6 Signs You Have Issues With Customer Retention (and how Gift Giving Can Help)
How do you know if you are having issues with customer retention? Check out these 6 signs that your customer retention isn’t where it should be.
Customer retention is a big deal when it comes to business. Returning customers are the drivers of your business, and they can make or break you. Seriously, if you haven’t heard of the 80/20 rule of business, you might think we’re being ridiculous. I promise you, we aren’t.
This rule tells us that 80% of our business comes from 20% of our customers, and vice-versa. That means no matter how good your business is at bringing people through the door, it really comes down to how you retain their business that matters.
1 – Customer Communication Breakdowns
How you talk to your customers is really important. Having a clear set form and line of communication is everything both for customers and employees. It’s how they are able to set the expectations and fix situations that arise. If customers aren’t able to easily contact help when they need it, they probably won’t return to you. They will head off and look for a competitor that they can contact.
2 – High Turn-Over Rates for Employment
Believe it or not, you can find out a lot about customer retention by looking at employee retention. Since customers will attach their view of your company to your employees and the interactions they have. If you can’t keep people working for you, you aren’t providing customers with faces to relate to. Your retention issues could be an employee retention issue that is leaking over. Check internally if you can’t correct your retention problems.
3 – Customer Feedback Slips
Customer feedback is extremely important. If you aren’t paying attention to your reviews and surveys, you need to add them to your radar. Having a lot of great reviews can help bring customers to your door, but when reviews start to slip, customers stop coming. If your reviews start to slip away from 5 stars, it’s time to reach out and find out what happened. The review itself should have some actionable items in it that you can tackle head-on, but reaching out to your customer makes an even bigger impact. Getting their personal views does two things. The first is giving you actionable items to active fix. The second is the potential to bring a customer back through the door by showing that you really care about their opinions. It’s a way to show the customer that your company is actively looking to improve.
4 – A Drop in Email Open Rates
If you are using email marketing to reach customer, you want to pay attention to your open rates. All-in-all, it’s generally accepted that a 20% email open rate is really good. If your open rates start to slip, it could come down to a few things. Maybe you are spamming them with too many emails, or your emails aren’t actually speaking to your customers. No matter what, your emails are missing the market, so your customer retention rate is going to go with it. An open rate on your email marketing plan can be a direct light into your potential to retain customers. Keep your open rates in mind when you are looking to sort out your customer retention issues.
5 – A Lack of Returning Customers
The biggest sign that you aren’t retaining your customers is not recognizing names or faces that come in and out of your store. As you start to grow, you should start to see names and faces that continue to pop up. Maybe it’s one big sale every year during a holiday, or maybe it’s a face you see every day. Either way, you should be able to see faces that are familiar to the business every now and again. If you aren’t getting these faces, maybe you should reach out to customers to ask questions. You can ask them why they bought the first time, and what stopped them from returning to buy again. These little surveys can give you major insights into your customers’ buying habits, and they can point you in the right direction if there is a problem you need to fix within the company.
6 – You Aren’t Rewarding Customers
Loyalty to a brand should come with a reward. If you aren’t rewarding your customers for buying from you, they might stop when they find someone who does. This is where the idea of gift giving comes into play. You can give gifts to thank your customers for choosing you. If you do something like real estate or car sales, giving a gift is a great way to put the cherry on top of a purchase decision. Think about it, if they buy something like a house from you, what’s sending them a beautiful new home gift basket to help them feel like their experience was truly personal? You can create a gift-giving culture that really connects you to the customer, and helps them want to support you that much more!
Listen to Your Customers
At the end of the day, your customer always knows best. It’s a simple rule of business, but learning it early can save a lot of heartaches later on. If you really take the time to field your customer’s concerns and actively work on fixing the issues at hand, your customers are going to notice. These simple actions can create lifelong customers.
Keep it personal, ask questions, provide answers and solutions, and you will start to retain your customers more and more. If you are still wondering how to improve customer retention, it’s time to check out the Bumblebee Baskets Business Success Program. Our business success team helps your brand build a culture of gift giving. We help you increase your customer retention by adding a personal touch to your business.