Rock-Solid Client & Employee Retention Strategies

Client-Employee Retention

There are three key factors for each business: customers, leads, and sales. In order to establish a successful business, you also must take care of your employees. Thriving businesses work with experienced, happy employees. That’s why you should do your best to retain both your customers and your employees. Today, there is a large number of methods and strategies to improve your business and increase productivity. We are here to help businesses with no retention ideas. If you are one of these, take a look at the following customer and employee retention strategies to curtail this problem.

CUSTOMER RETENTION STRATEGIES

Unfortunately, most companies are preoccupied with generating business leads but negligent in retaining their customers. Bear in mind that you’re going to waste seven times as many resources as what you’ve used in converting your customers if you lose them. So, it is very important to constantly update and optimize your client retention tactics so as to keep your consumers satisfied and stay relevant all the while.

Set Customer Expectations

Beyond complaints and inquiries, customer service is also supposed to meet the expectations of consumers. So, make sure to provide your customers with something they are looking forward to. However, it is difficult to satisfy somebody you don’t know at all. This is why you should tend to find out more about your customers. Try to understand what they’re looking for and set expectations accordingly.

A few low-cost, unique initiatives will go a long way toward building loyalty and delighting your users. When did you receive a welcome surprise last time? Discover milestones in the relationship with your clients and find the best way to reward those who don’t expect it. If a consumer expects a high-quality service or product but gets a poor quality one, he is quite likely to regret buying the product/service.

Build Community Trust

No business can succeed if there’s no trust in customers. To avoid this, you should consciously promote trust and initiate a relationship with both your existing and new customers. That way, you give your consumers the opportunity to believe in the reliability of your business. Use the behavior data of your customers when building trust to deliver huge value in your products. If your users discover that you aren’t trustworthy, they are very likely to switch to some of your competitors. Even worse, they can spread bad rumors about you and give you negative reviews that other people can see. On the other hand, most of the customers are going to recommend a brand if they truly trust it, while others will stick to that brand henceforward. They actually advertise the brand for free without any compensation. Instead of traditional marketing, build trust through conversations with your customers.

Community Trust

Test Email Strategies Continuously

Aside from using the information you’ve already obtained — such as what your audience has browsed or purchased — to tailor the product recommendations in your email marketing campaign, you should also regularly test incentives as well as other factors that let you see what yield the best results.

For instance, try to find out what email marketing cadence improves customer engagement and which subject lines are eliciting the most opens. That will help you figure out which email strategies work the best and how to apply them properly.

Make use of Automation to Re-engage Customers

Keeping and monitoring the clients is a time-consuming process. This is especially true if you do it manually. Did you know that most of your routines can be automatically handled by a software? One of the most popular ways to do it is through so-called marketing automation. When keeping a brand fresh in the buyer’s mind, there are a lot of operations to be repeated. That takes lots of time and effort every day. This is where automation comes in. The marketing automation software helps you do your business at a faster pace and re-engage your customers likewise. Through automation, you are going to communicate more quickly while managing your customer contacts much easier. Additionally, automation allows you to drip feed-education emails, send email newsletters, as well as schedule event notifications, promotional emails, and text messages. Once your regular processes get standardized, that’ll take your CRM (customer relationship management) to the next level.

Make a Communications Calendar (and use it!)

A communication rolling calendar is pretty much the same as an editorial calendar. It can help in monitoring content creation, content strategy, publishing, promotions and much more. Frequent communication can make the customers feel more important and valued. By doing so, you will be able to keep in touch with your clients and build strong relationships along the way.

This calendar is a pre-programmed sequence of calls, events, letters, special offers, “thank you” messages, handwritten notes, follow-ups, special moments, cards with a personal touch, and other things that occur automatically and constantly at particular points in the sales, post-sales, and pre-sales process. Not only do people positively respond to all of this, but they also appreciate it indeed. Frequent communication with the help of this calendar keeps the customers informed and engaged, acknowledges them, eliminates any post-purchase doubt, boosts trust level, and reinforces the relationship with you. Over the time, they are likely to start feeling like a part of your team and the overwhelming majority of them will want to come back over and over again.

Communications Calendar

Measure Lifetime Value

Do you regard your customers as the major assets of your company? If not, make sure to change your mind straight away. While an average sale can help you make a one-off profit, your average consumer represents a combined profit to your business and plays a big role when it comes to aggregate income. Over a period of time, a repeat customer purchases a number of products or services from you on a regular basis. Just think about how much expense, time, and effort you must invest in gaining such a customer. Yes, that’s of priceless value.

Of course, not all the customers are the same. Some of your clients are adding more value to your business than others. As someone running a business, you will probably want to know the value each customer brings to you. Lifetime customer value (LCV) is an essential performance indicator that allows you to evaluate the real value of the customers over the course of a business relationship with you. By knowing the worth of your customers, you can set up your budget for marketing campaigns and predict revenue with greater accuracy.

Improve Key Performance Indicators around Customer Service

Be sure to analyze key performance indicators of your business to get a better idea of what makes your customers unhappy or excited. Many companies utilize KPIs to assess the success in reaching their goals. It’s kind of like a roadmap, as you can visualize the future of your business as well as directions that should be taken in the months and years to come. Whether you are in charge of administration or customer service, the KPIs will show you how the customers are treated by your customer support. Make sure to deliver a good customer service all the time. Here are the five most important KPIs when it comes to customer engagement:

  • Actions per engagement
  • Funnel drop rate
  • Response time
  • Conversion rate
  • Communication freshness

Educate Clients through Messages and Webinars

When used with the appropriate content and application, the email newsletter can be a powerful tool in training the consumers. In addition, newsletters can help you grow or maintain relationships with your customers when they aren’t active for some reason. After the initial contact, attending to new subscribers and customers is of utmost importance. They will more likely want to purchase something from you and trust your brand if you periodically send them educational newsletters. As for the existing customers, it’s a good idea to nurture them with various loyalty programs on a regular basis.

If you want to get the most out of email marketing, think carefully about what type of emails you are sending to your customers. It’s advisable to provide them with educational emails that contain valuable content. For example, learn them how to use a product by means of step-by-step guides and behind the scenes videos or images. Also, get your buyers familiar with the key features and benefits of your products. Likewise, you need to consider using live webinars to inspire and educate your customers. Webinars are proven to create a strong impact and can get the attendees to turn into qualified leads with time. So, it’s no wonder that almost all authority websites have started out with online webinars.

EMPLOYEE RETENTION STRATEGIES

Having the fully engaged, satisfied associates and workers by your side should be one of your major concerns when running a business. It could be a daunting challenge to achieve this though. To help you improve employee retention and reduce employee turnover, we’ve gathered the following strategies for you to use:

Ask and Give More Feedback

Seeking feedback turned out to be very helpful for business owners who have no idea how to keep their employees motivated. Likewise, you should give feedback to your employees from time to time. If your employees don’t get enough feedback, they will not be able to assess if you are satisfied with their work or not. What’s more, they will start asking for your opinion in passing or at inappropriate places.

So, make sure to frequently deliver feedback to your workers to let them know whether or not you appreciate their work and effort. In addition, you may also make use of employee surveys and exit surveys to get better evaluations of your employees.

Offer Additional Development and Training

Do not underestimate the desire of your employees for more knowledge and experience. Most people, especially millennials, are willing to learn new things and skills, particularly those that are linked or relevant to their work. So, aim to give your employees the opportunity to keep training and developing through courses. The good training is going to enrich them and improve their performance.  Furthermore, that can make your employees feel more valuable on the job, which is a critical factor for them to stay longer in your company. All new employees need to go through onboarding training to get familiar with their job and what’s expected of them. Explain what their roles and duties are, as well as what the main goals of the company are. Remember that employees won’t feel comfortable or confident in their positions in case of an unsuccessful onboarding.

Provide a Pleasant Working Environment

There’s no other option if you want to retain your employees. Otherwise, they will fly away from you at their earliest opportunity.

There are so different ways to get a workplace improved. For example, you may consider using ramification techniques to make the work environment more pleasant. Your staff members will certainly appreciate it. Also, provide greater flexibility with more flexible schedules. Promote a good work-life balance and they will be more valued for sure.

Strive for Better Engagement

An engaged employee is a good employee. Such a worker always tends to be more productive at work. As a business owner, you should aim to make your staff members feel this way if you want to achieve a higher employee retention. There’s a wide variety of ways to engage employees. Just find those that can be received well by your employees.

DRIVING BUSINESS GROWTH THROUGH RETENTION

Whether you are a small startup company or a big corporation, these 12 business retention strategies are proven to work. As you would expect, they are not guaranteed to give quick results overnight. You should be patient as you’re implementing them. Sooner or later, you will reap the benefits.

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