Customer Retention is the Key to Small Business Growth
When you’re a small business, the tendency is to cast your net far and wide to find hoards of new customers. You. want. volume. Right?
But customer acquisition isn’t actually the fastest track to growth for your business. Retaining the customers you already have and turning new customers into loyal fans is the strategy that will take your business to the next level.
Nearly 80% of companies spend less than 30% of their time and budget on customer retention-focused messaging and content. – Accenture Strategy
It costs 5x more to attract a new customer than it does to retain an existing customer. – Thanx
With statistics like these, it’s amazing that more brands aren’t spending the majority of their time and effort on customer retention. When trust in your company grows, so does loyalty. And when loyalty grows, so does revenue. Across our clients, we find that customers who participate in our loyalty program spend 151% more annually than customers who don’t participate.
How Can Loyalty Programs Help Grow Your Business?
In order to keep your customers, you must reward them – either with money, personalization or perceived value.
Basic Loyalty Programs will give your customers points for every purchase. Once those points add up to a certain magic number, your customer will be rewarded with a $ off certificate.
Don’t worry – this reward isn’t meant to reduce your margins by giving a further discount on your products. In fact, we’ve found that the opposite happens. When looking at our client data, we see that customers who redeem a reward are spending up to 60% more than they would have without the reward. More rewards = more $$ for your business.
Standard Loyalty Programs will assign points and issue rewards but also allow you to reach out to the Rewards Program customers via email or SMS. These messages are typically created by the Franchisee and include information about sales, special offers and incentives that prompt them to return to your store.
Industry-leading Loyalty Programs, like our Driive Loyalty Marketing Solution, take customer retention one step further.
Driive Loyalty integrates directly with your POS and using transaction data to drive customers back to your store. Your customers receive triggered email or SMS messages with personalized, relevant information, offers and upsells – automatically. These messages are constantly shaping the behavior of your customers, putting them in the “Visits Regularly” bucket without any extra time or effort from you! Our system works quietly in the background to follow up individually with each of your customers while you take care of running your business.
Let’s Talk Results.
The results that Franchisees are seeing from robust loyalty programs, like Driive, are real. We analyzed millions of transaction records and found that our clients are enjoying:
- Up to 23.6% increase in top line revenue, annually
- Up to 218% ROI on our Driive Marketing Solution
See for yourself how a robust loyalty program will work to grow your small business!
Do you have any tips and tricks that have helped grow your business? Share them in the comments!
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