in 2015, Retaining customers is 6-7 times cheaper than getting new customers onboard, similarly, to account for a bad experience, you need approximately 12 good ones to ensure that bad publicity does not become your destiny.

Moreover, around 72% of people who purchase your product will go to the extent to share their experience instead of 67% who will willingly pay a higher amount for better user experience. Such statistics indicate the importance of investing in something to retain your customers, but perhaps, there is a lot more in the bigger picture.

With e-commerce gaining tract and higher levels of competition arising, marketing costs are expected to rise too. Considering this, businesses must emphasize developing self-generated marketing strategies to ensure that they can gather a much higher Return on Investment. In this particular scenario, social media can help you greatly.

An easy approach to measuring customer loyalty and retention can be made by looking at statistics or numbers. For that, three evidential factors are important.

1. Number of initial customers (x)
2. Total present customers (Y)
3. A number of new buyers. (Z)

Applying this formula to find out the rate of customer retention: (Y-Z)/X x 100

For instance, starting with 20 consumers with 50 new customers, and if you have a cumulative total of 60 consumers, your customer retention rate will be 50%, which is a clear indication that you lost half of them during the process.

The following techniques will help you better your customer’s experience and build long-lasting brand loyalty to boost retention.

Active Listening

The best approach is to listen to what your customer has to say on various social media websites. This accentuates the experience users have because you can provide them the solution to their problems. This can easily be done through software that deals with social listening and alerts you accordingly. They also feature other information related to services and commodities, which can be of great use.

Regardless of the type of feedback you receive, it will help you deal with them in such a manner that your marketing campaign is not rendered useless. Moreover, in cases where complaints have been registered, it provides you the opportunity to tackle them so that your reputation is not damaged in their minds.

Analyzing User Behavior

Not only does social media give you a glimpse of what the buyer wants from you, but it also helps you gather information on what their personal lives and preferences are. This sort of personal information is a huge factor in UX. The only way you can organize and gather information for your marketing strategy can be through social media.

Engagement with followers allows you the chance to learn their habits and their lives. These can be looked at through insights and analytics on Instagram and Facebook, which allows you detailed information on demography, operational timings, and other statistics related to content that may serve your purpose of looking into these numbers.

More than just their active information, it allows you to get an overview of what brands and companies your followers are most fond of. With this information in mind, you can customize strategies to ensure that you can create satisfaction amongst your consumers.

Engaging in customer service

This is considered a rather large selling point, which determines the rate of retention quite significantly. An easy approach can be through an extension of platforms which can serve as a reach out point for your customers.

Not only does active presence on social media sites provide you the chance to raise your outreach, but it also provides you the opportunity to deal with customers in real-time so that there are no grievances on the other end. This helps in reducing the dissatisfaction amongst customers, and overall improves the health of your company.