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Growth Marketing

Powering your retention tactics with customer engagement

Why do you think Amazon shows you recommendations of exactly what you might need, based on your past purchases, right when you open their app?

Hint-It drives existing customers to the products that they are most likely to want, need and buy.

Fun Fact: 35% of Amazon’s revenue comes from its recommendation engine.

Why do you think Starbucks came up with their rewards programs that help customers earn free food and drinks, place and pay for their orders, and receive personalized offers? 

Hint-It encourages customers to return by giving them discounts, exclusive access, or special offers.

Why do you think Hubspot came up with Hubspot Academy or Canva came up with Canva Design School?

Hint-They provide resources, how-to guides, and step-by-step videos that help customers use their product as well as hone their skills.

In short, all these are tactics used by organisations to RETAIN USERS. 

Because guess what’s better than acquiring one new customer?

It sounds like a trick question, but the answer isn’t “acquiring two customers.” It’s actually retaining an existing customer.

HERE’s WHY, 

  • Retaining a customer is 10 times cheaper than acquiring a new customer. 
  • However, increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can boost your profits by 25% to 95%! 
  • Existing customers are 50% more likely than new customers to try new products

As a growth guy, you know that encouraging customers to return is easier said than done.

Here are few things to keep in mind when framing a sound retention strategy –

  • One of the keys to improving your customer retention rate is understanding the underlying metrics. And the only metric you should focus on is ENGAGEMENT-as it is what drives Retention, not the other way round. 
  • This is why Swiggy sends you push notifications at 5pm for an evening cuppa …their goal is to keep you ENGAGED!
  • All your retention levers are ULTIMATELY your engagement levers.

Then HOW can we improve ENGAGEMENT?

  1. ADD USE CASES

The best companies with infrequent use cases develop other, more frequent use cases to stay top of your mind.

Why do you think KFC came up with the Wednesday offers? Or BookMyShow came out with their streaming feature in the pandemic?

  1. INCREASE INTENSITY OF EACH USE CASE

Why do you think Amazon has the Frequently Bought together feature?

  1. INCREASE FREQUENCY OF CURRENT USE CASE

Uber does so by notifying you whenever prices are low for rides so that you don’t consider other options.

  1. INCREASE FEATURE USAGE 

Orgs can have multiple feature offerings. Amazon has fresh, prime, alexa….Not all amazon customers use all these, but they keep you engaged by connecting all their features to each other. Amazon Music on alexa…alexa ad once you open amazon and so on.

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Harneet Bhalla, Program Director at Xpert
He leads Growth at Glance|ex-1mg. He has empowered more than 5 Fortune 500 companies, multiple start-ups, celebrities and thousands of others through his growth marketing insights. Has been an active speaker at various forums and conferences including TEDx GLAU and IIT Bombay. Featured on a number of podcasts across USA, UK, Canada and India.