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How Marketing Data Can Help Small Businesses Retain Customers

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By: Wise Marketer Staff |

Posted on August 8, 2022

As 65% of a company’s business comes from past customers, it is a no-brainer that brands — especially smaller ones — need to focus on retaining their customers.

In this post, you’ll learn three ways to leverage your marketing data to improve retention rates.

1. Send personalized messages and offers

According to a recent report, 71% of customers expect personalized experiences from businesses and 76% get frustrated when businesses fail to deliver a personalized experience. The same report also reveals that 78% of customers consider another purchase if the message sent by a brand is personalized.

It is becoming more and more important for businesses to deliver messages, services, and products as per their customer’s personalized needs or risk churn.

To curate and deliver a personalized experience, you need two things:

1) Customer data: Purchase history, past interactions, reviews, service preferences, etc.

2) CRM solution: A tool where you can segment your customers based on the above data and send them personalized messages, recommendations, and offers.

It’s challenging for budding businesses with budget restrictions and a small team to manage multiple tools and processes to deliver a personalized experience to their customers that will boost retention.

Fortunately, one example of services that provide a one-stop solution for small businesses is vcita. Through its client management portal, you can store and organize all the information about your clients and their interactions with your business.

Then, its intuitive CRM tool can help you segment your customers and send them personalized messages via email and SMS. What’s more, vcita generates rich marketing data reports, automatically giving you data-backed information about your customers’ engagement with your business.

2. Get feedback from current and potential customers

When visitors flood into your website and some of them become customers, two of the many questions that might be in your mind as the owner of a small business are:

  • Are these customers leaving satisfied?
  • What can we do to improve our services?

The answers to the questions above not only help you gain new customers by improving your services but also help you retain existing ones.

The easiest way to find the answers to the questions above is to ask your target audience when they visit your site and your customers after they make a purchase. However, challenges such as vague feedback, impersonal feedback, and unactionable feedback make it challenging for small businesses to understand their present and potential customers.

Here, a tool like Typeform makes it easy for you to gather actionable and coherent feedback from customers and visitors through NPS surveys, quizzes, polls, and more. You can create customized surveys and quizzes within minutes with the help of conditional logic and templates.

Typeform integrates easily with your website and email, making it easy for small business owners to gather actionable insights about the quality of their services and website from their visitors and customers.

3. Track visitors’ behavior on your website

Almost 90% of website visitors will switch to a competitor’s site after having one bad experience. It is, therefore, more important than ever to ensure that your audience has a good time when they land on your website.

To know whether your audience is finding the things they are looking for, you need to track how they browse through your site, how much time they spend on each of the pages, and whether they take the desired action.

This will give you actionable insights which will help you improve your site’s design, create better content that is more appealing to your target audience, and get more customers.

The best tool in the market that will assist you in doing that is Google Analytics. You can track your visitors’ on-site behavior, dwell time, bounce rate, and conversation rate. You can also set custom conversion goals yourself to measure the success of a campaign.

Along with Google Analytics, you can use Hotjar to find out how your visitors and customers interact with your content through heatmaps and scroll maps. You can get graphical behavioral data that will help you improve your site’s content and design.

Conclusion

Loyal customers continue to buy from you and bring in new customers while spreading the good word about your brand. Therefore, it is beneficial to invest in customer retention.

Fortunately, with the correct data and right tools, you can increase your retention rate in three simple steps:

1) Collect data relevant to past business interactions such as purchase history and send personalized messages and offers based on that data through a CRM tool that allows segmentation.

2) Get actionable feedback from your website visitors and customers through NPS surveys, polls, and quizzes to improve the quality of your service and on-site experience.

3) Track dwell time, bounce rate, and user journey of your audience on your website to gain a deeper understanding of how your content is received to make necessary improvements to appeal to them.

We hope that this post motivates you to take the first step toward collecting the right marketing data that will increase the retention rates of your budding business.