The modern-day digital world requires content marketing to generate leads and boost conversions. It is essential for every business and company nowadays. But it also works in reducing the count of your customers. We can call it the churn rate. However, if you want to keep our customers attached to us and retain them, we need effective strategies and techniques for content marketing in order to improve customer retention. Keep reading this article, and we will be telling you about how to use content marketing strategies to increase customer retention.
Customer Retention:
First off, we will start with ‘Customer Retention’. You must be wondering what customer retention is. Well, customer retention is measured in percentages. The number of customers you are retaining before the end of the given time period. Businesses can use customer retention to know about brand loyalty as well as their ability to retain customers.
It is a strong relationship between customer retention and a stable revenue stream, so it’s crucial to use the customer retention management program in your strategies. Implementing these techniques will make your business bring out more value from the customers, for instance, repeat purchases.
Most of the time, comprehensive customer retention strategies are focused on building and nurturing relationships. Furthermore, the processes and actions are tailored and designed in a way to give a better customer experience. It is to make sure that our customers don’t even find a single defect in our business.
Managing Customer Retention Strategies:
If you are thinking of improving customer retention, there’s not a single person or a team that would be taking full responsibility. It is done by teamwork and commitment from different departments working together in order to retain the customers.
Most of the departments that play an important role in retaining customers are:
- Product development
- Marketing
- Sales
- Customer support/service
There’s one thing that many companies have to recognize, and firstly, they have to eliminate silos to prevent the void in communication and ensure every team is on the same page.
We will list down some examples of the departments that have been good in communication and working together to improve customer satisfaction levels:
- Customer service/support identifies the pain points. They further communicate the customer feedback to the product development, so they can do some tweaks and updates. In some cases, sometimes there’s information that is provided by the customers that might lead to bringing out new value propositions.
- To build brand loyalty, the marketing team needs to start giving out incentives. By doing this, they will be able to use customer data from the service team to provide rewards for balancing out a negative experience.
Organizations that are growing rapidly have a customer success team that has the goal of managing the customer retention program. For these organizations, it is necessary to implement strategies for retaining customers. However, their primary role is to keep a strong relationship with the customers by engaging with them, facilitating them, and always being in touch with them.
Customer success teams have to work with every other group by assisting them in organizing and managing the operations for enhanced customer retention.
What You Should Call A Good Customer Retention Rate (CCR)?
CRR is the percentage of customers who keeps on doing business with the company in a given time frame. A higher rate is considered a healthy indicator if we talk about good CCR. Customer engagement should be good enough, and it has to include repeat purchases.
For a better CRR, it has to be around 100 per cent, ideally. However, it is simply not possible in the real world. But there are averages of every industry that you can exceed or match by implementing your content marketing strategies.
Below you will learn about the average rate of CRR in every industry:
- Retail (63 per cent)
- Banking (75 per cent)
- Insurance (83 per cent)
- IT Services (81 per cent)
- Professional Services (84 per cent)
- Telecom (78 per cent)
- Media (84 per cent)
- E-Commerce (34 per cent)
- Fintech (78 per cent)
- Ed-Tech (27 per cent)
- Food Tech (16 per cent)
- Sports and Gaming (31 per cent)
- Travel and Hospitality (55 per cent)
Keep a note of this the CRR varies by industry due to many factors. For instance, in professional services, most companies use a personalized marketing approach for developing and building customer communications and relationships. This is why the CRR of this industry is pretty high.
You must be thinking about what should be a good customer retention rate for your business. If you want to determine how your company is performing as compared to the competitors, you can calculate the CRR.
- Customer retention rate formula:
((E-N) / S) x 100 = CRR
- Key metrics that you should know before calculating CRR:
- E: Number of customers at the end of the given time frame.
- N: Number of new customers acquired between the time frame.
- S: Number of customers in the customer base at the start of the time frame.
For an example of the computation of customer retention rate:
We will take 900 as the number of customers at the end of the given time frame and 400 as the new customers that we acquired between this time frame. The number of customers in the customer base that we had at the start of the time frame is 600.
Putting down for a simple way:
[(900 – 400) / 600] x 100 = 83.3 per cent.
The result of this example is 83.3 per cent. However, the time frame depends on the company and its customer success team, which they can keep according to their strategies. It can be a month, quarter, or year.
Importance of Customer Retention:
Customer retention strategies are beneficial for forming and building strong customer relationships. These strategies include personalized marketing campaigns, effective customer communication, innovative products, impeccable services, and loyalty rewards. If we implement these strategies, it will assist the company in growing and increasing its profitability.
Check the important reasons why we need customer retention below:
Repeat Purchases:
As Frederick Reichheld, who’s the creator of the Net Promoter System of Management, has stated, “a 5 percent increase in customer retention produces more than a 25 percent increase in profit”. This happens because customer loyalty keeps them making purchases every time from your business. Sometimes even in larger quantities. Loyal customers might give a shot at your new products or services.
Reducing Costs:
It would cost you less to keep the existing customers than to get new customers. In the business community, some individuals believe that customer acquisition costs more than five times compared to customer retention. It will be costing you six or seven times more if you want to acquire new customers. Keeping your customers will help in reducing marketing costs.
Increasing Brand Loyalty:
Some of the consumers love the brand that they engaged with at first and had an incredible experience with them. In some reports, around 80 percent of people start to love a brand over time due to some reasons. Check them below:
- Great Products
- Incredible Experience
- Amazing Customer Service
- Positive customer feedback and reviews
There’s a possibility that six out of 10 loyal customers would purchase a new product from the brand they love. As loyal customers, they will buy more products than they did at first.
Retained customers won’t stop themselves from purchasing your product once again. They turn out to be your brand ambassador by telling their friends and family about the positive experience. This would help brands get new customers without putting marketing costs.
Using Content Marketing Strategy For A Better Customer Retention:
Using content marketing strategies not only enhances the leads and conversions, but it is used to retain customers. To get this done, companies need to cover each stage of the buyer’s journey. From start to end, they have to use effective strategies and ideal techniques. Also, you can get content services in Karachi for your business or company from us.
Consumers go through these stages:
Awareness Stage:
Consumers realize they have needs or problems which require a solution during the awareness stage. This is why companies are always reaching out to people and letting them know about their products.
For this stage, the content marketing specialists have to make strategies and produce content that is concise, easy to read, and relatable. The goal is to attract customers and engage them with our business.
The content type which raises awareness includes:
- Blog posts
- Emails
- Ebooks
- Social media
- Videos
Companies need to understand what their customers care about and deliver the content according to that.
Consideration Stage:
The consideration stage is when the consumers decide to pick a brand. Businesses need to show them how a product would help them or solve their problem.
Content marketers always focus on these types of content:
- Content related to the product. (For e.g., how it works, how it functions)
- Content related to instructions (For e.g., how to use the products and services)
Types of content for consideration stage:
- Blog posts
- Case studies and industry reports
- Ebooks
- Reviews and testimonials
- Studies
- Webinars
One thing that the content team or the writer must know about the initial phase is not to sell products. In the start, try to write how-to articles and guides which will show how products will solve customers’ pain points.
Conversion Stage:
The conversion stage is when the buyers are all set to purchase the product. This is where content marketing pays off. You have successfully made a customer, and they are buying your product.
The content in this stage will be pretty much the same as the consideration stage. But, there should be a little different in this stage’s content. It should be more persuasive and personalized. There’s a need for CTA (call to action) in the content.
Types of content used to turn leads into conversions:
- Blog posts and guides
- FAQs
- Videos
- Webinars
Loyalty Stage:
Companies that don’t care about their customers face higher churn rates. The reason is that they don’t put effort into customer retention. However, it takes a lot from the company’s budget to acquire new customers. So companies who want to grow can incorporate customer retention strategies in their daily operations and functions.
Types of content used to increase brand loyalty include:
- Blog posts
- Customer onboarding emails
- In-app messages, guides, and walk-throughs
- Social Media
- Surveys
Advocacy Stage:
You know your customers are loyal when they are repeat buyers as well as they recommend your companies because of the positive experience. However, not every repeat buyer will make recommendations to others. Marketers need to have this goal of turning these buyers into brand advocates.
You can give rewards, referral links, special offers, and opportunities to collaborate with customers to these customers.
Tips On Improving Customer Retention:
Below are the tips that you can follow to improve customer retention rates while you build a strong customer relationship.
Publishing High-Quality Content:
To keep your customers and others updated about your products or services, you need to keep producing and publishing content consistently. You have to stay consistent in order to bring traffic and turn leads into conversions.
Gathering And Using Customer Data:
Companies need to gather and use customer data very carefully. Getting the email address would be an ideal thing for you. However, they can enhance their customer onboarding by giving them welcome emails with instructions or a guide on how to use their products or service.
Focusing On Providing Value To Customers:
The content you are producing and delivering needs to be SEO-friendly. Whenever you are producing content, make sure that you are providing information that would let potential and existing customers find it valuable. It is important in order to build trust and loyalty.
Keeping Audience Engaged:
Keeping your audience engaged and entertained using social media platforms is important. Loyal customers love to engage with the brands they like. If they are happy with your content, they won’t switch to another company. This means more revenue in the future.
Final Thoughts:
To sum this up, you are pretty much aware of the content marketing strategies that would make it easier for you to keep the customer retention rate high. You can always keep your customers engaged and loyal to you by producing and publishing content. Also, implementing all of the strategies of content marketing will turn leads into conversions for your company.
