How to improve your retention rate and save lost sales

By John Brackett, Founder of Smash Balloon. Smash Balloon provides social media feed plugins for wordpress.

Customer retention is one of the most important factors you need to consider as a small business owner. Attracting new customers is a great feeling, but retaining people who have already made a purchase on your website has many benefits.

Repeat customers are more likely to do the following:

• Spend more per order (increase in average order value)

• Leave testimonials on your website and social media

• Subscribe to other marketing channels (social media, email, etc.)

The average retention rate varies by sector. At the high end, media and professional services have an average rate of 84%. Travel and hospitality are at the bottom of the scale, retaining around 55% of their customers.

In other words, if you don't try to retain existing customers in your brand, you may be missing out on a significant chunk of potential sales and engagement.

My goal is to help you avoid this situation. Today I'm going to share some tips you can use to improve your retention rate and save more lost sales.

Keep your promises.

The number one way to improve your retention rate is to simply deliver on your promises. As business owners and marketers, we are responsible for convincing customers that they need our products or services.

We get this message across through our blog posts, paid ads, social media posts, and other community interactions. But if you promise your brand can do things it can't, you'll see more users unsubscribe.

In this case, attrition is the opposite of retention. Retention is the number of customers you have retained after a pre-determined amount of time, and churn is the number of customers who have discontinued their service. If you exceed your promise, the opposite can become true. Customers will stay loyal to your brand despite a growing sea of ​​competitors because you went above and beyond and delivered on your promises.

Start a loyalty program.

A loyalty program can also help you convince customers to return for multiple orders. We encourage all new customers to sign up for our marketing and loyalty emails so they can be rewarded for shopping with our company.

The type of reward you choose can vary greatly depending on your resources and product availability. Companies offer discounts, reward points and freebies to build loyalty and improve retention.

A surefire way to convince customers to join your loyalty program is to put cash back on every order. For example, if someone spends $100 on your site, they get 10% of that amount back as store credit.

This system ensures that customers always have a little "bonus money" that they can use on their next order. We have seen repeat sales skyrocket after implementing this system on one of our websites.

Make it easy to stay in touch.

A common mistake businesses make is that they only have one primary communication channel. I'm here to tell you that it's one of the fastest ways to get customers going. You need to develop a diverse marketing and communications strategy that encompasses your website, emails, and social media.

Imagine that you decide to buy a new technological product. Instead of joining their mailing list, you simply follow them on social media. If something comes up, you think it will be easy to reach them there. Only, you will soon find out that they don't have an active customer support team on social media.

So you return to their website to find that you need to log in and submit a support ticket via email. I don't know about you, but I imagine a lot of people would feel like they wasted a ton of time to get a simple question answered.

Don't put your customers in this situation. At the very least, you should have the ability to talk to your customers via live chat on your website and direct messages on social media. These e...