5 Customer Retention Tips to Boost Revenue

We hear a lot about B2B lead generation and new customer acquisition as key ways to grow a business. But there’s one powerful source of revenue every business already has right under their noses—current customers. The customer retention tips we cover in this article can help you boost revenue by retaining your current customers and deliver other benefits like:

• Product/service improvements
• Enhanced customer service and support
• Strengthened customer relationships
• A customer-focused content strategy

Let’s dive in.

Quick Takeaways

• Customer retention is the ongoing effort to maintain relationships with customers and motivating them to stay with your business.
• Effective onboarding in the first weeks after purchase can significantly increase the value customers get from your solutions.
• Personalization is key to retaining customers—the majority expect it from providers and become frustrated when they don’t receive it.
• Content marketing can be just as effective for retaining current customers as it is for lead generation and new customer acquisition.
• Providing exceptional customer service and staying responsive to customer feedback are two sure ways to stay connected to current customers.

Customer Retention: What It Is and Why It Matters

Customer retention is the ability to retain existing customers over time. It requires active effort to build and maintain relationships with customers and deliver an experience that motivates them to make continued purchases.

For SaaS companies and others that operate subscription-based business models and depend on recurring revenue, retention is even more critical to financial health and revenue growth.

Prioritizing customer retention is a smart business strategy for several reasons. First, it’s more cost-effective than depending solely or even mostly on new customer acquisition. In fact, it costs 5X more to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones.

Retaining customers over time builds their loyalty to your company, which can translate to brand advocacy—when a customer publicly shares their positive experiences with your brand.

Given that 88% of B2B customers actively seek out word-of-mouth recommendations when they’re considering new solutions, cultivating brand advocacy is one of the most powerful ways to help your business grow through referral marketing.

Finally, high customer retention helps to establish a strong brand reputation for your brand built on your commitment to providing an exceptional customer experience.

Let’s look at five proven and actionable ways you can boost customer retention to drive revenue growth for your business.

5 Customer Retention Tips to Drive Revenue Growth

Onboard New Customers Effectively

Customer retention starts from the moment you convert a new sale. Having a formal process for onboarding new customers sets them up for success from the very beginning, and a staggering 86% of buyers say they’re more likely to stay loyal to a brand that invests in a strong onboarding experience.

• Focus on the first week — The more frequently a customer uses and familiarizes with your solutions, the more likely they’ll be to embrace it (and then likely buy it again in the future). Start your onboarding process right away, and execute the bulk of it in the first week after purchase.
• Make your content instructional — Don’t make your new clients sort through a barrage of content to get to the resources they need. Make your content concise and instructional, providing actionable tips to guide implementation and optimization.
• Assign a point of contact — Put a specific point person from your organization in charge of each client’s onboarding success.
• Cater to unique client needs — Be sure your onboarding content can be customized to meet each client’s unique business needs and goals.
• Have a clear process — Don’t let onboarding fall through the cracks. Have a clear process in place that your sales and success teams know to follow after each sale.

Personalize the Experience

Personalization is at the core of successful brand experiences in modern B2B. McKinsey research found that 71% of buyers expect personalization from brands, and 76% are disappointed when they don’t receive it. Separate research from Salesforce found that 84% of buyers say that being treated like a person, not a number, is “very important” to winning their business.

Most brands have responded to this demand by incorporating personalization into their marketing and sales strategies. But to earn high customer retention rates, that personalization must continue after purchase via customer success and support channels.

Deliver Frequent and High-Value Content

When you think of content marketing, you might think mostly of lead-gen focused content that aims to attract and convert new customers. But content can (and should!) also be targeted to current customers to continually elevate their experience and help them to maximize ROI from your solutions.

Types of content that current customers love include:

• Webinars and workshops — Educational content on thought leadership topics and how to optimize product/service solutions
• Surveys — Opportunities to provide feedback that can enhance the customer experience
• Exclusive content and resources — Content only offered to current customers as a reward for their loyalty and to contribute to the brand experience
• Interactive content — Quizzes, games, challenges, and live events that give customers the chance to actively engage with your brand and other customers

You can level up the ROI you earn on customer-focused content by creating and targeting assets to deliver hyper-relevant and -valuable content for each customer segment.

Provide Exceptional Service

Customer service means providing assistance and solutions to customers who have inquiries, issues, or concerns regarding a product or service.  This involves promptly addressing customer inquiries, actively listening to their concerns, and providing accurate and helpful solutions. 

Training your service agents to have the right knowledge and the ability to navigate customers through challenging situations is key.

Research shows a clear connection between quality customer service and retention. Today, 90% of consumers believe that customer service is important when they’re choosing (and presumably continuing to choose) a company. Further, about a quarter of customers will leave after just one bad experience.

If you’re looking for a way to connect better with customers so you can retain them at a higher rate (and lower your risk of losing customers for avoidable reasons), your customer service strategy is the first place to look. 

Ensure that you allocate enough internal resources (i.e. people and technology tools) to providing exceptional customer service, and if you don’t have them available, outsource to a third-party provider that does.

Collect and Respond to Feedback

Collecting customer feedback is easier than ever through channels like social media and email, and you can do it in a number of strategically valuable ways. One is to ask customers to rate your products and services as well as their experience on a numerical rating scale (such as the Net Promoter Score) so you can quantitatively track customer satisfaction.

Another is to ask open-ended questions that allow for more detailed and nuanced feedback from each customer. These questions add a qualitative aspect to your feedback collection to make it more well-rounded.

Collecting customer feedback on a regular basis and sharing the ways you respond to it (i.e. through product/service and experience improvements) is a sure way to make your customers feel valued and keep them loyal to your brand.

Over to You

Ready to jumpstart an enhanced customer retention strategy for your business? Televerde can help. We provide customer experience solutions at every stage of the customer journey and relationship—from onboarding and adoption support to retention and expansion to ongoing customer care.

Schedule a time to talk with our team to explore how we can help you strengthen your customer relationships, increase customer retention, and drive higher revenue for your business.