It’s no secret by now that all of our marketing efforts at Pastore & Associates are geared toward keeping our customers happy. We’ve told you many times that we consider our customers our greatest resource, and warned that it is much more expensive to acquire new customers than to keep old ones. Forgive us a moment while we get ready to beat our dead horse, but we’re just so hot on the concept of customer retention that we might as well touch on it again.
Lately, several businesses have made customer retention the focal point of their marketing strategy. When dealing with your own customers, you could follow the lead of Filters Fast, an online air and water filter company. The good folks at Filters Fast have taken a new approach to email marketing, coming up with a creative way of reaching out to their customers’ inboxes without ending up in the spam folder.
After some research, Filters Fast discovered that simply adding customers who had purchased their products to an email list produced a click-through rate of less than 2 percent. Not only did they find that they were wasting their time, but in many cases, they were trying their customers’ patience. Instead, the company has found success with opt-in subscriptions, in which individuals have the choice of signing up for free email alerts when it’s time to change their water filters (read: buy new filters from Filters Fast). President Ray Scardigno expects 15 percent of his audience to sign up before the end of the year, which means customers will start paying attention to Filters Fast emails, instead of going right to the delete button.
Large companies like to use the term “customer loyalty” when referring to customer retention, offering at least the illusion that these efforts are done for the consumer’s benefit. We all know, however, that when the customer feels they are benefiting from choosing our business, it also benefits our bottom line.
One of the more common examples of customer loyalty are of course, airline frequent flier miles. Does your business reward your “frequent fliers”, those customers who come back to you again and again? Perhaps you’ve seen these programs on a small scale during your lunch hour, when you got that punch card from your local sandwich shop. Did you buy your ten sandwiches to get the eleventh free? Odds are someone did if they keep giving them out.
For more on customer retention and new ways to implement it in this modern day and age, read Peggy Dau’s thoughts on how to use social media to keep your customers coming back for more.
And check out Harvey Thompson’s book Who Stole My Customer?? for ways to keep those consumers from going elsewhere.
What customer retention programs have you implemented for your business? What ways would Filters Fast opt-in program work for you? Let us know so we can share it with the rest of our readers!
