Client Retention is an incredibly important aspect of any business in any industry. Attracting new customers and clients is expensive, so encouraging your existing customers to return or stay subscribed to your services is a far more cost-effective and better option. However, many businesses are unsure how exactly to improve their retention rates, especially if their clients are small business owners who are constantly looking to make cuts.

The first thing you need to do is measure and understand your current customer retention rate to see how you’re performing. Lower retention rates indicate poor client satisfaction as compared to higher retention rates. From just analysing the data, you may be able to instantly see areas where your company needs to improve. Once you have a baseline, you can start to focus on improving your client retention rate with clever strategies to encourage brand loyalty.

Here’s everything you need to know about Client Retention:

Why Is It Important To Improve Client Retention?

Retaining your business’s clients is essential as it costs considerably more to replace your customers than it does to retain them. Developing a good understanding of your client's needs, struggles and desires can help you to develop a client retention strategy that works for them. For example, SMEs have to save money wherever possible in order to grow and develop, and if your business focuses on supporting small to medium enterprises, your customers will want to feel that they are getting a brilliant deal that is too attractive to give up. Your business can encourage them to feel this way by offering your clients additional perks, like subscriptions to business tools and exclusive discounts.

Another benefit of improved client retention is your customers are more likely to spread the word! Word-of-mouth referrals can be very profitable, and it’s something that’s only achievable through good client relationships. New customers may only buy from your business once, but loyal customers will return and buy on multiple occasions, helping to boost profits! So, focus on retaining loyal customers rather than trying to appease and acquire new customers with the following four methods.

What Methods Can Be Used To Improve Client Retention?

Be Accessible & Caring

SMEs want to feel that they matter as much as big companies. If they feel that they aren’t seen as important, they will find other companies who will value their custom and make them feel appreciated. Whenever you speak with your SME customers, you want to make sure that you have their information in front of you and that you can talk to them confidently and comfortably. Having a reliable and good CRM system in place is key. Building a relationship and connection with them can make a huge difference in your client retention. It improves their experience - and keeps them engaged with your brand, boosting your profits! A multi-channel customer service system can work really well here. It involves offering your clients more ways to interact with you, which can have a good influence on their overall experience.

Implement A Sleek Onboarding Process

Onboarding processes help your clients get set up and start using your product, platform or service much easier. From signing up to activating the product and using it for the first time, the onboarding process helps your customer throughout the whole period, and it can give a great first impression if done well. This makes the product, platform or service more effective as they will be using it the way it’s meant to be used - and it can get them excited to be partnering with your brand! Engagement is key here. Providing anything from a welcome email to a video walkthrough or something similar ensures they stay engaged. Keeping in touch while they go through the onboarding process also helps them to become accustomed to your products and services.

Keep The Products/Services Front & Centre

Your products and services need to become more familiar with your customers as you may be missing out on the opportunity to upsell them additional services or, at the very least, improve your brand awareness, which is so important nowadays. When they need a product or service that you offer, your brand should be the very first thing they think of! So build a client email list and regularly send out newsletters to keep your brand and, in turn, products and services fresh in their minds. This can also encourage them to refer you to others as they don’t forget about the support you offer. For long healthy client relationships, you shouldn’t stop marketing yourself to them simply because they are clients. Be sure to pack your emails with fresh value-led content - doing so helps you to beat the competition, makes you look like you are giving free guidance and keeps your customers loyal!

Perk Schemes

If you are really looking to enhance your offering, partner with other businesses to offer your clients an enhanced service packed with perks. Business Stack, for example, is a digital platform that enables a modular approach to professional services, allowing you to select only the services that fit the needs of your SME customers, and it is available exclusively for business partnerships!

Personalisation is an important aspect of the customer experience. So you can offer your customers access to a tailored solution that covers Legal & HR, Accountancy, eLearning, IT Technical Support, and Financial Planning! This level of flexibility is sought after by all types of SMEs. Businesses adapt and change all the time; that’s why we took a modular approach when creating our platform, allowing you to add multiple services if and when needed. The experience of all your SME clients matters a lot, and Stack can make it unique for them!

The information presented in this article is provided as general guidance, it should only be used as the basis for further research or requesting professional advice.