If you need proof that a customer retention strategy should be a critical part of any business, consider the following statistic: it costs as much as five times as much money to attract a new customer than it does to keep an existing one. When it comes to a task as important as this one, there’s a reason why many marketers said that direct mail is still one of the most commonly used customer acquisition channels – it’s a precise, emotional and effective way to continue to manage those essential relationships at exactly the right moment.
Customer Retention Is About Relationship Management
One of the most important things to understand about your customer retention strategy is that you need to make sure that you’re building your larger direct mail marketing campaign from the right perspective. First, it’s not about keeping just any customers but the right customers. Take a look at your customers and separate them into segments that can help you identify certain trends or other patterns. Are you losing a particularly high number of people in one segment? How are your customers with high lifetime value doing?
Separating things into these demographics won’t just help give you more actionable information that you can use to form a more specific direct mail marketing strategy, but it can also help you quickly see which types of customers you have to worry about and which ones you don’t.
Next, you need to see customer turnover for what it really is – an indicator that you might be doing something wrong. You really need to think long and hard about what you as a company might be doing to contribute to customer turnover in the first place. Then, craft your direct mail postcards and other collateral with language that indicates you’ve acknowledged any problems and have taken steps to correct them.
Customer turnover is nothing new – and it isn’t even really a bad thing, provided the levels don’t get too high. There will always be an acceptable amount of customers that you’ll lose to one-off purchases that is just a simple fact of doing business. So while turnover isn’t necessarily an indicator that you’re doing something wrong, it’s still something you need to at least consider to preserve those high value relationships you’re going to need as time goes on.
If you’d like to find out more information about how even something as seemingly simple as a plastic postcard mailer can make a big impact on your customer retention efforts, or if you’d just like to learn more about why direct marketing lists are so critical to your success, don’t delay – contact us today.
