Learn how Patch can help you increase customer retention and unlock eCommerce success with powerful features designed to keep customers coming back.
When your business is struggling, you can do many things to try to stay afloat. You might offer sales, change your marketing strategy, or even rebrand your company.
But sometimes, the best solution is something a little simpler: focus on customer retention.
Customer retention refers to the ability of a business to retain its existing customers over a period of time. It is the practice of maintaining a long-term relationship with customers and ensuring their loyalty to the brand. I
In other words, it is the process of encouraging customers to continue doing business with you by providing them with excellent products, services, and support.
Customer retention is an important aspect of any business because it helps to reduce the cost of acquiring new customers while increasing revenue from existing ones. That's why effective customer retention strategies should be high on your priority list.
Customer retention is crucial for your business for various reasons.
Firstly, it is cost-effective because retaining your existing customers reduces the cost of marketing and sales efforts required to attract new customers.
Secondly, those loyal customers tend to spend more over time and are more likely to recommend your business to other potential new customers.
Customer retention is a sign of customer satisfaction and loyalty, which is important for building a positive brand reputation. A business with a high level of customer retention can be seen as trustworthy and reliable, which can enhance its image and give it a competitive advantage over competitors.
Finally, customer retention is essential for long-term business success. By maintaining a loyal customer base, businesses can ensure consistent revenue and growth over time.
Customer retention is a critical component of any successful business strategy. In today's competitive business landscape, you must focus on building strong relationships with your customers to improve retention rates.
Here's how you can develop long-lasting relationships with your customers and achieve sustainable growth:
Automate customer journeys: By automating customer journeys, you can ensure that customers receive personalized and timely communication at every touchpoint.
Keep conversations alive: Maintaining ongoing conversations with customers through social media, email marketing, and chatbots can help you build lasting relationships and increase retention rates.
Turn customers into brand evangelists: Encouraging customers to refer their friends and family to your business can help increase brand awareness and loyalty, leading to higher retention rates.
Use personalization: By offering personalized experiences based on customer preferences and behaviors, you can demonstrate that you understand your customers and care about their needs.
Leverage social proof: Displaying customer reviews, ratings, and testimonials can help build trust and credibility, increasing customer retention rates.
Boost response times: Responding quickly to customer inquiries and support requests can demonstrate that you value your customers and are committed to providing excellent service.
Improve customer communication: Providing clear and consistent communication can help customers understand the value of the product or service, leading to higher retention rates.
Identify and solve retention problems with real data: Analyzing customer data and feedback can help you identify areas for improvement and develop targeted customer retention strategies.
To accomplish this, businesses need to focus on various strategies that help retain customers. However, managing customer retention manually can be a challenging task, especially for businesses with a large customer base.
This is where customer retention software comes into play.
Customer retention software is a type of software designed to help your business manage and improve customer retention efforts. These types of software provide your business with tools and features to monitor, analyze, and engage with your customers, with the aim of improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Customer retention software typically includes features such as automated customer journeys, email, and SMS marketing blasts, customer insights and analytics, etc.
These tools enable you to gather feedback from customers, identify areas for improvement, and develop targeted retention strategies based on customer behavior and preferences.
It’s easy to get carried away with all of the shiny new tools that offer only one piece of the customer retention strategy puzzle. Still, oftentimes it pays to invest in a tool that has everything you need under a single login, like Patch.
At Patch, we have over a decade of experience developing a cutting-edge customer retention platform designed to help eCommerce brands retain their current customers and optimize customer lifetime value, all in one convenient platform.
As the world's first retention platform with an integrated RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) scoring model, we use this model to automatically segment customers into actionable groups, which can be targeted using a tailored approach.
Here are nine ways Patch can help you retain your existing customers:
Today’s consumers have high expectations for the brands they interact with. They want a highly personalized and engaging experience throughout every step of their journey. And if customers feel you’re not providing it, they’ll go elsewhere.
Relying on manual processes and one-size-fits-all solutions isn’t going to cut it anymore. That’s where automated customer journeys come in.
Patch's retention platform simplifies the process of tailoring your marketing campaigns, allowing you to create a more personalized experience that is much more likely to boost your ROI.
Here’s how we do it:
If-Then Logic: You’ll determine what happens next in your customer’s journey using triggers and actions. For example, if a customer abandons their cart, our system automatically sends out a notification after 30 minutes.
Drag-and-Drop Editor: This lets you customize and build out the perfect customer journey in minutes.
Blank Canvas: We give you the canvas, and you can fill it in with a range of pre-built campaigns, or you can build bespoke ones designed to meet your unique business needs.
When you automate your customer journeys, you’ll be able to set up automatic responses that are triggered by different customer actions, allowing you to:
Imagine walking into a store where no one comes up to greet you, answer your questions, or offer suggestions. Let’s face it—humans crave interaction and the more channels you engage with customers on, the better.
By not having ways to engage with your customers, you’re losing out on the ability to track customer sentiment or understand what they’re really looking for. This data is essential for informed marketing and product decisions.
That’s why Patch offers TextChat, the ultimate widget for keeping the conversations alive with your customers and prospects.
Our TextChat widget is a powerful tool that allows you to quickly and easily engage with your customers in real-time. Plus, it’s simple to install, meaning you can get started right away.
With TextChat, you can:
Keeping the conversation going is an essential part of building relationships, increasing loyalty, generating leads, reducing churn, and driving sales through cross-selling and upselling. And with Patch, you can do just that.
Without a loyalty or rewards program in place, you’re missing out on the chance to turn your customers into loyal repeat customers who are willing to promote your brand to their friends and family.
But to retain customers and them coming back, you need to give them a reason to do so. That’s why we’ve built a customer loyalty program into our customer retention platform—no need for a separate solution!
With our easy-to-use platform, you can:
Create Custom Loyalty Rules: Like our automated customer journeys, you’ll use if-then logic to build a program just the way you want it.
Harness Automation: Once your triggers are in place, our system does the rest! It delivers the right messages at the right times, completely removing the guesswork.
Track and Measure Results: Every loyalty program comes equipped with advanced analytics to give you insight into your loyalty program’s performance so that you can use your data to make smart decisions.
By rewarding customers for their continued patronage, you’ll not only keep them coming back, but you’ll also turn them into raving fans who will sing your praises to anyone who will listen.
It’s no secret that personalization is key to success in today’s online world. But many businesses don’t realize that they need to use SmartOptions for granular personalization to truly capitalize on the power of personalization.
But what are SmartOptions? Well, they are customizable fields that autofill with relevant information for the recipient. For example, emails that include your name in the greeting, show you previous purchases, or display images of what’s in your cart—all using SmartOptions.
And we’ve built this feature into every aspect of our customer retention platform. Our SmartOptions allow you to:
Make your Shopify store’s coupon codes one-time-use, so each customer receives their own unique code for better tracking
Utilize tracking links to direct traffic and measure the performance of your marketing activity
Easily insert customer data fields into text and email messages
Create dynamic content that features text blocks, images, calls to action, and more—all unique to each customer
One of the greatest advantages of using SmartOptions for granular personalization is the ability to build deeper relationships with customers by providing them with content relevant to their needs.
Social proof is one of the most reliable ways to create trust with potential new customers, yet many businesses miss out on this opportunity because they simply don’t ask.
When prospective customers see that others have had positive experiences with your business, they’re much more likely to take the leap and try your product or service themselves. And that’s exactly what our Review Requests feature does.
It allows you to collect customer feedback right on your website and showcase them, so visitors can see for themselves how others have benefited from doing business with you.
Here’s how we get the best results:
Powerful Automation: With our innovative automated tools, you can send a review request immediately after the transaction or at any other point in your customer’s journey.
Omnichannel Outreach: Unlike traditional email-based requests, we use both SMS and emails to generate reviews from customers, allowing us to generate 15 times more reviews than other methods of getting feedback.
Custom Link Generation: A simple click will automatically take customers to the review site of your choice (Google, Yelp, your website, etc.).
Review requests are an incredibly effective way to improve customer retention rates, and the setup is effortless. Once you’ve configured your automation, our platform does the heavy lifting.
People are constantly bombarded with choices and decisions, and they often don’t have the time or energy to make informed decisions about everything. So, give them the customer reviews they need to make an informed decision.
In our fast-paced world, customers expect you to be available 24/7 and immediately respond to their inquiries. If they don’t receive a reply within a reasonable amount of time, they’ll likely take their business elsewhere.
So what happens when a request comes in outside of normal business hours? Well, if you use our auto-reply feature, it sends out preprogrammed text messages to your customers.
They’ll feel satisfied knowing that someone is listening and cares enough about their needs during off hours! And if the request requires additional assistance, then the conversation can be diverted to a representative who can help.
When you boost response times with auto-replies, you’ll:
Without effective communication, retaining customers and keeping them happy and engaged would be nearly impossible.
Instead of feeling like they’re being heard and valued, they receive mixed messages that cause them to eventually turn away and stop engaging with your brand altogether.
That’s why it’s so important to ensure you’re doing everything you can to improve customer satisfaction through communication—and one of the best ways to do that is with a two-way messenger.
With our two-way communication widget, you can:
Customers are more likely to stick around long-term when they are satisfied with the communication they’re receiving.
With so much information being sent out every day, it’s easy for your messages to get lost in the shuffle—especially when you’re relying on email alone.
By not taking advantage of using both email and SMS, you’re limiting your potential customer base and severely restricting your ability to grow your business.
A well-crafted blast can reach thousands of people quickly and easily, making it a great way to generate leads and sales, which is why our platform lets you harness this omnichannel opportunity.
Patch lets you:
Segment Your Audience: With detailed segmentation, you can easily target your customers by gender, location, age, and more, so the right customers get the right message.
Personalize your Content with SmartOptions: Make messages personalized and unique to each person you’re sending them to by adding their name, expiration date, or other valuable data.
Collect Performance Data: Get all the information you need for your campaign’s performance to make a decision from one source.
Email and SMS blasts are affordable and easy to set up, making them a great option for businesses of all sizes. Additionally, they offer a high return on investment.
When it comes to customer retention strategies, you can never be too proactive. Failing to properly identify and solve retention problems can cause you to lose valuable customers and miss out on converting one-time buyers into lifelong customers.
By understanding the warning signs and addressing them quickly, you can keep a closer eye on your target market and ensure that you’re meeting their needs—before it’s too late.
And with the help of our granular analytics and insights, you’ll be well-equipped to do just that. Our system rates your current customers and gives you an idea of whether they are likely to come back or if they are at risk of dropping out.
With our platform you’ll be able to track the performance of:
Our intuitive dashboards give you a bird’s eye view into your customer retention efforts, allowing you to identify the root cause of your customer retention rate problems and come up with solutions that will help keep your customers coming back.
And we’ve barely scratched the surface of what‘s possible with Patch.
So, what are you waiting for? Get in touch with our team today to schedule a free demo.
Master the art of customer retention with our comprehensive guide on how to create a powerful loyalty program that keeps customers coming back.
Harness the potential of customer retention automation to increase customer loyalty and revenue for your Shopify business with these 5 techniques.
A customer journey map—the visual representation of a customer’s experience and touchpoints—is vital if you want to build an efficient …