In recent years, the marketing sphere has started to emphasize customer attraction. The mere view of new visitors on your website is an encouraging and a positive occurrence. However, an emphasis on attracting customers causes a drop in regular customers.
Attracting new customers is seven times more expensive, and it also contributes to a lack of brand consistency. Loyal customers are the crux of every successful business and retaining them should be a priority. So, how can you accomplish this?
Out of a plethora of possible solutions, social media has proven to be the most effective tool. A higher retention rate has a direct correlation to profit increases, in all sectors.
Using social media and its benefits, you can easily retain more customers with each passing period. To help you accomplish this, we’ve split the use of social media for customer retention into 6 key strategies.
1. Listen to your customers and their preferences
Social media is an efficient tool for many reasons, but none can match the connection with customers it allows. By being vigilant and ever-present on social media, you will engage in listening to the people who follow you.
Knowing your customers’ preferences and wishes is the first step towards growing your brand and establishing customer retention. But how does social media accomplish this?
The first way involves letting your customers know you’re there and you’re listening. Actions such as liking comments, replying to them or sharing posts are a great way to establishing retention via positive customer experience. Without doing anything to boost your brand, you will be able to send a message of support, as well as making your presence known.
As for the second method, you have to visualize social media as a good channel where you can learn the preferences of your customers. By simply following all your social media channels on a daily basis, you can gain valuable insight into how you can improve your product.
Positive comments on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter can help you with keeping your business on track. By providing people with what they want, you will gain their loyalty and retain customers in the process.
2. Reward active posters
The power of hashtags is an underrated aspect of social media. Not only are most people unaware of it, but many also refuse to see its benefits for customer retention.
First, they were only a Twitter-limited phenomenon, but the appearance of hashtags on Facebook and Instagram has improved the usability of social media. How do hashtags benefit marketers exactly?
By following and exploring hashtags, you can see a tidy list of all the people who are posting about you and advertising you. After you’ve seen their activity, you can affect customer retention simply by rewarding them. When your customers make a conscious effort to post about you, let them know that you see it and appreciate it.
User-Generated Content (UGC) is a great way of outsourcing your marketing factor – for free. Rewarding those who provide UGC is a great way of establishing customer retention.
When feeling appreciated, people will pledge allegiance to a brand or product. Rewarding UGC can be as simple as liking or commenting on a post, or as lucrative as sending product samples or “thank you” notes.
In this era of declining brand loyalty, customers are quick to choose a supreme service. If this service is paired with a loyalty program, then they are more likely to stay.
3. Personalize everything
Time and time again, it has been proven that people like to feel special. At first, it was something well-recorded, but not that prevalent. However, in the last 20 years, we have seen the rise of the personalization trend in marketing.
Mass marketing, pumping millions into screen time and simply being present won’t do anymore. To be able to retain your customers, you have to employ social media to personalize your content.
Facebook is a great way to see how personalization works. The first and most important level of personalization is adhering to the mother tongue of your customers. If they see a post in their native language, they are bound to feel more special.
Multilingual posts are still only a Facebook thing, but you can use the new 280-character limit on Twitter to fit a second language. Instagram allows you to have a 2200-character description, as well as comments, so there is enough space for a multilingual post.
Another facet of personalization is, of course, interaction. Nobody likes message templates with just someone’s name used in a few instances. People love freedom and informal conversations.
Don’t be afraid to interact with your followers, use jokes and establish a positive atmosphere. When other people see that you’re encouraging interaction, they will also join in and recommend your brand as well.
Customer retention is all about creating an environment people will want to become a part of. By connecting to everyone on a personal level, they will choose your brand above all others. Social media gives you the option of getting closer to your customers, for free and using minimal effort to accomplish this.
4. Be sure to promote special and limited-time-only offers
Before you unlock the full potential of customer retention via social media, you have to establish a large enough audience. With more customer retention tactics, this can be possible in a short period of time.
You will be able to use social media as a platform for promotions. Online contact is the most efficient way of reaching people so that should be your first and primary option for reaching out via promotions.
Don’t forget, offers and promotions are an integral part of customer retention. Upon being presented with a good offer, your customers will feel fortunate.
Since people who don’t follow you aren’t aware of those offers, they will understand the offer as a form of a reward. Through personalization and loyalty programs, you can easily amass a group of followers that will likely accept the offer you’re presenting.
Although limited-time offers don’t create that much revenue per offer, they are the best possible investment for the future. One purchase at a lower price will soon turn into multiple in the future. By accomplishing that, you will ensure a constant influx of purchases by your regular customers.
If your crux audience is performing well, then you can also view the phenomenon as secondary customer attraction. Retention by itself includes the customer promoting your brand by using it, thereby attracting even more potentially interested people.
5. Forge customer perception using your tone
To retain your customers, you first have to understand them. While there are many ways to accomplish this, segmenting your audience via the use of analytics is a great method of doing so.
Not all people have the same mindset, and not everyone responds to a marketing strategy the same way, so you must separate your audience into groups.
To avoid wasting resources, you have to direct your social media presence to please every single group. Speaking to them in a tone they understand will impact your revenue and brand popularity greatly.
Older people don’t respond well to the use of slang. Younger customers appreciate brevity and a concise way of sharing information. Research the average age and education level of your customer base.
Try tailoring different posts for different groups and see how they perform. Just because your followers like the same product, it doesn’t mean that they can be spoken to in the same way.
Many say that social media is an echo chamber. While this may be bad for information, it’s great for you as a marketer. By observing the performance of your posts, you can find out how exactly people respond to different tones. A simple change in wording or formatting can result in tremendous advancement and retaining different groups of customers at the same time.
6. Be sure to share at the right moment
Even this aspect of customer retention is closely connected to analytics. Timing your posts was once considered a “hit or miss” strategy, but it all comes down to analytics.
Retaining customers doesn’t just mean providing the right content, but providing the right content at the right time. To accomplish this, you need to figure out the location of the biggest part of your audience. Upon finding this out, you will be able to schedule your posts for that time.
By sending out content when everyone’s awake and online, you will improve customer retention through active engagement. When your followers receive posts, they want to see them at the right time. This increases your chances of receiving even more hits through sharing. In addition to the customer retention you will accomplish, this is yet another building block of a stable brand.
After only a few days, your followers will notice that they are always receiving timely content and will want to stay loyal to your brand. With minimal effort and the power of scheduled posts on Facebook, you can gain the loyalty and allegiance of your already faithful customers. Through retention will come attraction as well.
To conclude
Using social media to retain customers is free, requires minimal effort, but has a great impact on the overall state of your brand. Without many resources, you have to show your customers that you are willing to go the extra mile to provide them with additional convenience. Along with supreme service quality, you will be able to grow your brand through that customer core that will grow as time goes on. All you need is analytics, fast thinking, and patience.
