Customer retention. You want to make sure that you not only have customers but that those customers remain with you for a long time. That requires a willingness on your part to change with the times, to evolve business practices.
And, customer retention counts on you gaining the customer in the first place. You have to negotiate the tricky marketing funnel, to go from customer attention to purchase. A comprehensive strategy includes such inevitability as customer dissatisfaction and, in the worst case, churn (when someone decides they are done with your business).
This article will offer up suggestions to boost your marketing.
#1: Change your analytics
If you are a small business, you might use Google Analytics to provide you with traffic data about your website. While it’s a free service that provides you some useful data, the basic information they provide doesn’t tell a complete story.
Yes, it’s nice to know how many people visited your website, but that isn’t the only information that an analytics company can gather. And Google Analytics would have you pay $150,000 to attain more information, as well as customer service.
If you use Google Analytics’ free services, you may wish to consider paying a company to provide you with more detailed analytics.
A good analytics company can provide you with data that show trends. You can see if a certain part of your website gains more clicks, or if something on your website is being avoided.
With good analytics, you can determine if a change to your website has made things better or worse if customers are regularly engaging with your website, even what their surfing habits are.
In other words, a good analytics company can do wonders to help with the marketing funnel.
#2: Offer information, but don’t inundate your customers with it.
One rule that most journalists follow is to provide enough information in the first paragraph so that a person reading it could determine the full story. This rule applies well to the business world as well.
This doesn’t mean that you should not provide your customers with information about your company. Far from it; you should always strive for transparency in your practices. You should always allow customers access to information to which they should be privy, as this allows for trust between consumer and producer. So, make sure that specifics about your services and products are always available and relatively easy to access, perhaps in a drop-down menu on your company page.
However, you must also strike a careful balance between providing information and not overwhelming your potential customers. According to a Microsoft study, the average American’s attention span is roughly 8 seconds; a separate BBC study suggests that the average amount of time spent on any one website at a time is one minute. So, you want to utilize that 8 seconds (or 1 minute, however long you can keep someone’s attention) as best as possible.
Provide just enough information on your main page to catch the reader’s interest. Don’t clutter your main page with thousands of pictures, just focus on making a handful of pictures as appealing as possible. Large blocks of text will send customers away in droves, while small blurbs that point out the best, most underutilized features of your services can keep that attention a little longer.
#3: Be willing to use humor (but don’t go too far)
Your company’s social media presence should be more than just links to the website and ads for deals. If you really want to get subscribers to follow your Twitter handle and possibly keep you in mind when they need services you provide, provide entertaining content.
This content doesn’t need to be complex; a perfect example is the Twitter account for Wendy’s, the fast-food restaurant. Their Twitter handle regularly gets retweeted because of its silly, often good-natured roasts of other brands, and sometimes their customers. While comedy may be difficult to pull off, anybody can ultimately be funny.
Some things that might gain positive attention include funny stories from the office, attempts to make food that went awry or bad attempts at poetry.
However, when attempting to create humorous content, don’t punch down. Don’t engage in racism, sexism, or homophobia in your attempt to be funny; not only is such behavior cruel and unbecoming of a person, but it will also ensure that you lose business.