Your Secret Weapons for Business Retention

Improving business retention is critical for the long term health and success of your company. It involves keeping clients and customers loyal to your business, ensuring they continue to purchase from you and rely on your products and services instead of going to the competition. Retaining business over the long term is no easy task and involves significant effort on the part of your sales team, customer service team, product teams, and everyone else involved in processes that touch the client or customer.

Strategies for improving business retention
There are several key methods at your disposal for keeping your business retention as strong as possible. Here are some of the most important strategies.

Consistent communication

• Regularly interact with and send messages to your customers via email, social media, ads, and more
• Use data driven insights to determine what to put in your messaging, which products to highlight, and which services to focus on
• Segment your customer lists into different groups based on things like the type of customer and typical purchases

Use customer feedback

• Listen to what customers tell you about your products, services, and processes
• Make real changes based on the feedback that you regularly hear
• Show customers that you are acting on what they tell you in order to improve their overall experience with your company

Offer post sale support

• For most types of B2B (business to business) companies, a key part of maintaining and improving business retention is to provide excellent service after the sale
• Follow up after the purchase, offer maintenance services, give advice and tips, and suggest complementary products

Track the key metrics for retention

• Customer retention – How long you keep customers over a given time period
• Purchase frequency – How often customers purchase from you
• At risk customers – Customers that are considering leaving you for the competition
• Customer lifetime value (CLV) – The estimated total revenue a business can expect from a single customer
• Types of purchases – What your customers are buying from you and which products are most popular

Business retention secret weapons
There are two extremely powerful tools that you have at your disposal to maximize your company’s business retention, customer satisfaction surveys and email.

Customer satisfaction surveys
The best way to boost business retention is to understand what your customers’ needs are and how well you are meeting them. When conducted by a third party, satisfaction surveys provide honest feedback about areas of your operation that may need improvement. The phone surveys that we conduct at Winsby are particularly effective—they have a 33% response rate compared to less than 2% for email, allowing you to identify and resolve problems before customers leave you for competitors. If you take the feedback provided to you by our surveys and act on it, you can quickly increase your business retention by up to 30%. Plus, when someone tells you about an issue and sees you solve it, they often become some of your most loyal customers moving forward.

Email marketing
Email marketing provides businesses with a return on investment of hundreds or thousands of percent. For example, the equipment dealers we work with at Winsby see an average annual ROI ranging from 208% to 10,205%. In other words, for every $1 those dealers spend on emails, the average customer receiving them spends between $208 and $10,205 more than the average customer not receiving them. That immense value is the primary benefit of email marketing for equipment dealers and other companies. One of the main reasons the ROI for email marketing is so high is that they help increase purchase frequency and business retention. By regularly sending out emails, you remind customers that you exist, what products you offer, the quality of your services, and why they should buy from you. The higher their purchase frequency, the more likely you are to retain them.

Customer satisfaction surveys and email marketing can be your secret weapons for boosting business retention, but only if you do them right. Contact Winsby today to put these weapons in place and start significantly increasing retention, purchase frequency, and more.