Why Customer Retention Matters
For brick and mortar stores and small businesses, driving repeat business means everything. With increased competition for less traffic and reduced consumer attention, small businesses too need to learn how to stand out and be memorable. Increasing customer lifetime value is part art and all science—data and marketing.
The right customer retention tactics for your independent business could mean success or failure in the critical window; here you need to grow and increase ROI and focus in on your most valuable customers to drive sales.
1. Serve the authenticity motive.
Consumers need to feel a connection to your staff, your store, and your products to keep coming back. This requires great customer service, competitive prices, exquisite products, and building trust with authenticity. At the end of the day, your best customers will want to support you and see your establishment do well if they feel a connection. By being genuine, transparent, generous, and focused on giving to the community, your local business can do great things and drive people to care, and shop more!
2. Adopt a loyalty program.
The surest way to re-target customers and drive repeat sales is to choose and implement the best loyalty program that works for you, and generates higher sales on the top 20% of your customers that are the most profitable. With a solution like thirdshelf, small businesses and boutiques can quickly develop a loyalty program and easily on-board their customers to enjoy the benefits.
3. Drive visual and mobile attention.
Adopting tech at your small business does not have to be expensive, and it can help increase repeat sales and pair products most commonly bought together. This is fairly intuitive with the implementation of digital signage via Sophatar. The impact of digital influence on customer engagement is increasing; contextually based dynamic content that’s highly visual can increase basket size and augment the customer experience.
4. Have the very best customer service.
The key to having great customer service is in well trained and motivated sales associates and store clerks. Investing in employee engagement tools and staff training programs such as those offered by Myagi can help keep employees on top of their game. Customer fulfillment in physical retail really is very based on the human experience with staff, and if their training was skill-based, they will have all the tools to deliver truly memorable service.
5. Acquire and utilize customer data for personalization.
Even the smallest retailers should be obsessed with their customers and this also means gathering customer data. This is the genius of loyalty programs in that they benefit the entire business by understanding customer and product analytics at a deeper level. To increase customer retention, engagement, and repeat business, it’s therefore essential to gather customer information. Re-targeting with email marketing and personalized offers is the bread and butter of any customer retention program.
6. Elevate the customer experience that matters to your key customer segment.
Every business will have a sweet-spot of what the ideal customer journey looks like and the most common points of friction. By providing more of the best and minimizing the usual rough spots, independent stores can constantly improve the experiences they provide. Offering educational opportunities, events, and even appointments with an expert can provide added incentives for loyalty customers to convert. A tool like Booxi can drive traffic via online appointment booking while simplifying the journey.
7. Optimize and quantify your physical retail success.
For loyalty marketing that’s data-based, you will be able to create marketing campaigns that are customer-centric. This means having the right data your fingertips, both in terms of customer segments and actual foot-traffic, and for this, we recommend getting Dor. Dor can help you measure marketing outcomes as it’s an actual foot traffic solution that’s affordable and easy to install at your retail location.
One of the key takeaways is that growing repeat customers takes data, it takes hard work, and it takes a lot of testing via loyalty and marketing campaigns. The savvy retail entrepreneurs, who understand their customer the best, can implement the right solution to drive additional revenue and increase sales. Setting these priorities firmly in mind can enable you to grow your business with proactive growth mentality that is constantly in tune with your customers that are always in search of adding more value to their experience.
- Do more with less; try new tools and software.
- Eliminate pain points and friction.
- Zero in on providing add-on value for your best customers.
- Create fresh campaigns that truly differentiates your retail brand as an experience provider.
- Incentivize repeat business will well-crafted and personalized offers.
