Nowadays, there are many innovative marketing strategies that keep businesses looking for and winning new members. However, with the contemporary fast-paced business environment, getting a new member to your community is a real challenge. According to research, 60% to 80% of customers who are satisfied with the business they bought from do not purchase from that business again.
One of the major reasons why customers do not go back for repeat business with a company is a lack of connection with it. For instance, if you visited a nail salon and they did a good job on your nails but they kept silent while doing your nails, never bothered to know your name, and did not follow up to know if you were satisfied with their services, would you go back to that nail salon another time?
Creating a personal relationship with your clients can go a long way into helping you retain them. Not to mention, retaining existing members is a lot cheaper than acquiring new ones.
How important is it for your business to keep new members? Read on to find out!
Top 3 Strategies to Retain Paying Members
If you have been having trouble retaining your community, consider using these true-and-tested strategies to help your business keep more members in future.
1. Have Clear Success Metrics
Just like in a relationship, your community members are your partners, and they want to feel that you are working tirelessly to give them the best experience. Would you stick with an underperforming partner? I assume not. How can you enable customers to gauge your performance and check if it is in alignment with their expectations?
Marketing KPIs
Dependent on Target Industry & Utilized Tracking Tools
- Sales Revenue
- Cost Per Lead
- Customer Lifetime Value
- Inbound Marketing ROI
- Traffic-to-Lead Ratio (New Contact Rate)
- Lead-to-Customer Ratio
- Landing Page Conversion Rates
- Organic Traffic
- Social Media Traffic (and Conversion Rates)
- Mobile Traffic, Leads and Conversion Rates
Source: IMPACT
You can begin by establishing mutually agreed upon Key Performance Indexes (KPIs) that you and your community can use to track if you are satisfying their needs. Some of these KIPs can be tracked and reported by you to your members while others can be tracked by the members themselves.
In doing so, you will make them feel that you care for their needs, which not only separates you from the crowd but also helps you to increase customer loyalty.
Some KPI tracking features are available with Brilliant Directories while many others can be tracked by you once you begin using Google Analytics’ free tools with your website.
2. Keep the Promises You Make
A great sales pitch will win you new members, but it cannot help you retain them, especially if you do not follow through on your promises. For any member to remain loyal, they need to be sure that fulfilment of promises is key to your organization.
When leads brought about by your sales pitches convert, make sure that you have met all your promises by the end of every purchase. This will establish a strong connection and new members will deem you trustworthy, increasing chances of retention.
If you have trouble coming up with an excellent sales pitch that brings in strong leads, you can get professional help and tips from the best writing websites.
3. Get to Know Your Community Better
While ignoring community members and lack of a personal connection can plummet your ratings and decrease customer retention, rushing your customer relationships will have the same effect.
Community members want to feel known and understood, and they will run to your competitor if they feel that they understand them and invests time in creating a solid relationship with them. Invest more time with each member and take some time to create a real relationship with them to increase your retention rates.
Benefits of Actively Engaged Community Members
If you are thinking about investing in a solid strategy to help your website retain new and existing members, here is what you stand to gain:
1. A Boost in Profits
Repeat purchases bring in more profits to your website/company. Customer retention rates of just 5% can increase your profits by up to 95%. According to studies, repeat members are 300% more likely to spend more money on your business than new ones. Unlike new members, existing ones use your business more for purchase and tend to purchase more over time.
Every loyal member trusts your business and believes that you offer superior goods and services compared to your competitors. As a result, they are also more likely to buy even expensive and new products from your company which boosts your sales and increases your profit margins.
2. Free Advertising
Loyal website members are likely to recommend your business to their friends and family through word-of-mouth. When it comes to driving sales and advertising your business, never under-estimate the power of word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth drives sales 5 times more than paid impressions.
According to recent research by Nielsen, 92% of people trust recommendations from their family and friends more than any other form of marketing. People who get recommendations from friends and family are 4 times more likely to buy from a business.
Additionally, 49% of U.S. consumers credit their brand awareness to friends and family. These statistics clearly show that retaining a member not only offers you free word-of-mouth advertising but also wins you more new members.
3. The Cost of Retaining Is Low
It can cost you up to 30 times more to win a new member than to keep an existing one. Remaining very close to your community – so you know exactly what people need – helps you to innovate and improve your business to suit their tastes and preferences, which increases overall retention.
Most importantly, it means that you save money that you could have used to attract new members/win back old ones and put it in your savings or reinvest it in another part of your business.
Conclusion
Long-term members have a positive effect on your brand as they are proof that you offer great service. The more clients you retain, the more potential members will perceive you as trustworthy, and the greater the chances are that they will stick with you.
To realize these and more benefits of member retention, make sure that you use the strategies discussed in this article to increase your retention rates. Do not forget to implement feedback systems that enable your members to provide you with feedback and insights on how you can improve your community.
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Author: Carol Duke Carol Duke is very keen on teaching students new, effective ways of learning. When not freelancing and blogging on marketing-related matters, Carol enjoys traveling, taking immense pleasure from visiting new countries. View All Articles |
