You are bound to react with delight when someone buys from your company. However, if that person makes just a one-off purchase and doesn’t regularly return to order more things from you, they are going to contribute little to your company’s longer-term growth. This is why customer retention should be very important to your business.

Build personal relationships with your customers

This means learning their names, stories and buying habits – in short, treating each customer as a person you are interested in getting to know rather than just making money from.

So, as a particular customer’s birthday approaches, you could email them a “happy birthday” message – or, perhaps better still, post them a physical card, given how easily an email could be overlooked.

Provide content that would likely interest your customers

As you increasingly get to know your customers on a personal level, you can also gain a valuable insight into what kind of content would be most useful to them. You could then create webinars, videos and blog posts of this sort before sharing them all through a customer engagement platform that would let you see which of this content spurs the most engagement.

Start a customer loyalty programme

“We’d all love to think that customers will buy from us again and again, with brand love being the driving motivation,” Herb Jones, chief marketing officer of Fracture, tells Business News Daily. “Unfortunately, reality doesn’t work like that.”

For this reason, he recommends introducing a customer loyalty scheme to “ensure that you are recognising your most valued customers and keeping them connected.”

Stay active on social media

To put it bluntly, any brand lacking a social media presence could too easily be perceived as irrelevant. Therefore, you should be sure to interact with your company’s fans across a wide range of social media platforms – as doing so would help you to foster a strong online community.

Offer a high level of customer support

A customer could soon become disillusioned with your brand if this person often finds that, when they have run into a problem with one of its products or services, you leave them in the lurch. So, whenever a customer sends a question your way, make sure you have service staff ready to answer it to the best of their ability.

Invite your customers to leave feedback

Encouraging this – such as by sending out surveys or requesting email reviews – after a customer has interacted with you will show them how eager you are to improve your service.

Naturally, after noticing the extent of your dedication, this customer could grow more inclined to stick around to see just how much better things get.

Showcase testimonials

In a survey reported by CustomerThink, 70% of respondents said they trusted consumer opinions posted online. By posting testimonials to your brand’s social media pages or website homepage, you could demonstrate why more people should, so to speak, tip their toes in the waters of your product or service offering.