It’s been said that the easiest way to gain a new customer is to keep an existing one. Put numerically, experts will tell you that it costs five to seven times more to land a new account than it does to retain one you already have. This isn’t to say that you should abandon your prospecting and focus exclusively on making your existing customers happy—you’ve got to keep bringing in new business to succeed.
However, if you’re ignoring customer retention, you are leaving “easy money” on the table. And one way to make it even “easier” is through the use of marketing automation.
How a Tool Like HubSpot Helps You Maintain Strong Relationships
We’re big advocates of HubSpot at 30dps (in fact, we’re HubSpot Agency Partner Certified) because we’ve seen the tremendous benefits it provides to the companies we work with, and to our company! But whatever marketing automation tool you use, you’ll find that it can help you increase your customer retention rate. Here are six critical ways:
- Marketing automation helps you find the right customers. One of the keys to retaining customers is ensuring that you have the right ones to begin with. With your marketing automation system powering your content marketing program, prospects get the materials they need to make a well-informed decision about becoming a customer, which helps prevent “buyer’s remorse.”
- Marketing automation creates a warm welcome. Workflows you develop can send new customers a welcome email, information on how to connect with your technical support or customer service team, etc. This makes them feel like “part of the family” and less inclined to leave and break those bonds.
- Marketing automation increases adoption. From reminders about the benefits of your products to suggestions on helpful ways to use them, ongoing interaction with a customer, facilitated by your automation system, helps them see the value of their purchase.
- Marketing automation enables personalization. It may seem like there’s little difference between sending communications that start with “Dear Customer” versus “Dear Sara,” but personalization can make people feel like you know and appreciate them. And the greeting is just scratching the surface of how implementing marketing automation can help you customize your interactions.
- Marketing automation helps you communicate important information. Nobody likes being left in the dark about scheduled system outages, new product features, policy changes, or other topics that affect them as a customer. A marketing automation system enables you to share this information quickly and efficiently.
- Marketing automation makes it easy to offer incentives. For most people, all it takes is the occasional insider “perk” to keep them loyal. You can use a marketing automation tool to drive a program in which you offer incentives at key points in a person’s evolution as a customer, keeping them interested and engaged.
Customer Retention: A Modest Increase Delivers Major Revenue Benefits
Here’s another stat. Experts say that something as achievable as a five percent increase in customer retention can drive an increase in profits of 25 percent or more! So, to summarize:
- It costs much less to retain customers than to find new ones.
- By retaining them, you increase profits.
- A marketing automation system like HubSpot makes it easier to improve your customer retention rate.
In other words, if you are not taking steps to retain more customers, you should be! And we can help.
Our teams of content marketing and marketing automation experts in Colorado Springs, CO, and Springfield, MO, have extensive expertise in bringing automation systems and customer retention programs online. Imagine what your financial results will look like if you increase your customer retention not just by five percent, but by 10 percent… or 25 percent! Better yet, stop imagining and let’s get started!
