It is an often-quoted statistic in marketing circles that acquiring a new customer costs more than retaining an existing customer and yet most organisations spend a fair chunk of their marketing budget on new business development.
According to research by Invesp Consulting, acquiring a new customer is five times as expensive as retaining an existing customer, while 44 per cent of companies admit they have a ‘greater focus’ on acquisition, while 18 per cent focus on retention (the rest claim an equal focus).
Crucially, the research also showed that the success rate of selling to a customer you already have is 60-70 per cent, while the success rate of selling to a new customer is 5-20 per cent. In addition, increasing customer retention rates by 5 per cent increases profits by 25-95 per cent. Working to retain loyal customers seems like a no-brainer.
Arguably, in today’s business climate, when leads are probably even harder to come by, it is more important than ever to retain existing clients and build as strong a relationship as possible with them. It is important to keep in contact with your best clients, sending regular communications and perhaps sharing special deals to keep them engaged.
In a bricks and mortar business, you will probably start to recognise your regular customers and be ready to point them towards new products you know they might like. You might even know them by name. You’ve probably got a good idea about what it is that keeps them coming back. It might be your customer service or that you make sure whatever they’ve ordered is hand-delivered to their door within 24 hours.
Those happy customers will not only keep coming back for more, but they will most probably recommend you, either directly through a recommendation or a review, or through a social media post which praises your product or service.
Recent research from Yiedify has shown that retention has overtaken conversion and acquisition as the key goal for website personalisation across the UK and the US. The study identified that many brands are now focusing on how they can create great personalised experiences for existing customers as the effects of Covid-19 make it ever more difficult to acquire and keep new customers.
When asked what motivates them to pursue a website personalisation strategy, 58 per cent of those surveyed said increasing retention rates, while 55 per cent said increasing conversion rates.
While bricks and mortar businesses naturally start to personalise the experience for customers, it is also possible to do that with online customers too.
Using Sitecore, you can begin to personalise the journey for your customers and visitors by delivering them targeted content based on their browsing behaviour and their accumulated profile values.
The process for doing this can be implemented through the Sitecore Experience Editor – where you can create rules to determine the types of content a visitor will see. The more times a person visits your website and the more journeys they take within that space will help you to build a profile about that person and enable you to send them to particular pages.
There are two ways of profiling website visitors, using implicit values, which relate to browsing behaviour and explicit values, which relate to visitor responses. Establishing implicit values will include looking at website analytics – which will reveal quite a lot about your visitors, such as what device they are viewing your website on, browsing patterns and time spent on different pages and where they are located. Establishing explicit values will be gained from looking at any feedback or enquiry forms customers might have filled-in.
Using the Sitecore Experience Editor you can customise content, putting it into different ‘buckets’ so that it’s seen by visitors with a particular persona.
If you’d like to know more about how you can personalise and tailor your customer experience, then get in touch.