Blog posts tagged customer retention

What's your priority - customer acquisition or customer retention?

Ok, so that’s a bit of a leading question, but whilst we all know what our answers should be, it’s tempting to focus all of our time and money on acquiring new customers rather than looking after the ones we have. Acquiring new customers satisfies our need to get onto the next thing, it seems exciting and new. But does it make good business sense?

The short answer is no. It can cost you up to six or seven times more to gain business from a new customer than it does from an existing one according to Flowtown. The same blog highlights that you can increase your profits by up to 95 per cent just by improving your customer retention rates by five per cent. That sounds pretty optimistic to me, but even an increase of 20-30 per cent in profits wouldn’t be a bad thing for most businesses.

Your loyal customers will spend more money with you, they cost you less to gain repeat business from, and they’re probably more loyal and less sensitive to price than new customers. So, if retaining the customers you have makes good business sense, then why don’t many businesses put their existing customers at the heart of their marketing strategy?

In the small business world, it’s easy to think that it might be a lack of strategy. Many business owners don’t have a strategy or a marketing plan and will often lurch from advertising to leaflet drops to manic social networking without taking a considered or planned approach. Perhaps that’s a very unfair way of looking at things, but I do believe that without a strategy to retain customers you leave yourself open to losing customers unnecessarily.

That said, big businesses aren’t immune to failing to retain their customers effectively. Talk to anyone renewing their insurance and you’ll wonder whether the insurance companies have even heard of the concept of customer retention. I know that it’s always cheaper for my family to apply to our existing insurance company as a new customer, than it is for us to just renew. How unbelievably inefficient for us all!

Large and small businesses could do well to think more carefully about customer retention. In this age of comprehensive spending reviews and increased efficiency, frankly we could all do with whatever help we can get in leveraging more business from our valuable customer bases. What strategies do you use in your business?

 

Fiona Humberstone is an expert contributor to Marketing Donut and managing director of Flourish.