Social Media Tactics for Customer Retention

In the process of acquiring new customers, retaining them sometimes takes a backseat. Studies have shown that retaining customers costs seven times lesser than acquiring a new one. To prevent such situations, businesses have to focus on extending their customers’ lifetime with their brands, a.k.a., customer retention. They have to keep giving their audience opportunities to  hold onto so that they do not think about switching to other brands or products.

Retention can help boost revenues significantly as  customers trust the brand and keep coming back to it for repeat purchases. To help you out, here are five plans of action that will help keep your audience hooked - 

Cultivate your Listening Skills

Businesses should focus on becoming active listeners as this helps in enhancing their customers’ overall social experience. To do the same, a social listening software can be employed wherein listening alerts can be set up to understand customer queries better. It can also be used to give product/service information. This makes two-communication much faster, and the customer feels acknowledged.

Several kinds of social listening tools can be used to open potential windows for link building by digging up unlinked product/brand mentions. Also, by using different active listening approaches, businesses can identify customer pain points and design compelling offers to engage and retain them in the future.

Infer engagement Analytics

Businesses can find out a lot about their customer by analysing their online behaviour on social media platforms, as they offer better insights into the customer’s life and choices. They can interact with their customers on social media platforms like Snapchat and Twitter as it will help them create an in-depth user experience via hyper-personalisation.

Tools like Instagram Insights or Facebook Analytics can be utilised to keep a real-time track of activity duration, online purchases, customer demographics, and content statistics. Furthermore, analytics can be divided into separate categories like prescriptive, descriptive, predictive, diagnostic, and consumption to have a more streamlined content creation approach. This way, personalised content can be used to engage the customers.

Upscale your CRM game

Businesses must have a  good CRM game-plan as that can be a huge selling point. It genuinely helps with customer retention and also creates a huge window for building long-term relationships. Brands can open support accounts across all kinds of social media platforms to actively interact with their customers, boost brand health, and reduce customer dissatisfaction.

To take it a step further, well-segmented community-specific groups can be created on social media pages that can employ customers as brand ambassadors. This will have a powerful impact on purchase decisions and bring positive results. Additionally, there is an option for ‘Profile Enrichment Services.’ This can be employed to get better information about customers, complete their profiles, and address their actual needs. 

Incentivise Incessantly to boost ROI

Businesses should always ensure that they provide incentives to their customers as this will kickstart a cycle of giving and receiving, which will help boost sales and increase ROI. There should keep an active lookout for brand advocates across platforms so that incentives and rewards can be given to them to ensure a lasting relationship.

Marketing gimmicks like ‘irresistible offers’ can be used to ensure that customers do not switch brands and continue to be loyal to the business’s products and services. A thorough analysis of customers’ social media profiles should be done to maintain the correct timing and tonality of sending out incentives as this will impact CTRs significantly.

Automate to be efficient

Businesses should make an active habit of using automated systems and scheduling tools to ensure flexibility of posting content and information. Today, customers are more into raising queries on social media platforms rather than calling on customer service numbers. Automation will address their issues in real-time and keep them interested.

Social media scheduling tools like Buffer, Taggbox Commerce, Google Analytics, Hootsuite, and many more can be used to track UGC, competitors, content, and optimisation. Also, businesses can invest in marketing automation software as it will allow them to have a clear insight into the customer journey and help develop customised deals to keep them coming back for more purchases.

Customer retention is not something that can be achieved overnight. It takes consistent dedication and time to get to that point wherein your customers will return to your business for more. You need to have some plans or strategies in place so that you can give them the incentive to do so - like finding ways to delight them, improving their experience, giving them discount offers, and making them realise that your business enjoys and appreciates their goodwill and support. The more consistent your efforts are, higher will be the retention!