Welcome to the Rob Clegg blog. What's better than acquiring one new customer? It sounds like a tricky question, but the answer isn't "acquiring two customers." It's actually retaining an existing customer. 

But how do you create a customer retention strategy that keeps your current customers engaged and happy?

Let’s start with onboarding. Onboarding is an effective customer retention tool because it prevents churn with new customers. Onboarding ensures customers know how to utilize your products or services so they can complete their goals on time.  

You also need a process for obtaining customer feedback and sharing that information with the rest of your organization. This is where a customer feedback loop provides a system for collecting, analyzing, and distributing customer reviews and surveys. Once gathered, you should analyze your survey results by looking for trends in customer behavior and areas to enhance user experience.

Even if your customers aren't reaching out with feedback, Consider adopting a communication calendar to manage customer engagements. A communication calendar is a chart that keeps track of customer communication. While it's important to focus on customers who are at risk of churn, you can't forget about your loyal customers as well. 

Why should you care about existing customers?

Existing customers have already bought from you, so unless they had a disappointing experience, they will buy from you again. You’ve already established trust, inspired confidence in your product, and even know something about them, which makes it easier to identify their needs and predict their moves, says Rob Clegg.

You’ll also spend less time and effort finding new customers and convincing them that you are the one they should buy from, which means – less expenses, Rob Clegg added. 

Lastly, selling to existing customers is less focused on price, as opposed to selling to new customers. And since your existing customers trust you already, it gets easier to convince them to become interested in even more of your products or services through up-selling and cross-selling.

In other words – the customers you have are your best shot at maximizing your revenues and making your business more profitable!

Even though gaining new customers is a sign of business growth, losing customers is simply too expensive. Your existing customers give you a great chance to increase your profits, as they are more likely to buy from you, than prospects.

And in order to make it happen, you need a tool to keep your relationships alive – CRM. With the help of a CRM software, you can gather and manage information on your customers and also manage activities around customer engagement.

Use the data that the CRM software provides to not only retain customers, but also to keep them happy and grow profits – all without the added expense of acquiring new customers.

How do you use CRM software to keep existing customers?