How Great Content Can Improve Customer Retention

HOW GREAT CONTENT CAN IMPROVE CUSTOMER RETENTION

How can all your created content serve the goal of retaining customers? That’s an important question because your current customers are valuable; they are the ones who have already bought into your product or service.

And consider the potential impact the customers you keep will make on your bottom line:

• 80% of your future profits will come from 20% of your existing customers.

• Repeat customers spend 33% more than new customers.

Given this kind of data, it would be a miscalculation to spend all your company’s strategic content efforts on getting and selling new customers—as important as they are! Using your created content to also keep your current customers happy and on board is a tactical must.

Retain customers with customer-serving content.

Creating content that is intentionally focused on serving your customers makes a lot of sense from a customer retention perspective. Research in this area finds that a “commitment to customer experience results in up to 25% more customer retention and revenue than sales or marketing initiatives.”

Actively working to retain customers through consistent customer-serving content requires a comprehensive plan.

Some vital elements to incorporate into a plan that builds your long-term relationship with each customer are:

Your website.

Most of today’s customers meet you first when they land on your website’s homepage. Besides playing the critical role in gaining customers, your website also plays an important part in keeping them. When your customers come to your site for a quick answer, do they find it easy to navigate? Intuitive? Visually engaging? Does it project empathy with customer challenges and an eagerness to help?

New customer greetings.

The time to start retaining customers is the moment they become customers!

Make your welcoming emails warm, enjoyable, and even entertaining where appropriate.

Show that you want each customer’s experience with your product or service to be everything they hoped for and more.

This is a good place for a coupon or other special offers, sign-ups for your newsletter and emails, and links to your Help Center, FAQ, and contact info.

Help center with FAQ and contact info.

If your customers can quickly find answers about a product or service in your website’s help center, they will be happier customers. And if their specific question isn’t addressed there, they will be pleased you have provided a quick way to speak to a helpful human being, either by phone, chat, or a well-monitored email address.

Emails.

The ones you send to your customers on a regular basis should be personalized and designed to create dialogue. “No reply” emails are frustrating; instead, let your customers ask questions and make comments about the thought-provoking information you send them. And always respond to them, showing that you are listening and concerned with both positive and negative comments.

Newsletters.

A periodic newsletter—either digital or print—is a good way to stay on each client’s radar. Yours is not just another company among competitors for their business. Instead, through a newsletter, you can show authority in your field—and who doesn’t want to stay with a company that knows its stuff? A newsletter can alert customers to trends and help them stay abreast of developments on the horizon. It can share other clients’ experiences, and, above all, let each customer know how much you appreciate their business.

Blogs.

Use blogs to build a friendship with each client. Retention—endurance over time— happens in this relationship much as it does in other relationships you want to keep—through conversation.

A blog is your personal conversation with your client. Which questions can you anticipate and answer via your blog? Which of your new products or services might be just what they need right now?

Have other clients shared successful outcomes that you can pass on?

Customer engagement surveys.

There are times when you really want or need to know what your customers are thinking. And who doesn’t like to be asked politely for their opinions? Customer surveys—usually via email—serve a dual purpose: They help you gather information on customer preferences while also showing that you care enough to ask. Customers who know you care about their priorities make good prospects for long-haul (retained) customers.

Follow-ups.

Whether a customer is new or established, effective follow-up communications are customer-retention tools you can’t do without. In its most basic form, a follow-up is a personal “thank you for your business.” Follow-ups can also provide links to tutorials and online manuals, helpful blogs, email and newsletter sign-ups, coupons, rewards, and special offers. Let your customers know they are appreciated, and that you are ready to help with any questions that arise.

This is a continuous process. As Colin Boylan of the customer engagement platform Intercom notes: “Support isn’t just about resolving a customer’s first question and moving on…You need to make sure the customer is happy with the resolution, so consistent, thoughtful follow-ups are key…they have a profound impact on the customer experience.”

Hire a writing agency for unlimited content creation.

Creating a customer retention plan and the volume of consistent, quality content that ensures your clients are well-served takes time. It also takes skill—in big-picture strategy, in research, in writing for your brand, and more. And it requires qualified people to do the work of continually creating each form of content.

If all of that seems like a big “ask,” that’s because it is. Especially when you are asking otherwise-occupied employees to shoulder these tasks.

Enter a qualified writing agency to take on all your content creation/customer retention initiatives. A seasoned agency has the necessary scope of expertise across industries and types of content to do the job. Its staff knows how to work tactfully and efficiently with your staff to develop and execute a content-centered customer retention plan.

Hire a writing agency to create the following:

1) A Content-focused Customer Retention Plan

A talented writing agency is practiced in creating each type of content you need to make outstanding customer service and customer retention a top priority.

Its writers and editors also have the skills to create a big-picture plan that encompasses all your customer-keeping content. Having an overall, cohesive customer retention plan in place ensures no element is left out or done randomly, and that the elements work together in harmony.

2) Website Content

When you hire a writing agency, there are no limits to the professional-caliber, customer-friendly content its staff will produce for your website.

Attractive, detailed product and services pages are vital to your sales and your distinctive brand—and, ultimately, to customer retention. A diverse agency’s staff has the know-how to create those pages, whatever your industry. Consulting with your sales and marketing teams, they’ll bring your offerings to life in each category, with engaging images and professional-quality copy.

Creating your help center and FAQ is no problem for an adept writing agency, either. Its writers and editors are expert organizers of information. They will efficiently research and compile your help procedures and contacts and frequent customer questions and answers, verifying each with your department heads and experts before the pages go live.

Your blog pages—your frequent online conversations with your clients—need to be compelling, be easy to scan, and bring value. Savvy agency writers understand that you only have a few moments to capture customers’ attention before they move on. The agency’s team writes the headlines, subheads, bullets, and more that serve as magnets to your blog’s content.

If information-gathering interviews are needed, agency writers will make efficient use of your experts’ time.

Your site’s online manuals and handbooks should be easy to find, complete, read, and use. A smart agency knows how to achieve all of that, no matter the high- or low-tech nature of the material covered. As objective writers and editors, agency staff can help ensure that your manuals and handbooks are written in language that truly serves your readers, rather than soaring over their heads.

3) Other Customer-reaching Content

Customer greetings, follow-ups, and customer engagement surveys are all designed to show your clients that you appreciate them and don’t take them for granted.

To accomplish its mission, this content needs to be done consistently. (Periodically, in the case of surveys.)

Hire a seasoned writing agency to help create a calendar for this content, and then to deliver each piece on time, every time.

An experienced writing agency coordinates with your marketing or other departments to garner ideas for topics and survey questions.

Customer appreciation newsletters and emails. A competent writing agency’s staff includes journalists as well as writers from the corporate world. It can provide a team to write compelling copy on the industry-related topics and people you want to feature, at the level of your typical reader’s knowledge of the industry.

Take the intensive work involved in producing frequent, eye-catching, enlightening newsletters and emails off your own full plate. Hire a writing agency to provide professionally written content for these important pieces of your customer retention plan.