6 Ways to Boost Customer Retention on Your Site [Updated]

To boost customer retention, know this: revenue and business growth are all about sales. To increase sales, you need a constant supply of leads and new clients. Getting new clients is beneficial, and it can grow an enterprise, but, is that the only way to increase profits?

What if you design a system that can help you constantly improve the businesses of your clients?

As a matter of fact, selling to an existing customer has a success rate of 60-70%, while the success rate of selling to a new customer is only 5-20%! Additionally, it can cost you six to seven times more money to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one.

It’s all about building relationships with your clients and keeping them away from your competitors. This is not easy since you’re dealing with industry competitors that can steal your customer base.

This is why in this article, we’re going to equip you with six tactics to engage your existing customer base, using your WordPress website.

6 Ways to Boost Customer Retention

1. Leverage your web content
2. Improve the design of your website
3. Highlight the product/service value
4. Put customer loyalty packages into practice
5. Cultivate and utilize your email list
6. Refine your mobile version

Why You Should Care About Your Current Customers?

As it turns out, one of the best sources of new revenue is right in front of you: your existing clientele.

Here are the main reasons why you should care about existing customers:

• Improved conversion rates. Your clients already work with you. So, unless they’ve had a disappointing experience, they will buy from you again.
• Fewer marketing efforts. With customer retention, you’ll spend less time and resources on new clients. You won’t have to convince them that you are their best choice. Building a long-term business relationship with a new customer can cost you 16 times more than to retain an existing customer.
• Improvements. Customer retention is an excellent way to enhance offers and their effectiveness. Is your customer service department on point? Did your products meet clients’ expectations? Do you provide an excellent value for the money that you receive? Ask for feedback, take notes, and improve!
• Increased profits. As long as your existing customers trust you, it is much easier to cross-sell them. In fact, according to Gartner Group, 80% of your company’s revenue in the future will arrive from 20% of your current customers.
• Reduced costs. Saving money is always a good thing! As reported by Bain and Company, new prospects will cost your company 6-7 times more than keeping the existing ones. Also, a minor 5% increase in customer retention can increase your company’s ROI by 75%!

Calculating Retention Rate

If you want to estimate your customer retention rate, first, you need to define the measurement period (a week, a month, a quarter, a year). After that, add up the number of existing customers you had at the start of the specific time period, at the end of the time period, and the number of new customers you attained during that period.

When you have the data ready, you can use the following formula:

(# customers at the end of the time period – # new customers acquired during the time period) / # customers at the start of time period x 100%

1. Leverage Your Web Content

Pumping out quality content on a regular basis may not be widely considered as a customer retention tactic. However, besides bringing you relevant web traffic and quality leads, content can help you nurture and engage with your customers.

What do you think, how often does your current customer base open your website?

The key in blogging is to lure your clients, to capture their attention through your content. If they use your services, make sure that you provide them with even more value through your content.

Moreover, if they visit your website often, you’ll have more chances to upsell and keep them as your clients. Your only “costs” are producing high-quality content that keeps them engaged. Here are 4 ways that you can use your blog to reinforce the relationship with your current customers:

1. Provide tutorials
2. Company news, announcements, and achievements
3. Customer success stories
4. Keep customers on your website

Provide Tutorials

One of the best ways to retain your clients is to provide knowledge that can improve their lives and their businesses. You need to provide them with as much knowledge as possible regarding your services. This includes tutorials and guides with useful strategies and tactics.

Your blog can also serve as an excellent place for step-by-step tutorials full of tips.

Company News, Announcements, and Achievements

Your blog is your news hub! WordPress allows you to put together a nice post of images, videos, slide shows, banners that you can include in your copy. A blog post is a great way to share your company news and to voice out your brand to your customer base.

At DevriX, we love to capture our moments and share the success with our current and future clients on our blog.

Customer Success Stories

There are clients that you’ve helped transform the way they work and make profits. Consequently, it’s normal to share their story with the world, and it is especially interesting for the rest of your clients.

The thing is, even if you’re giving 120% for each of your clients, you can’t expect every one of them to advertise to you. This is why it’s important to share customer success stories.

Keep Customers on Your Website

Your blog is the apéritif or your entire dinner menu. And we all know that a good apéritif is a perfect way to spark a conversation. When you create an article that is brimming with value, it builds your credibility as a brand and encourages consumers to want more of you.

This is where you open the door to your other pages. More specifically, to your landing pages and your service pages, where all the service/product packages that you’ve been talking about are. A blog post is an excellent way to take consumers there, free of pressure, and hideous sales pitches.

2. Improve the Design of Your Website

Nowadays, your company cannot survive without a solid digital presence. As part of your customer retention strategy, each of your web components serves a specific purpose. From visuals to UX, everything is vital when it comes to customer experience, and everything can have a major impact on customer retention efforts.

The thing is, you only have seconds to capture and retain the users’ attention. This means that you only have a short amount of time to confirm how amazing you are as a brand! If all the customers see is bad web layout when they open your site, it will be hard to establish your credibility again.

So, what can you do to continuously wow your customer base?

• Have a clean layout that highlights the value of your products/services.
• Incorporate beautiful visuals that will be displayed properly on mobile and desktop devices.
• Pay attention to colors and how each color palette affects consumers.

How to Improve Customer Retention Via Design?

Appearance is not everything when it comes to web experiences. Usability matters too! This is something that you need to consider if you want to keep your clients and offer them something new and exciting from your product palette.

According to HubSpot, 76% of consumers say the most important factor in a website’s design is that “the website makes it easy for me to find what I want.” Considering this, there are a number of things that you need to take into consideration.

Navigation

Navigation is how your customers explore and guide themselves through your website. This is why your web navigation needs to be uncomplicated and easy to use. If a user feels confused, that’s it, the customer journey might end there immediately.

Your navigation must be sleek and straightforward, and users shouldn’t have to worry about whether they’re on the page that they were looking for. It needs to be intuitive and practical for users. This also applies to every action button and navigational menu on your page.

Websites with good navigation make users stick around longer, read content, browse the services/products, and ultimately buy more. When it comes to improving your website navigation, consider the following tips:

• Use breadcrumbs. With breadcrumb navigation, you can display a hierarchical links’ menu at the top of the page that users are on, so they can “track the breadcrumbs” back to where they came from.
• Minimize the main menu. If you’re not Amazon or IBM, you don’t need a plethora of menus and submenus. Having too many choices is what makes people overwhelmed to the point where they’re simply not able to find what they’re looking for easily. Keep the main menu to 5-7 choices or less.

• Display related posts. One of your clients just read your article, now what? This is where displaying related, or the latest posts can be helpful. Most of the WordPress related posts plugins allow you to provide a link in the form of a thumbnail. This makes the related post look more clickable and encourages people to stay and explore more of your articles.

• Check mobile navigation. When on the go, your clients will open your website on their smartphones. So, if your mobile version fails to deliver the right navigation, you’ll lose them faster than you won them. The “hamburger menu” became the industry standard and something that you should consider implementing to make users know where they can navigate further on their mobile device.

• Content arrangement. A website is not a novel. Users scan websites, and at times, they’re even after fragments of information, something that they need at a given moment. Your content headlines, product pages, categories, and every other type of content should be easy to see and effortless for reading. You need to arrange your content in a manner which makes it easier for skimming, but at the same time, to communicate the value that you want to provide.
• Homepage Content Hierarchy. The way you organize your Homepage content directly impacts the conversion rate. A clear hierarchy for your content matters because people skim the content on each page, and they don’t tend to stay more than 10 seconds in the process. An example of a content hierarchy that always works like a charm from Tyche Softwares.
• Readability test. Content readability is vital! If your customers can’t understand what you’re on about, you won’t be able to keep them on your site. If you want to gauge the readability of your content, the following circumstances need to be taken into consideration:
  1. Is the typography easy to read?
  2. Are the colors of the fonts and backgrounds in the right contrast?
  3. Is the text a readable size?
  4. Is the design perfectly aligned with the content?

You need a design that emphasizes your content while making your offer clear.

Provide an Awesome Experience for Mobile Devices

Mobile traffic took over the desktop a long time ago, and this means that if you want to keep your customers, you can’t ignore the mobile experience.

Your prospects want adaptable website elements when they open your website on their smartphones. Luckily, WordPress provides you with a mobile-responsive experience from the moment you start to build your project. This is the norm of the users and the norm for a WordPress page that boosts customer retention.

It is necessary to provide a flawless transition on every screen, whether that’s a laptop, smartphone or tablet.

Bond with Your Customers

Your website is a powerful relationship-building weapon! In addition, it is a showroom for your product, it lets you establish and highlight your credibility as a company. Consumers trust companies that have a professionally-made web experience over businesses with cheap-looking Lego “websites”.

Having a professional web presence is the key to forming a long-lasting connection with your clients. It creates a positive emotion for your company, which makes your clients come back for more.

Always Tell a Story

Storytelling on your website is an excellent strategy to evoke positive emotions. When your users feel delighted about a fellow client, they’re much more likely to stay with you and strengthen the relationship more than ever. Building a story around your company and products is vital if you want to attract new and returning customers to your values as a brand.

3. Highlight the Product/Service Value

Providing a clear and irresistible UVP (Unique Value Proposition) on your website is crucial if you want to convert and retain customers. According to Investopedia, a Unique Value Proposition refers to:

“A business or marketing statement that a company uses to summarize why a consumer should buy a product or use a service. This statement convinces a potential consumer that one particular product or service will add more value or better solve a problem than other similar offerings will. Companies use this statement to target customers who will benefit most from using the company’s products, and this helps maintain an economic moat.”

In essence, a UVP is what makes you the best choice for your customers, and what sets you apart from the competition.

By highlighting the value proposition on your website, you’re telling your customers that you’re still the best choice for them! It’s focused on their pain points and your solutions to their problems.

Is Your UVP Highlighted on Your Website?

What do you think that users first see when they open your website? Typically, this would be the headline and the hero image. When they see this information, users judge what you offer within seconds and decide whether to stick around or not.

For example, let’s say that you’re looking for a productivity tool/app, and you run on Evernote’s page.

Lovely contrast of colors, the headline delivers, there are screenshots that show the UX of the tool is brilliant, and the app is highly rated. Everything looks good, and it invites users to sign up.

Here are the elements that a proper UVP must contain to be effective:

• Accuracy. The customers should always understand what you offer.
• Attractiveness. You need to constantly intensify the customers’ desire for your products.
• Exclusivity. What you have is better and more unique than your competitors’.
• Integrity. You need to prove the claims that you make for your product or service, company or yourself as an entrepreneur and service provider.

Let’s dive a little deeper and analyze the components of the product value that you want to highlight on your site. There are 4 major components that form the presentation of your UVP on your landing page:

• Main headline. The first line that users see and read when they open your homepage. This is where you need to be clear about your product/service benefits.
• Sub headline. Short line that supports the main headline. It can come as an extension of the main headline or as an additional compelling message.
• Experience statement. A message that is usually found halfway on the homepage, and it describes the experience that users will get if they opt for your offer.
• Closing statement. This is where you need to add additional messages to strengthen your UVP.

The Hero Image

Highlighting your product/service benefits is more than a text. You also need to know how to visually represent what’s good about your business. There are two excellent ways to achieve this on your homepage:

• Images. If you have a tech product, a good idea might be a photograph of someone using it.
• Video. You can directly showcase the benefits and the product UX with a video.

The Offer

Your offer should always be described in details, and one of the best ways to outline the benefits of your services are:

• Bulletin list. Your homepage is not an article from your blog, and this is why the shorter the descriptions, the better. An introduction followed by bulletin lists can be enough.
• Extended description. Broaden things a bit, but don’t exaggerate. Don’t provide every single detail, instead, invite your customers to discover more on your website.

Social Proof

Satisfied clients are one of the most convincing arguments for your product benefits and company values. Social proof directly shows how customers use your product/service to improve their lives and solve their problems. If others use your service, new customers will be convinced easier to do so too. Social proof can come in the form of:

• Testimonials
• Social signals
• Customers count
• Trust seals
• Awards and certifications
• Reviews from customers

By better highlighting your core values and the messages that support those values, you affirm your credibility. With that, you’ll keep your existing client base and further boost your customer retention rate as a result.

4. Put Customer Loyalty Packages into Practice

Your clients want to feel appreciated! That’s how they stay your clients in the long run! This is why putting loyalty packages into practice is excellent to show that you appreciate customer loyalty. Genuine customer loyalty programs can help you keep your customers engaged with your brand.

Today, customers are buying products based on something that is much more than a good price. They’re purchasing based on engagement, and the emotional relationship that they share with a business. A loyalty package is a brilliant way to provide even more value to your clients. This makes them feel happy and satisfied, and thus they’ll definitely stick around longer with you.

Bringing a loyalty program/package into practice might sound like a daunting task, but, it doesn’t have to be that way. You need to start from the basics, and those are your most valuable and most loyal customers. By now, as a serious company, you must’ve implemented a CRM program. If not, we got you covered!

We developed DX Sales CRM, a chief CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform that allows small and medium-sized business owners to manage their internal transactions within their WordPress dashboard.

DX Sales CRM provides you with one main location for your contacts and leads. It also lets you know when your last communication with a client was. This plugin can track weekly sales numbers, and you can have an overview of the entire business organization. In short, DX Sales CRM helps you maintain your business better.

Here’s a short video about some of the main features – your first glimpse of the platform and the options:

Open your CRM and see which one of your clients spent the most with you in a given month, quarter, or year, and email them a special offer each month. Test what additional offers will resonate with your top clients. Send them a “Thank You” note and a 10, 20, even 25% discount off your services.

When you test the waters out, you can commit to the development of a proper customer loyalty reward program.

Have an Outstanding Name

The first phase of creating a profitable customer loyalty program is choosing an outstanding name. The name must invite curiosity and interest from customers. An interesting name will make them take part, and it is also needed to differentiate the program from your competitors.
Your customers need to feel pumped that they’re part of the program!

Make It Purposeful

Of course, you want to get and retain as many customers as possible. But, in business, it’s not all about the dollars, your company has some other value as well, and it’s your job to get your customers hyped about them.

Provide an Assortment of Rewards

Offer different rewards to your loyal clients. For example, HubSpot’s customer advocacy program, HubStars, lets customers earn points for different actions every week, like reading and replying to a blog post, or engaging with a video on Facebook.

Gamefy

Everyone fancies a competition of some sort. Your clients are winners, and you need to utilize that feeling to get them interacting with your business more often. You can turn your customer loyalty program into a game in order to earn valuable interactions within your website.

For example, Treehouse, an online coding, and app development learning platform that rewards users with more and more points leading up to a badge which they can display on their website, social profiles, and portfolios to impress colleagues and potential employers.

5. Cultivate and Utilize Your Email List

Email marketing is always an excellent way to achieve better customer retention! You can remind your customers that you’re still there for them. Here are five types of emails you can send to your clients that have the power to boost customer retention.

Welcome Emails

Welcome emails are always the right move after someone signs up for your service. This is a prompt reminder of why they signed up in the first place, and it helps you to make sure that they won’t unsubscribe or mark you as spam. A good welcome email is also excellent if you want to provide an introduction and expand more on your product and its features.

Friendly Reminders

Through reminder email messages, you can ensure that your customers will keep on buying. In B2B, you can use friendly reminders to upsell and cross-sell. For example, if you’re already doing some marketing work for a client, you can send them friendly reminders for your other services, such as design or web development.

Rewards and Premium Offers

Your customers will love a special and exclusive offer that is tailored to them! You can reward their loyalty with an event invitation throughout the year, a holiday, a year-end special offer/reward, or an anniversary.

Feedback Requests

Want to show your clients that their opinion matters? Then ask them for some feedback! This will keep them engaged with your company. In return, you’ll get useful and practical information that can enhance the way you run your business.

E-commerce businesses can do this by sending out product review requests, while service-based businesses can send out a quick survey to get feedback.

Re-Engagement Emails

Of course, there can be some customers that will suddenly stop their interaction with your business. If you use a CRM tool, you can trace their engagement and trigger emails that will be sent when a client hasn’t engaged with your company for some while.

These email tactics above are an excellent way to keep your users in the loop. Focus on what brings more churn in your company, and think about even more ways to boost customer retention through email marketing.

6. Refine Your Mobile Version

Mobile traffic is now bigger than desktop traffic, and that percentage is going to rise further. Your customers are using their smartphones more and more, and they ask from you to make it easy for them to access your website on the move.

Many of the WordPress websites out there are not optimized beyond the responsive theme. Today, having a layout for smaller screens is not enough to engage and convert your mobile visitors. You have to make sure your mobile site is fast, easy to use, and designed specifically for small screens.

According to Google, 61% of users won’t return to a mobile site they had problems with, and 40% would open a competitor’s site. Everyone does competitive research today, and if you’re not able to interact with your clients on smartphones, they might never return again.

To not let that happen, here are some strategies that you can use to enhance the mobile experience of your WordPress site.

Speed Things Up

The first thing that you can do is speed up your site! Faster websites grow conversion rates and decrease bounce rates. On the contrary, slow load time will send your clients to your competitors. Here are several tactics that you can use to speed up your website for mobile.

Reduce Image Size

Big images bring big load times! However, the good thing is that this is an easy fix.

First, analyze your pages and get rid of images that are not necessary. A/B test how your pages convert with and without some of your main images and gauge if you can use fewer images on the particular page.

If the images really have to be there for a better effect, make sure that they’re compressed without losing too much of their quality. You can achieve that with the help of tools such as TinyPNG.

Responsive images are excellent for increasing load times. Fortunately, they are already in WordPress core since version 4.4. If your WordPress version is up-to-date, you don’t have to do anything to optimize the responsiveness of your images.

Plugins and Themes Optimization

Even if everything else on your website is perfectly optimized, badly-coded plugins and themes can cause a serious bottleneck for the performance of your website.

If you assess that this causes the speed problems, update your themes, plugins, and WordPress core. If that doesn’t fix the problem, you need to deactivate each of your plugins on a staging site until you find the corrupt plugin. Your best bet is to have your system build on top of some WordPress default themes, for example, TwentyNineteen.

Another useful move that you can make is to minify and connect the CSS and JS files of your plugins. For the purpose, you can use a plugin such as WP Rocket. If you’re using a hosting environment like Pagely’s that is already heavily optimized, the caching may be already performed for you.

Use an Excellent Hosting Provider

Speaking of Pagely, there’s not a single better hosting solution for your WordPress website out there.

Managed WordPress hosting providers such as Pagely have server infrastructure and caching in place that will skyrocket your website speed. They make use of modern technologies like PHP 7.3, which is several times faster than PHP 5.4, and a CDN (Content Delivery Network) which can speed up your media files load time, and it’s very easy to use.

Dodge the Usual SEO Blunders

First, ensure that you don’t utilize a misconfigured robots.txt file or sitemap, which can prevent Google from having access to your site. Also, examine your site for bad redirects or broken links, specifically the ones that would affect your mobile version. A plugin such as Yoast SEO can help you to enhance your SEO, and detect some errors on the way.

If you’re utilizing a popup plugin or app download interstitial, you need to ensure that they don’t cover the screen on your customers’ smartphones. Instead, use a less interfering banner, or completely disable your pop-ups for mobile.

Make sure that your articles are one-column without any visible sidebar on a smartphone screen. For more recommendations on the perfect responsive site, read this guide from Google.

Wrapping It Up

Bottom line, obtaining brand-new clients for your products is a lot harder than keeping the current ones.

Your customer retention rate is crucial for the success of your enterprise. This is something worth to invest in, rather than waste your resources and worry whether you’ll reach new clients or not.

Take action, and there is a good chance that you’ll discover the right set of tactics will not only boost your customer retention but also, your brand loyalty as well!

Professional marketing advice and support will help you to stay on the top of the competition and ensure the stability of your business. Contact us to learn more.