The only indication that proves that you don't just have the best products/services, but also the best sales team is when your customer does not just buy once. They come back again and again for more.
If you are an SME/SMME owner, or part of the marketing/sales team, one of the challenges you may face, especially with limited budget, is what decision to make to increase and boost your sales between focusing on continuously implementing customer acquisition strategies, or customer retention?
With the enormous difficulty of just running a business, increasing your sales is one of the many stressful and challenging things entrepreneurs face, especially when you run on a limited or no marketing budget at all.
A lot of people then tend to focus more on increasing the number of customers they should gain to reach the sales or financial targets they have set. In so doing, they then forget about the customers they already have or had.
Granted. Every business needs to have more customers because every business is started to make profits. There more customers, the more the sales, thus more profits, and growth thereof. However, with that in mind, customer retention is more important than customer acquisition.
"Did you know that increasing your customer retention rates by just 5% can increase your profits between 25-95%? Relationships generate bigger profits. It is true, customer loyalty has a valuable impact on your bottom line" - Lori Hill
Putting your focus and energy on the customers that have already bought your product helps you build amazing relationships with those customers. They trust you with their money, and see the value thereof. Even if your product is the most amazing product ever, building relationships with each and every customer that purchases your product creates and extra value on top of the product itself. Which may also positively benefits you in terms of competing with others in your market place.
"It is less expensive to retain customers than to acquire them. Stats prove that you spend five times less money on customer retention compared to acquisition" - Lori Hill
With so many marketing tools and strategies out there, none beats the old and the best ever: Word of Mouth. Your customers are your best markers for your product, let no one tell you otherwise. If you do it right, your customers will be loyal to you, and become your brand advocates and ambassadors without even asking them to do so. That will happen only through retaining and maintaining good relationships with them.
As an entrepreneur, you should never have a customer that buys from you, and never come back again. If you sell a shitty product or your service is just bad, obviously they will not come back. But if you have the best and quality product, and your customer does not come back to buy either the same or different product, it is time you focus on your customer retention strategies before it is too late, because lack thereof may result in having difficulties in even acquiring new ones.
Remember, in as much as word of mouth can benefit you, it can as much destroy you.
What I hope to leave you with in this post is that in as much as increasing the number of new customers you have or gain is of vital importance, retaining your existing customers is way way more important.
Build long lasting relationships with your customers. Your customer should not only buy from you once, and that's it. You implement measures to ensure they do not forget about your brand, and do come back to you. By doing that, ultimately you will have brand ambassadors that are loyal to your brand, and will surely help you acquire new customers.
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