Small business owners who deal with customers face to face generally know what makes their patrons tick and can therefore plan to retain them effectively through their strategized business model. Despite nearly every small business having a website, from my viewpoint there is a clear lack of retention strategies being applied to the customers who have been acquired online by SMEs.
This post provides you with a quick guide on ways your small business can better re-target the customers who have interacted with your website. I’ve given my top 4 tips below:
1. Customer Service
The most basic face to face customer retention strategy still remains true online, you should still concentrate on customer service, but the application of how you do so is slightly different. When online you’ll likely never see your customer or even speak to them, nearly every order or contact will be processed automatically. You simply need to make sure that if the customer has any specific product or service questions you answer them promptly and once the order is processed you get it delivered with double speed. This alone isn’t generally considered enough to retain customers; it is considered usual practice for online companies since customer service reliable sites like Amazon have become so popular, but without this being applied the following four online customer retention tips might as well be non-existent.
2. Keep your customer email address
Email has become one of the most common forms of communication in the modern world, yet a lot of small businesses don’t utilise the customer retention avenues that it opens. If you have a new promotion coming up, a discounted product or even some important news then send it to your list. These people have given you there email address because they are already interested in your products; it is like someone reaching out to grab a business flyer which doesn’t exist. If you don’t have a mailing list as customers don’t need to sign-up to your site then simply take the steps towards getting one, add an email subscription section on your homepage and you may be surprised by the results.
3. Social Media
One of the most common misconceptions of having a business social networking page, such as Twitter or Facebook, is that business owners still view them as personal and don’t see the need to update them on what they’re currently doing or feelings. That is why you see countless business social networking pages which have been set up with no content on them whatsoever, which in my opinion is almost worse than having no presence at all. View the social network page as a modern way to engage with your customers commercially, update it with company news and special offers on products. Most importantly, engage the customers who have followed your business socially and encourage them to regularly visit your brand with simple tactics like running competitions exclusive to that page with giveaways and incentives. This not only acts as a retention strategy as they build up loyalty to your brand, but also enables acquisition to come in to play through the ease of sharing these links to friends.
4. Invest in behavioural advertising online
In my opinion, perhaps the most underused technique for retaining customers to your brand. Modern online advertising technologies tracks people who have visited specific pages on your site and then serves advertisements on other websites based on the previous activity they have completed, all controlled by you.
As an example of how well this works, my younger brother purchased an Xbox games console on Amazon using my laptop about 6 months ago, one week later I was on The Sun newspaper website when an Amazon advert appeared asking the question of whether I wanted games with my new Xbox. Since then I’ve noted it several times around, I visit an online live casino and play once, I’ll then view an advert for the exact same casino offering me another bonus 2 weeks later.
Imagine having tailored billboards advertising your latest products everywhere your customers visit, it is targeted retention advertising at is best.
This helpful article was kindly provided by David Merry – CEO of online live casino CastleCasino.com and a Director at Right Casino Media.
