8 Retention Marketing Strategies for Your Growth Marketing Plan

Conventional marketing strategies place significant emphasis on acquiring new customers, but buyer-centric growth marketing demands equal attention to customer retention. Long-term customers drive sustained revenue and accelerate company growth through referrals, valuable feedback, and repeat purchases. Your customer retention rate also indicates whether your marketing strategy truly resonates with your audience and adapts to their needs.

You know retention is important, so how do you go above and beyond to gain traction compared with your competitors? Businesses who prioritize retention need to build actionable data streams and long-term customer relationships. Read on to learn about specific retention marketing tactics for keeping customers happy.

Set Marketing Objectives Based on Customer Retention Data

A data-driven growth marketing strategy requires consistent assessment of customer satisfaction metrics over time. Prior to launching retention marketing campaigns, businesses should measure two foundational metrics: Customer Lifetime Value (“CLV” or “LTV”) and churn rate.

• Expressed as a dollar amount, CLV is a calculation of the total revenue a customer brings to your business over the lifespan of their relationship with it. Comparing your CLV to the cost of acquisition will help you understand the profitability of each new client and the ROI you can expect from client retention marketing. Customer acquisition costs are usually higher than the costs of marketing to existing customers. Retention marketing strategies can help increase CLV. 
  
• Churn rate is a measure of the percentage of customers who choose to leave your business within a certain time frame (e.g. quarterly, annually, etc.). A low churn rate means you have a high customer retention rate. Calculating and understanding your churn rate is essential to defining your retention strategy.

Your CLV and churn rate provide baseline figures you can use to set concrete retention goals and establish priorities for specific customer retention strategies.

Calculating CLV & Churn Rate

CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUE

Value of Purchase x Purchase Frequency x Customer Lifespan = ($$)

Example:
$100 x 3x per year x 2 years = $600 CLV

CHURN RATE

Lost Customers (during a specific time frame) ÷ Total Customers (at the start of the time frame) x 100 = (%)

Example:
10 customers lost in 2022 ÷ 100 customers in January 2022 x 100 = 10% churn rate in 2022

Keep in mind that revenue from repeat purchases is only the beginning of the value you get from a high customer retention rate. A loyal customer base will naturally drive brand awareness and referral traffic through word-of-mouth promotion. Purchase frequency doesn’t necessarily reveal how much total growth comes from a happy customer!

Educate Your Client Base to Add Value to Their Experience

Expand your company’s communication beyond content that is obviously intended to drive sales. Educational content reminds customers why your company is worth buying from – without directly asking them to purchase.

Consider creating newsletters, videos, social media posts, or webinars that highlight how your brand meets their needs. Also use this content to increase customer awareness of additional features or products that your business offers, indirectly encouraging them to buy from you again.

Use Entertaining Content to Boost Brand Engagement 

Incorporating well-placed humor or other entertainment value in your company messaging can go a long way in building an emotional connection with your audience and boosting customer engagement. Consider ways you can relate to your customers, speak to their experiences, and remind them of the real people behind your brand. 

Email campaigns and social media posts offer opportunities to interact with your customers less formally. Conventional marketing models treat clients in a far more transactional way than growth marketing, which encourages businesses to build a loyal following. That could mean breaking the mold in your industry and finding creative ways to entertain your audience!

Personalize Follow-Up Messages to Stay Top Of Mind

Improve client satisfaction and keep your brand top of mind by sending highly personalized followup messages, such as thank-you’s, surveys, or additional resources. These low-pressure communications tell your clients you care about their experience – not just their purchase. For example, a follow-up email sequence triggered by a purchase could include tips for how to use the product or a survey asking if the customer is satisfied with their purchase. 

Automated marketing tools give today’s marketers the ability to segment users based on their behavior and send highly customized content that resonates with their needs and values.

Create Customer Loyalty Programs that Reward Longevity 

Many companies provide onboarding incentives and offer deals to first-time buyers. While these are effective means for obtaining clients, consider how you can reduce your customer churn rate and drive revenue by rewarding existing clients. 

Prove to your clients that you value their ongoing loyalty, not just their first purchase. Points-per-purchase, referral programs, exclusive memberships, and discounts on related services are popular ways to incentivize clients to consistently buy from you instead of a competitor. Be creative within your niche to develop incentives that fit your business model.

Use Technology to Facilitate Quality Customer Support

At some point, your customers will inevitably run into problems with your products, services, or user interface. Make it easy for them to reach your support team and find answers to their questions. Quality customer support leaves a long-lasting impression in the minds of your customers, who have likely had many negative experiences with other businesses’ long wait times or ineffective solutions to their problems.

Implementing support ticketing systems, for example, lets clients submit support requests after-hours and gives you the ability to efficiently view and manage all open requests so no one is left waiting. 

Your retention marketing strategy needs to include ways to proactively anticipate potential hurdles and develop effective means for helping customers resolve their questions.

Use Customer Feedback to Refine Your Product

Customer feedback is an indispensable way to use the feedback loop to improve your product and your processes. Ratings, surveys, and interviews are helpful information- gathering methods. Hearing from your customers serves a dual purpose. 

First, it provides unique customer insights that wouldn’t show up in website or email metrics. This data will develop a more holistic picture of your audience that should inform your marketing efforts at every level from acquisition to retention. Use this valuable customer data to understand what products or services resonate with your audience and why. The more you tailor your products to your audience, the better you can establish your business as an indispensable part of their lives. 

Secondly, giving your customers genuine opportunities to share their thoughts (and see results from it) improves customer satisfaction by proving you care about their experiences. Customer feedback systems build brand loyalty and encourage future customer engagement once your clients see that their opinions matter.

Create a Holistic Customer Experience with an All-In-One Marketing Platform

Growth marketing requires you to think holistically about your marketing efforts, and retention marketing is an important component of your plan. The specific retention tactics you choose must be integrated into a long-term strategy that begins with client onboarding and extends to long after your customers become loyal brand advocates. 

An all-in-one marketing solution makes this possible by integrating fragmented marketing operations into one platform, so nothing falls through the cracks. Businesses who use all-in-one marketing software can easily manage key parts of a customer’s experience—payment pages, support ticketing systems, automated sequences—and then analyze user behavior from a consolidated analytics dashboard.