10 Customer Retention Strategies to Ace in 2024

A survey conducted by Semrush has claimed a 60% to 70% chance of selling to an existing customer. The same survey has revealed a 5% to 20% chance of closing sales for new customers. It goes on to substantiate the significance of customer retention and the importance of upgrading the strategies to keep the ball rolling.

Customer retention is hard but now impossible!

Yes, customer retention is hard. Yet, it is amply clear from the statistics above that it is also imperative that you retain your existing customers to build a successful business. A survey, upon analysis, has revealed that 59% of customers admit that discounts and loyalty points make them stay longer. This is where the rewards and rewarding platform comes in.

Manage your reward campaigns at scale, track the ROI through the integrated email marketing strategy, improve the pain points accordingly to drive retention with gifting platforms.

With the average consumer being exposed to nothing short of 4,000 to 10,000 ads daily, you need more than an ad budget to be appreciated by your customers. And gifting, with its unique ability to generate reciprocal goodwill, is just what you need to achieve this priceless emotional connection with your customers.

A survey by Forbes has found that 65% of the business generally comes from the existing consumer, stressing the importance of garnering trust. Now, let’s dive into how to make sending work for you and your organization.

What is Customer Retention and How to Improve It? | Xoxoday

Do you know retaining a customer is much cheaper than acquiring a new one? What are you doing as an organization for customer retention and how do you plan to improve it?

XoxodayNeha Surana

Getting Started

Sending isn’t an activity you can jump into without forethought. To make the sending strategies below work for you, create a reliable, repeatable process. This involves putting together a sending playbook that ensures your team knows what to send, how to send it, and when to send it. Besides, a follow-up plan and ROI-tracking methods are essential.

For example, you can use an e-commerce competition monitoring tool to see how your competitors approach this process. Later, these insights can help you overcome them and win over a larger market share.

Next, budget your sending using customer segmentation based on the account value, the customer's stage life cycle, or campaign specifics. Basis the criteria, the gift can vary from a simple e-gift voucher for a webinar attendee, for instance, or a highly personalized gift for an influencer.

While a timely and relevant send will create an impression, what will make your prospects sit up and take notice is creative gifting. Understand your customer well before deciding on the sending strategy you’ll use to entice them and use all available information about them before you arrive at a decision.

And voila, with that, you’re ready to go to market with your sending strategies! Without further ado, we give you the four tried and tested strategies that will have your customers sitting up and taking notice of your organization in no time and, most importantly, continuing their engagement with your company without a second thought!

10 Customer retention strategies guaranteed to increase customer satisfaction

These 10 customer retention strategies are tried and tested. How to increase customer retention and satisfaction? Move over discounts and rebates and try these customer retention strategies.

1. Invite new customers to your organization by sending

Let’s start right at the beginning of the sales cycle. There’s no time like that when a new customer makes their first touchpoint with your company to make your brand stand out. Customers are most receptive at this point and expectant, in today’s landscape, to receive more information from you.

Moreover, the transition period from sales to marketing can be especially quiet, and some much-needed pampering can be delivered through nurturing through gifting. This helps the customer build a rapport with your company, generates goodwill, and builds a strong relationship right from the start when the customer is most receptive to your relationship-building efforts.

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Insider Tip: Make sure that you send gifts relevant to your customer at this stage of the sales cycle to ensure effective rapport-building. This can be done by segmenting customers according to company type, size, etc.

2. Align teams across your organization to unearth great sending ideas

It is important to stay relevant when it comes to appealing to your customer through sending. And this can be achieved by aligning different internal teams in your organization. Such a coming together should aim at sharing data that will reveal where the gaps in customer satisfaction lie and unmet customer needs.

Another area that will benefit from the such collaboration is customer stories. Stories of successful customer journeys can be gathered through interaction with the customer success and customer support teams, for instance, to create valuable content, such as case studies, to use your marketing team. Ultimately, the idea is to share data scattered across teams to determine the best ideas for content sharing and other sending strategies to nurture your relationship with your customers.

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Insider Tip: Identifying your happiest customers can also prove to be the perfect first step towards leveraging them for brand advocacy activities in the future.

3. Allow your support team to leverage sending opportunities

Your customer support team's everyday transactional interactions with your customers can be rendered far more powerful by sending strategies. A personal connection is thus made possible, resulting in a sea change in how your customers interact and talk about your brand to their peers and organizations.

Use sending here as a way to both say thank you to your customers for using your products or services and to enable an ongoing conversation with your customer support team, vis-à-vis a mere transactional relationship.

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Insider Tip: Some great ways to empower your support team by making gifting a part of their everyday operations are by recognizing customers for contributing to building a better product by pointing out issues with your current version and also by leveraging your customers’ life events around which sending strategies can be executed.

4. Reward loyalty and celebrate milestones by sending

It is a tragedy that several major brands have neglected to reward loyal customers. Avoid this grave mistake that can put you at the risk of churn that can seriously impact your growth as a brand and business and, instead, keep customers engaged as they journey with your brand. Prioritizing this should be a no-brainer for brands.

Rather than sink into the marsh that is business as usual, show your customers that you value them by offering them both surprise and delight by implementing sending strategies through the customer life cycle. For instance, renewals, usage milestones, and upsells all offer opportunities for just this.

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Insider Tip: Define the milestones for which sending will be carried out and pair them up with the gift you will be using for each milestone to make life easier and the plan clearer to your internal stakeholders.

5. Personalize your offers and communications when sending

Personalization is a critical element in customer relationship management. According to Salesforce, 79% of customers are willing to share relevant information about themselves if they feel understood. Therefore, if you want to retain the existing customer base, try to provide a personalized experience.

Each customer has different needs, so you need to offer tailor-made solutions. Avoid having a one-size-fits-all approach when handling consumer needs, but instead, ensure that your business solutions can solve their problems. This is important because consumers are likelier to stay loyal to your brand based on your attention to their needs.

Communication improves the trust level with the customer and eliminates purchase doubts. Using a subscription management service like Chargebee can help both scale your business and ensure a smooth customer experience.

Additionally, personalization is critical if you are looking to gain a competitive advantage. Therefore, whether you send rewards, perks, incentives, or payouts, ensure that you pay attention to every need. For instance, you can start by addressing the customer by their name in an email to make them feel valued.

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Insider Tip: Ensure that you identify your loyal customers and personalize communication to keep them coming back each time.

6. Use automation to boost your sending efforts

Marketing automation technologies can take on the entire marketing process to simplify workflows. Keeping your customers updated on your brand manually can be time-consuming because it involves a lot of daily processes. Instead of tracking individual customers using your team members, use automation to re-engage them with personalized offers and gifts.

With automation, you can manage your customer contacts and schedule promotional emails, text messages, notifications, and gifting emails much faster. For instance, if you need to send newsletters twice a week with discounts and coupons, you can use market automation software to standardize the process and deliver the gifts on time.

You don’t have to update the content manually. Your constantly engaging your target consumers keeps your brand memorable and enhances its reputation. Investing in automation will take your customer relationship management to a new level.

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Insider Tip: Collect customer analytics and data to help you with sending. This information can be used to improve your gifting process and boost your automation efforts.

7. Create a strong customer onboarding experience by sending

Customer onboarding is vital in every industry because it provides more information about how to use a product or service. To stand out from the saturated market, you must create a strong customer onboarding program for new and existing customers – especially when you have a new product or service.

This leaves the best first impression to keep them coming back. Your onboarding program should be seamless to avoid customer service hiccups. For instance, customers are more likely to recall issues with the onboarding experience if they are not handled properly from the beginning or don’t have a direct point of contact.

Therefore, as soon as the customer signs up, send them key information such as tutorials, customer service team contacts, and company services like loyalty programs. This acts as an incentive to encourage them to buy your products. You can also send emails and follow-up messages with welcome offers and gifts to impress the customers.

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Insider Tip: Create a sending schedule to help you determine when to start sending gifts. For instance, this can be a day after a new customer signs up for your service or purchases a product from your business.

8. Have a customer feedback loop

Your business will encounter operational challenges if you don’t have an idea about how customers feel about your products and services. To ensure that you don’t lose your customers to the competition, collect customer feedback and share it with the entire team.

A customer feedback loop provides your business with a system to collect, analyze, and distribute customer reviews and surveys. Collecting and distributing positive customer reviews will help you deliver a great customer experience. You can also use negative feedback to identify flaws and improve the quality of your services and products.

This system allows you to understand customer behavior and develop engaging custom content for customer retention. For instance, if your customers are not satisfied with the quality of your services, you can send a voucher they can use to shop the next time they need to buy anything from you. In addition, you can also strategize on which areas to focus your sending efforts.

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Insider Tip: Send out regular feedback forms and emails to customers to get information about the quality of your products and services.

9. Create a frequent communication calendar by sending

To keep your customers engaged, your team should proactively communicate with them. A communication calendar helps you keep in touch with customers regularly. For instance, if your customers have not interacted with you for some time, you need to use sending strategies to reach out and re-engage them.

The communication calendar should include a programmed sequence of events, special offers, and incentives you send to customers. Use this system to alert you when existing customers have not communicated with the brand. You can send promotional offers and gifts to bring them back with this information.

Furthermore, frequent communication will improve the customer experience and make them feel valued. For instance, if a customer’s subscription to your service is about to expire, reach out with an email with the recent offers to remind them to pay for the account. Frequent communication improves the trust level with the customer and eliminates purchase doubts.

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Insider Tip: One of the ways to make this easier is by creating a consistent sending schedule for the entire team. This creates a unified sending system in the entire organization, making it easier to reach all customers.

10. Provide fast delivery and easy returns

If you are running an E-commerce, delivery and returns are the biggest concerns for most customers. How you manage these two processes will determine if you retain customers. Simplifying and offering a positive return process improves customer relationships and improves your chances of having return business.

To retain customers, ensure that you provide a fast and easy process. This will differentiate you from your competitors. In addition, it will give your customer peace of mind and encourage them to keep shopping from your store. You can facilitate the return process by not charging customers any fee or offering them a free voucher for another product.

If you send the wrong or faulty product, you can use sending to get in the customers’ good books. Replace the faulty item immediately and send an additional gift to keep the customer happy. This sending strategy will come in handy during the fulfillment of orders. In return, the clients will also stay loyal to your brand due to the quality of services.

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Insider Tip: To boost your sending efforts, identify the delivery and return issues your customers usually have. Have your team focus on improving these areas to build a more efficient order fulfillment process.

Xoxoday: Leverage Sending to Achieve Your Goals

When it comes to sending, do you struggle with siloed solutions that require you to make a host of integrations before you can go seamlessly from trigger to action? Are multiple vendors breaking your bank? Are you unable to track effectiveness due to the fragmented nature of your sending solutions? Is the user experience of these solutions being hampered by limited catalog options, delayed deliveries, and poor support?

Enter Xoxoday!

No matter which business function you have in mind when it comes to leveraging sending, Xoxoday has just the platform you need. A unified solution targeted at your marketing, sales, HR teams, and more, Xoxoday is designed to simplify the management of rewards, benefits, and incentives to achieve the business goals you have in mind.

Sending for Every Stage of the Sales Cycle

Use instant gifting to drive traffic to your webinars, demos, and meetings, ultimately allowing you to gather more leads. Then nudge them along the sales funnel with personalized gifts to close deals faster. Effectively influence purchase decisions through the customer journey, from the awareness and interest stages to the decision and advocacy stages, by using Xoxoday to incentivize your customers. Use context-based rewards and benefits to stimulate demand and drive sales. Further, reward loyalty and incentivize referrals using Xoxoday customer loyalty rewards software.

Xoxoday can also be used by agencies, your research team, or even your dev team to achieve the goals they have in mind.

Sending for HR teams

Xoxoday acts as the ideal sending platform for HR needs, incorporating features to recognize employee achievements, celebrate with festive gifting, appreciate your employees with service anniversary awards, and implement employee savings and discounts. Enjoy a dashboard that gives you full visibility into spending, access control, bulk orders, and notifications, and choose from an array of gifting options, including prepaid cards, gift cards, experiences, perks, financial benefits, donations, and more!

And all this in under 60 minutes of work!

Create campaigns that integrate seamlessly with your existing systems, including your HRIS, CRM, and more, in no more than 60 minutes, and distribute them using a wide range of channels, including SMS, email, WhatsApp, QR codes, or APIs with just the click of a button!

Conclusion

Rewards-sending platforms, such as Xoxoday, are among the most powerful tools today to differentiate your brand from your competitors in the highly saturated marketing landscape we find ourselves in today.

Plan and implement sending throughout the sales cycle to take advantage of the power of gifting, which is among the oldest social customs built into the human psyche, and help your customer retention efforts win!