The Art of Client Retention for an Inbound Marketing Agency

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Praveen Kumar
date icon Jul 06, 2016
date icon 10 min read
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Let’s talk of one industry that is not competitive, Can think of one? No, right. Let’s face it, your customers have a lot of choices these days, and thanks to inbound marketing by your competitors, your customers know about them. In such challenging times how can you retain those clients?Will putting some FAQ’s and how-to’s on your website help? No, you need to do a lot more than that, and it starts from day 1 when the sale is made. It is the Inbound marketing that can help you retain your customers.

What Are The Reasons That Make Your Customers Stay With You?

  • They are happy with your product or service.
  • Issues are quickly getting resolved and customer service is polite and helpful. They feel connected and supported.
  • Everything revolves around the products and services. Products are constantly improving or the service is showing sustained and positive results.
  • Customers feel that you are the industry expert and are ahead of the competition.
  • Your product or service is unbeatable, and the customers don’t see the added value in switching to your competitor.

How to Retain Your Customers Using Inbound Marketing in Few Simple Steps

Step #1. Put Forward the right tools in place- you need a close integration of a good CRM system and your Inbound Marketing lead generation tools. This is termed as Closed Loop Marketing. This type of marketing will empower your sales and marketing team to work together and monitor customer communications, progress, support issues and milestones, such as trial expirations, subscription renewals ,etc.

Step #2. Stay connected with your clients by reaching out early and often- to gather knowledge of any malfunction of a product or error in service, schedule regular review meetings to answer questions and provide best practices to improve performance. Send Monthly newsletters with product/service update and new content. Let your client know that you genuinely care and are growing bigger and better by the time.

Step #3. Be available online and offline- make sure that you are available across all the channels where your clients can reach you out. Make sure that all your lines are open and people can submit a service/support request or reach out to a human being to get their issues resolved. You don’t need to be present 24/7, but it also depends on your business type whether your client can be in need at odd hours and you are needed to be available, but be transparent in telling the client or new customers at what time they can reach you.

Step #4. Use Social Media as a PR Tool- your support team should have a Twitter account that is monitored in the business hours or preferably more. Use attractive hash tags for your different product or service lines, and publish them on your support channels. Your ORM team must be able to respond to all inquiries, even if it means referring them to a support page. Do follow the same instructions for Facebook and Google+.

Step #5. Grab Attention- to stay ahead of your competitors. This means constantly publishing good content often. It means creating content that not only solves the problem of your existing clients but also attracts new customers. Participate in chats, forums, and regularly comment on your blog posts. Invite people to write guest posts on your blog and seek guest posting opportunities on influencer blogs. By doing all of this “you stay on top of mind” with your own clients while you attract new ones.

Step #6. Measure your retention rates- Track your customers through their interaction with your website, blog and content marketing efforts. Use Advanced Marketing Analytics tools to track your client behaviour and reach out to them via behavior driven communications. Identify problems early and fix them- you should look for negative comments posted on social media or blogs. You can track such comments using advanced social media analytics tools. Reach out to the complainant directly, but privately, to address their issues.

By making customer retention as important as customer acquisition, you benefit from enhanced customer lifetime value, increased referrals and reduced customer complaints. By using Inbound Marketing for both new sales and retained sales, your business benefits from using one set of resources for two important goals. You can beat the competition just by establishing yourself as the leader in the industry, by being most responsive,  and by being most genuine to clients.

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