Growth marketing is a data-driven marketing approach that aims to optimize the entire customer journey, from acquisition to retention and loyalty. It involves experimenting with different strategies and channels to find the most effective ways to grow your business and delight your customers.
But growth marketing is not only about attracting new customers. It’s also about keeping your existing customers happy and engaged, so they become loyal advocates for your brand and refer more people to you. Retaining and delighting your existing customers can have a huge impact on your bottom line, as it costs 5-25 times less than acquiring new ones, and loyal customers spend 67% more over time than first-time customers.
So how can you use growth marketing to retain and delight your existing customers? Here are some tips and examples to inspire you.
Customers expect fast and convenient service, especially when they have a problem or a question. Providing real-time support via live chat, chatbots, or phone can help you resolve issues quickly, reduce frustration, and increase satisfaction. For example, REVE Chat is a live chat software that helps businesses provide real-time support across multiple channels, such as websites, mobile apps, social media and messaging apps.
Customers interact with your brand through various touchpoints, such as your website, email, social media, ads, etc. To provide a seamless and consistent customer experience, you need to ensure that your customer service is aligned across all these channels. This means having a unified view of your customer data, history, preferences, and feedback, and delivering personalized and relevant service at every stage of the customer journey. For example, ActiveCampaign is a marketing automation platform that helps businesses deliver consistent omnichannel customer service by integrating email marketing, CRM, chat, SMS, web personalisation, and more.
Your customer service team is the face of your brand, and they have the power to make or break your customer relationships. To empower them to delight your customers, you need to provide them with the right tools, training, incentives, and autonomy to go the extra mile. For example, Zappos is an online retailer that is famous for its exceptional customer service culture. The company gives its customer service reps the freedom to do whatever it takes to make customers happy, such as sending flowers, cards, gifts, or even pizza.
Customer feedback is a valuable source of information that can help you understand your customers’ needs, expectations, pain points, and satisfaction levels. By analyzing customer feedback regularly, you can identify areas of improvement, spot trends and patterns, measure your performance, and take action accordingly. For example, HubSpot is a CRM software that helps businesses collect and analyze customer feedback using surveys, NPS (Net Promoter Score), CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score), CES (Customer Effort Score), and more.
Customers appreciate it when you treat them as individuals rather than numbers. Personalizing your communication can help you to build rapport, trust, and loyalty with your customers. This means using their names, preferences, behaviour, history, and context to tailor your messages and offers to their specific needs and interests. For example, Netflix is a streaming service that uses personalization to delight its customers by recommending content based on their viewing habits, sending personalized emails and notifications, and creating custom artwork for each title.
Customers like to connect with other customers who share their interests, challenges, and goals. Creating a community for your customers can help you empower them with peer-to-peer support, knowledge sharing, feedback, and engagement. A community can also help you foster a sense of belonging, advocacy, and loyalty among your customers. For example, Salesforce is a cloud-based software company that has a thriving online community called Trailblazer Community, where its customers can learn, collaborate, and network with each other.
Customers expect you to deliver on what you promise, and they get disappointed when you fail to do so. But if you exceed their expectations, you can surprise and delight them. This means setting realistic expectations and then going above and beyond to deliver more value, quality, or convenience than they anticipated. For example, Amazon is an e-commerce giant that delights its customers by offering fast and free shipping, easy returns, price matching, and other perks.
Customers want to be heard, understood, and valued by your brand. Listening actively to your customers can help you show empathy, respect, and appreciation for their opinions, concerns, and feedback. It can also help you identify opportunities to improve your products, services, or processes based on their input. For example, Starbucks is a coffee chain that listens actively to its customers by inviting them to share their ideas, suggestions, and stories on its online platform called My Starbucks Idea.
These are some of the ways you can use growth marketing to retain and delight your existing customers. By doing so, you can increase your customer lifetime value, reduce your churn rate, and generate more referrals and word-of-mouth.
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