Why Customer Retention Should Always Be on Your Mind

Building an outstanding post-purchase customer experience

Building a highly personalised customer experience is an effective way to ease a new customer along to conversion. But customer experience is about more than getting customers over the line. Done right, it is also a smart way to retain them.

The journey a customer takes after their first purchase is crucial if you want to retain them. Focusing your attention on the post-purchase customer experience is a smart way to enhance this journey.

Your aim is to positively influence post-purchase behaviour. This is the way a customer thinks, feels, and acts after they have bought from you. And it affects whether they buy from you again.

Customers often feel anxious after they have made a purchase. They may be considering if their money was well-spent. If they see attractive offers from competitors, they may regret their decision to buy. This is called buyer’s remorse.

Creating a post-purchase customer experience that reduces buyer’s remorse and encourages positive brand sentiment is the first step in increasing retention.

A good post-purchase customer experience is designed to:

• reduce buyer’s remorse
• encourage a customer to feel good about their purchase
• build a stronger connection with your brand
• encourage repeat purchase
• encourage the customer to speak positively about your brand to others.

The sorts of tactics that you might use to create a positive post-purchase experience are:

• advising about refund policy and returns process
• sending a thank you email
• asking for a review
• sending a how-to guide
• recommending complementary products
• giving product care tips
• encouraging the sharing of user-generated content
• sending a replenishment reminder

Why prioritise customer lifetime value?

Fine-tuning your customer’s post-purchase experience to increase customer retention also increases customer lifetime value.

Customer lifetime value is a smart marketing metric to prioritise if you want to boost revenue. It considers the total value each customer represents to your business over the lifetime of their journey with your brand.

So tweaking your strategy to get the maximum value out of each existing customer makes business sense. It is more easily achieved than attracting new customers to spend with you, thanks to the power of marketing automation. For example, cross-selling and upselling with personalised product recommendations at key points in the customer journey pumps up customer lifetime value, automatically.

The importance of re-engagement

Another important consideration in your customer retention strategy is re-engagement.

One of the main ways brands miss out on repeat custom is by allowing customers to lapse. Creating re-engagement campaigns is a powerful way to combat this.

These can be triggered by inactivity from a customer for a certain period of time. Messaging should be tailored to remind customers what they are missing, giving them key reasons to re-engage with your brand.