Post-sales Guide: 7 Customer Retention Strategies You Must Follow

Let’s face it – most of the marketing gurus out there focus on attracting customers and getting more leads. While it is a vital part of improving your sales, customer retention is also one of the most important yet overlooked aspects of it.

Remember, your motive is not to sell your products for a single time, but to maintain a fulfilling post-sales relationship with your customers. Therefore, in this post, I will let make you familiar with some effective customer retention strategies that you must follow to get better results with your sales.

What is Customer Retention and Why is it Important

In simple terms, customer retention is the overall ability of your business to preserve its existing customers over time. Mostly, year-to-year metrics are evaluated to check how many customers were gained by your business and the number of customers that are no longer active.

You can calculate it by checking the number of customer accounts that are closed/inactive or users who have canceled their subscriptions. Mathematically, customer retention can be calculated by applying this simple formula:

Importance of Customer Retention

Apart from gaining new customers, retaining your old customers is considered more important due to the following post-sales benefits:

· More Sales: It is observed that the selling rate of a product for a new customer is just 5-20% compared to that of 60-70% for existing customers.

· Reducing Costs: Marketing can consume a huge chunk of your company’s budget and you can optimize it with customer retention strategies. It can be up to 25 times more expensive to acquire new customers compared to retaining existing ones.

· Better ROI: Increasing the customer retention rate in your business by 5% can improve the revenue of your business by 25 to 95%. Needless to say, by following some simple post-sales steps, you can see substantial benefits in your business.

· Referrals: Furthermore, if you have loyal customers, then they would automatically refer your business to their friends and family and will be your biggest marketing ally.

7 Customer Retention Strategies That You Must Follow

Now when you know the overall benefits of customer retention, let’s learn how to work on it and get positive results with your online business via these post-sales tactics.

Tip 1: Start by Creating a Complete Customer Journey Strategy

The first thing you need to do is come up with an end-to-end customer journey strategy. Most of the experts only focus on the first part of the journey that is about acquiring new customers. Afterward, you need to focus on other vital components like purchasing, platform usage, customer support, order fulfillment, after-sales services, and so on.

Therefore, you should focus on all the vital aspects of your customer’s journey and distribute your budget thoughtfully.

Tip 2: Focus on Providing Excellent Customer Support

Once you have generated leads by getting new customers, you should focus on providing quality support to them. Ideally, you should try to provide a seamless and memorable experience to your customers so that they won’t be lured by your competitors.

It has been observed that around 33% of customers switch companies just after a single poor customer service interaction. Therefore, providing responsive 24/7 live support on your website or app should be one of the priorities in your customer retention strategies.

Furthermore, if your customers have had a bad experience with your platform, then you can compensate for it by offering extra discounts or reward points.

Tip 3: Give Powerful Features to Your Customers

These days, most users avoid interacting with customer support and would like to get more customized options on the native platform instead. This would be a win-win situation for everyone as it would save your resources while giving more control to your customers.

For instance, you can provide dedicated options on your store, letting your customers track their orders. You can also come up with features to return a product, reorder it, manage subscriptions, and so on. With these customer retention strategies, you can provide a more hassle-free shopping experience to everyone.

Tip 4: Get Feedback from Your Customers

Obtaining feedback from your customers should be one of the most vital parts of your post-sales activities. It would let you know more about the overall services of your platform and the products that are listed there. I would recommend having dedicated sections in the feedback form so that your customers can rate your services, products, and so on easily.

Also, you should consider making the feedback form user-friendly so that your customers can fill it without any hassle. It should be short, precise, yet provide proven statistics to you so that you can easily improve your business.

Tip 5: Run Exclusive Discounts and Events for Existing Customers

From the above-listed statistics, you can clearly observe that your customers are the most important asset of your business. Therefore, you should consider hosting all kinds of exclusive events for your loyal customers. With these customer retention strategies, you can boost your sales and make your existing users feel valued.

One of the best ways to achieve this is by running members-only discounts or giving early access to an upcoming sale to your loyal users. You can also give them discounts based on the duration for which they have been a part of your platform.

Tip 6: Come up with a Rewarding Loyalty or Referral Program

While attaining customer loyalty can be tough, it should be the prime focus of your post-sales strategy. Besides providing cutting-edge services to your customers, you can also consider running loyalty or referral programs for them.

A loyalty program would simply reward your customers for buying products on your platform (like getting some cashback or subsequent discounts). This would encourage your customer to keep coming back to your store to buy more products.

On the other hand, with the help of a referral program, you can use your existing customers to get new users. To do that, you can simply provide referral bonuses to your existing users that would be added to their accounts by getting leads.

These are some of the best customer retention strategies that would build up a strong relationship with your new users and convert them into loyal customers. Remember, it is a gradual process, and you can come up with different levels in the loyalty program to make it more exciting. This would provide gradual yet consistent rewards to your customers and they would definitely keep coming back.

Tip 7: Keep Communicating with Your Customers

Last, but most importantly, you should keep communicating with your customers using different channels. One of the best ways to do that is by posting all kinds of updates on your social media platforms.

Apart from that, you can also take the assistance of email marketing to implement these customer retention strategies. You can simply send emails to your customers in case they have abandoned their carts or can inform them about an upcoming sale. Not just that, you can also send some exclusive offers to your old customers who haven’t visited your platform as a reminder mail that can lure them to shop again.

By implementing these post-sales tips, you can certainly make your customers feel appreciated and convert them into your most valuable asset.

Build Your Dropshipping Store with DSers

Besides following the above-listed customer retention strategies, you should also have appealing products in your online store. Therefore, to level up your dropshipping business, you can consider exploring a tool like DSers.

It is the official AliExpress dropshipping platform that features thousands of sellers, letting you pick just the right products for your store.

· You can explore DSers for free (or upgrade to its premium version) to explore millions of products listed in different categories.

· Using DSers, you can order products in a bulk and can also take all kinds of operational steps to organize your store.

· It features automatic options like the updating of your order status or syncing of tracking numbers that would save your time and resources.

· DSers also offers a unique Supplier Optimizer feature that would let you handpick the most profitable and highly rated suppliers in different categories.

· You can seamlessly integrate DSers with other dropshipping platforms like Shopify or WooCommerce.

Final Words

This brings us to the end of this extensive guide on the importance of customer retention and how we can improve it with all kinds of post-sales activities. To make things easier for you, I have listed some of the best customer retention strategies in this guide that you must follow to get profitable results with your online store.

Apart from that, you can also consider using a tool like DSers to set up and manage your online dropshipping store without any unwanted hassle.