Keeping your regular customers happy in uncertain times is tough. But it is 100% achievable. Customer retention tactics are essential. This is true whether the market is positive or negative. And you may have already been using some without even realizing it.
The difference between marketing in normal circumstances and marketing during COVID-19 is that many consumers are facing tough times. Plus a heightened sense of emotions with health fears and financial uncertainty directly impacts how customers interact with many companies.
In this article, we’re going to discuss customer retention strategies. How you can utilize them during COVID-19 to adapt to the current market conditions.
3 COVID-19 Customer Retention Tactics
#1 Personalized Thank You Messages
Personalization always has a massively positive impact on customers. Dale Carnegie explains in his book “How To Win Friends & Influence People”. Everyone loves to hear their name. Sending personalized thank you messages to your customers is a win-win scenario. They love that you have taken the time to tell them how much you appreciate the customer, and you earn their loyalty.
You could take this one step further and send personalized handwritten messages. In addition, send a small thank you gift with each customer’s order.
#2 Provide (even more) Valuable Content
Optimizing your content marketing and social media strategy is crucial. And providing even more valuable content than usual to your customers is a surefire way to retain your customers and stay relevant. As more people spend time at home while online, you need to capitalize on this. You’ll have more eyes than ever looking at your web page and social media channels.
This content can be in the form of blogs, long-form YouTube videos, newsletters, social media posts (think Facebook and Instagram stories), and more. Before posting more content, you should analyze what content is popular. Plus what your audience would most likely want to see.
#3 Utilize Automation Tools
Automation tools are an essential part of any marketing strategy. But they’re also vital for customer retention. Platforms like ActiveCampaign make customer retention easy, with tools that enable automatic personalization of emails and SMS messages. You can create a complex email and SMS message sequences that react depending on customer behavior — if they purchase something, you can set it to trigger a personalized “Thank You” message.
Or if they’re interacting with your emails frequently, you can choose to send them more content that you think they’ll like — which keeps them consistently engaged with your content and your business.
Marketing automation tools will really help you to leverage the number of people online during self-isolation or government-enforced lockdowns to improve engagement and your overall brand awareness.
Optimizing Your Marketing Strategy
So, should you change your customer retention strategy? If you don’t already have one in place, you need to devise one as soon as possible to capitalize on the opportunity of having more eyes on your business than ever before.
Instead of changing your current strategy, you should update and post valuable content more regularly, and you can optimize your time using automation tools such as ActiveCampaign.
To learn more about marketing your business through the COVID-19 pandemic, check out some of our most recent blogs, including Marketing in the Time of Coronavirus and Should I Cut My Marketing Budget?
Written by Lewis James