Customer retention is one of the most important metrics for any business. It measures how many customers stay loyal to your brand over time and keep buying your products or services. Customer retention is crucial for increasing your revenue, reducing your acquisition costs, and building a strong reputation in your industry.
Calculating Your Customer Retention Rate
Before we dive into improving customer loyalty, let’s talk about measuring it by calculating your customer retention rate. Here’s how you do it:
- Choose a time period, like a month or a quarter.
- Count how many customers you had at the start of that period. This is your initial customer base.
- Count how many customers you still have at the end of that period. This should not include new customers acquired during the observed period. This is your retained customer base.
- Divide the retained customer base by the initial customer base and multiply by 100. This is your customer retention rate as a percentage.
For example, if you had 100 customers at the start of January and 80 customers at the end of January, your customer retention rate for that month would be 80/100 x 100 = 80%.
You can also use these steps to calculate your churn rate. A churned customer is a customer who has stopped buying from you. To calculate churn, divide your churned customers in a given time period by the amount of customers you had at the start of the period. In our previous example, the churn rate would be 20/100 x100 = 20%.
Tip: it’s easy to measure retention and churn for subscription-based businesses because customers have to explicitly cancel their subscription. For other companies it can be more difficult and requires defining criteria for when a customer is considered to have churned. For example, a company might observe that customers purchase monthly on average and that 90% of customers that go at least 90 days without purchasing never purchase again. Therefore they might count any customers that go 90 days without purchasing as churned.
The higher your customer retention rate, the better. Likewise, aim for a low churn rate. That means you’re doing a good job of keeping your customers happy and loyal. A low customer retention rate (or high churn rate) means you’re losing customers and you need to figure out why.
Improving Customer Retention and Loyalty
Once you’re tracking your customer retention rate, you’re in a good place to look at improving it. So how can you improve customer retention and loyalty in 2023? Here are some strategies that you can use to keep your customers happy and engaged with your product.
- Provide excellent customer service. Customers expect fast, friendly, and helpful service from your business. If you can exceed their expectations and solve their problems quickly, they will be more likely to trust you and come back for more. You can use tools like Twilio to communicate with your customers via voice, video, chat, SMS, and email, and provide personalized and consistent service across all channels.
- Reward your loyal customers. One of the best ways to show your appreciation for your customers is to reward them for their loyalty. You can create a loyalty program that offers discounts, gifts, exclusive events, sneak peeks, and more to your repeat customers. You can also use gamification techniques to make your loyalty program more fun and engaging, such as by giving points, badges, or levels to your customers.
- Educate your customers. Customers want to learn more about your products or services and how they can benefit from them. You can provide valuable content that educates your customers on how to use your products or services effectively, how to solve their pain points, and how to achieve their goals. You can use platforms like Raven360 to create and deliver online courses, webinars, podcasts, blogs, ebooks, and more to your customers.
- Ask for feedback and act on it. Customers want to feel heard and valued by your business. You can ask for feedback from your customers regularly and use it to improve your products or services, customer service, marketing campaigns, and overall customer experience. You can use tools like HubSpot to collect feedback from your customers via surveys, reviews, testimonials, social media, and more.
- Create a community around your brand. Customers want to belong to a community of like-minded people who share their interests and values. You can create a community around your brand where your customers can interact with each other, share their stories, ask questions, give advice, and provide support. You can use platforms like WordStream to create and manage online forums, groups, newsletters, events, and more for your community.
These are some of the customer retention strategies that you can use to improve customer loyalty and retention in 2023. By implementing these strategies, you can build long-lasting relationships with your customers and grow your business.