Customer retention is valuable in more ways than you might initially expect. In fact, the cost of retaining a customer is up to seven times less than acquiring a new one. Moreover, repeat customers spend on average 33% more than new customers!
So whilst many companies are borderline obsessed with spending increasing amounts of time and budget dedicated to the acquisition of new customers, retaining customers is where you should really be focusing your efforts.
So, customer retention can have many benefits on your bottom line but how do you implement a successful customer retention strategy in a modern world when customer loyalty is so hard to maintain? How can you keep customers coming back for more? And what are other brands doing successfully with their retention marketing campaigns?
Well, we’ve had a look at some BlueVenn clients to tell you how they are using unified data, analytics and multi-channel marketing to join the online and offline customer experience and improve retention rates:
1. Boosting customer retention by a whopping 28%!
As a result of fantastic PR and marketing, this online fashion retailer hit the marketplace with a unique offering that produced unprecedented demand for their product. They created a level of customer acquisition that was the envy of the market and growth was phenomenal!
But their marketing team had no way of accessing this constant stream of new customer data – let alone analyzing or segmenting it. This meant they weren’t gaining any insight to how many of their customers were sticking around to make another purchase, and they were missing out on all the benefits customer retention can bring.
With such amazing growth and acquisition rates no-one really cared too much though!
Following a proof of concept with the BlueVenn Customer Data Platform (CDP), which has data analytics and campaign management built in, the marketing team gained data access for the first time and, using the tool, discovered that just 4% of their newly acquired customers over the previous two financial quarters had come back to make a subsequent purchase.
Further analysis created the case to invest in BlueVenn. Through segmentation and real-time personalization across ecommerce, mobile and email they now boast retention rates of 32%, and the revenues have grown phenomenally by 950%.
2. Data and decisions that changed the cosmetics industry
When it came to customer retention and upselling to customers, the marketing team at one of the world’s largest multinational group of cosmetic brands relied on the long-standing industry tradition of using mascara as a first-purchase item. The theory, adopted by all the major cosmetic brands, was that this was the best entry product to promote heavily and draw customers into a store where they could be sold more products. This turned out not necessarily to be the best method of customer retention.
This particular giant of the cosmetics world invested in BlueVenn to empower the marketing team with insights that might normally be reserved for data scientists. By looking at the entire customer journey, and analyzing the lifetime value of customers across 25 brands, they discovered that lip gloss products were in fact far more effective than mascara products at creating high-value and long-lasting customers. They saw that these customers were far more likely to then respond to retention strategies and were proven to become proportionally high-value to the business.
The organization's marketing team has claimed that the revelation has helped to add several millions of dollars to their annual revenues, as they are able to track this increase of lifetime value for every individual customer and use predictive modeling to optimize future campaigns.
3. Insurance firm stops generating transient customers
Many insurance companies have spent a fortune on acquisition of new customers and compete fiercely on comparison websites, on pay-per-click and other expensive campaigns. Of course, these customers are very transient and always looking for the cheapest insurance deal and therefore were very difficult to retain.
However, one particular insurance company analyzed their customer data with BlueVenn. They discovered that by using offers to get customers to purchase two insurance products instead of just one, they were six times more likely to become a long term customer, thus improving their customer retention rate, over those who purchased one product!
It further transpired that the customers who purchased two products were with the company, on average, for over ten years, whereas the customers who only purchased one product only hung about until the date of their first renewal.
These insights have now completely changed the customer retention strategy for this insurance firm, with the business now focused on acquisition channels that help to generate higher value, long-lasting customers, rather than transient customers focused too firmly on the cheapest products.
Improve your customer retention marketing with BlueVenn
Download this Customer Journey Optimization eBook for ideas about how you can use customer journeys to improve the customer experience and boost your retention rates.
