The signs are there. Your company isn’t retaining enough customers to offset the cost of acquiring them. It’s also possible that maybe you’re a more established business that seems to have saturated the market, meaning that your company has a such stronghold in the market that most people who would potentially become your customer are already be one. It seems like your business has reached a growth plateau, but this moment doesn’t have to be met with dread. In fact, it can open up your business to more exciting opportunities that can help your business reach heights and markets your company never expected.
1. Successfully Onboarding
If you aren’t actively helping your customers achieve what they set out do with your product or service, they won’t stick around. First, you need to make sure that your company is attracting qualified leads with a proper understanding of the benefits and capabilities of your products and services.
This is essential to ensuring that your customers’ expectations are aligned with reality. This can be one of the biggest ways to lose a customer and the sad thing is a little communication makes it entirely preventable. Buyer personas are tool that can help your team match people’s specific to your offering that would complement them.
Your team also needs to help your customers map out how to get to the final goal they hope to achieve. Include milestones to help them and your team track and measure their progress. Many business leave customers to fend for themselves after they’ve locked the payment, but the business that actively tries to educate their customer while helping them face their challenges and achieve their goals is one that is appreciated and far more likely to retain customers.
2. Content Marketing
Content Marketing is a great way educate your customers. Videos, blogs, and more media can be created to teach your customers how to reach of the milestones your team mapped out for them during onboarding.
Content Marketing is powerful because it can be used to both acquire and retain customers. People who are looking for solutions through search engines or social media will come across the content you’ve provided your business and come to trust that your business as one that is knowledgeable and capable. It makes them more likely to become a customer.
Content marketing also great for nurturing and retaining customers. In any industry, people need to constantly learning to stay ahead of the competition, keep up with changes in technology, and face any shifts in the social, economic, and political environment to better serve their customers.
3. Gathering Multiple Forms of Feedback
Many businesses seem to lean strongly in one direction when taking feedback from their customers to make decisions and strategize. They either look at user data collected from software, mull over customer interviews, surveys, and reviews, or rely on comparison A/B testing when making decisions, when the clearest picture comes from doing all of these things and more together.
Studying multiple forms of feedback will help your company avoid possible skews in the data and give more visibility to consistent patterns and trends in your business. It’s also important to remember to be proactive when it comes to user feedback, and not just reactive. For example, testing should occur from the planning stages of your product or service through its completion and continue over its life cycle.
Thoroughly vetting key decisions will save your team time and money from making many preventable and costly mistakes, which can be particularly costly in the tech industry. This will also make your company shine in your customers’ eyes as one that cares and anticipates their needs.
4. Reengaging Current Customers and Former Prospects
One of the important things is to remember what you already have to work with. Even if you didn’t up closing the deal or retaining these customers, they were still interested in your company for a reason. Start with reengaging former or inactive customers to gain a better picture of why they’re no longer engaging with your business. Offering incentives such as discounts, rewards, or a special preview will help increase the amount of replies.
Figure out what made them lose interest and if turning that around would bring more profit to your company. Make sure you are optimizing your approach to suit your customers. It could be that your notification/email frequency tips the scale of annoying for them. Also don’t forget that for people who just happen to stumble onto your site and never return, there’s retargeting ads, which will follow them as they go to other websites, giving them ads that encourage a retun back to your website.
5. Acquisitions, Mergers, & Entering New Markets
As a growth strategy, your company may also want to consider mergers and acquisitions. Newer companies that offer an innovative product or service may set out to be acquired. When acquired, addition to a wider range of customers and greater influence and power, these startups would also gain access to more resources. This could be more skilled labor, tools, money, promotions and more, which can also make a huge difference in growth.
This move can also benefit a stagnant established company reach a new market. Entering new markets is another strategy that could be implemented by both startups and powerful corporations. For example, these businesses could attempt to break into a new region, such as a new country where public interest in their offering has shown promise. Alliances help companies mask their weaknesses with another company’s strength.
Paying attention to unique ways your customers are using and benefiting from your offerings could also illuminate a way for your company to enter a new market. Diversification is another pathway to growth. It consists of growing your business through a related or unrelated market. In related markets, it’s usually the pairing of two business that offer complementary products, like a joint hair and nail salon. An example of an unrelated market would be the famous Berkshire. Hathaway that offers everything from batteries, to insurance, to underwear.
Remember, growth and retainment opportunities aren’t just limited to these, but they’re a great place to start. Work to improve your overall customer experience and being perceptive of emerging ways to reach a new market can only do good for your business.
