Customer acquisition and retention: 7 ways to find, delight, and keep your customers
ARTWORK BY Naomi Gennery
Sustaining your business requires you to find and be found by your customers, offer them stellar support, and deliver great value for money. Learn seven best practices to boost business growth.
Customer acquisition and retention are essential to building and scaling your business.
There are seven core ways to find, delight, and keep your customers:
Have a prospecting strategy
Improve your visibility
Build a frictionless buying experience
Encourage repeat purchases
Personalize customer support
Mitigate customer objections to pricing
Grow your customer base through social proof
1. Have a prospecting strategy
Startup profitability hinges on finding and courting ideal customers to induce a sale. Lead generation is a core factor in the growth of your business, and a steady stream of leads assures a full pipeline and rising profits.
The first step to effective lead generation is building an accurate buyer persona to guide your prospecting efforts. A buyer persona may include demographic information, psychographic information, and a list of their Jobs To Be Done (JTBD). These three pieces of the puzzle will provide greater clarity on which leads are worth your time, money, and effort.
The next step is to build a channel strategy for each channel you’ll find new customers in. For example, you may need to invest in social media marketing to find and engage new leads, but Instagram will feature a different strategy from LinkedIn, while social media as a whole will differ from how you will approach your email newsletter strategy. Having a plan for each of your channels lets you align your overall marketing approach accordingly.
For digital channels, using the right tools can speed up this process significantly. For example, an email finder tool like Snov.io or Reply.io can help you find B2B leads who are a close fit for your business, while a tool like Circleboom can help you build targeted lists of potential customers on Twitter based on specific criteria.
2. Improve your visibility
While outbound prospecting involves actively searching for new customers and engaging with them across different channels, there’s merit in improving your visibility and attracting sales through inbound marketing.
There are three main inbound marketing tactics: SEO, content marketing, and ads.
A. Search engine optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) involves improving your website’s visibility through content and technical tweaks. Billions of people search for products, answers to questions, and solutions on the internet every day, and the search terms they use are the key to ranking high enough in search engine results pages to capture their search intent.
The content side of SEO involves using the right keywords in your landing pages and blog posts, adding meta titles and descriptions related to the keywords you want to rank for, and optimizing the size of your images. The technical tweaks involve creating sitemaps, compressing your web files to improve load speed, and improving your URL structure and navigation experience.
B. Content marketing
Content marketing involves creating helpful, relevant, and timely content to attract new users, engage existing ones, and drive more conversions. With customers searching for answers to their problems online every day, websites with better content generally beat those without.
Your content strategy should focus on the customer problems you want to solve, the goals you want to achieve, and the channels you want to execute on.
For example, you might want to help HR teams streamline their hiring processes — so you release an infographic on LinkedIn on how to do it with your product. Or you want to help stay-at-home parents manage their family meals — so you publish healthy recipes to Facebook and Instagram with a link to your store. Ensure any content you create relates to the product or service you’re selling while still providing massive value for your audience.
C. Paid ads
Ads are a great way to place your brand in front of new audiences searching for information related to your product. You can run ads across different channels like print, social, search, TV, radio, and outdoors. Digital advertising channels are the easiest to track thanks to their traceable knowledge of who is consuming what content, where, when, and how. All social media channels and search engines allow you to create and run ads on their platforms on a defined budget and timeline. Many offer robust ad reporting analytics to drive better marketing decisions.
3. Build a frictionless buying experience
The buying experience can make or break a sale. With so many competing products and distractions standing between you and a sale, it’s more important than ever to remove any obstacles that might hinder a purchase. To mitigate interested buyers choosing another product or service, pay attention to three critical aspects of the buying experience:
Product information
Payments
Delivery
A. Information
Customers need information to make purchase decisions related to your product, benefits the product provides, and pricing. Businesses that fail to provide these critical pieces of information (or sufficient detail about them) stand to lose a sale to a better-highlighted product. An easy way to avoid this is to build individually robust pages for your businesses with SEO titles and relevant keywords for each product range or category. You should also include pricing information so that customers can decide if it falls within their budget, which has the added benefit of reducing the number of poor-fit leads you need to pursue.
B. Payments
When a customer is ready to buy, payment needs to be as smooth and seamless and possible. Remove all unnecessary distractions from the checkout page, incorporate one-click checkout where possible, and encourage — but don’t enforce — account registration. At such a critical moment, reduce the time and effort a customer takes to finalize their purchase.
Offer multiple payment options to account for different customer needs, locations, and concerns. For example, customers may not feel comfortable handing out their credit card information, but paying via PayPal may appeal more to them. A trusted third-party payment processor like Stripe may allay these fears more than your custom-built checkout process. Lastly, one payment method may be active in one country but not in another, so offering multiple ways to pay increases your sales revenue.
C. Delivery
If you sell digital products, delivery is relatively straightforward: you can deliver the product via email or a third-party dashboard or platform (including yours). If you sell physical products, you can offer to ship directly to your customers or make purchases available for in-store pickup. The latter method may require you to set up multiple shipping options to account for distance, delivery times, and pricing. The more convenience you can offer your customers when it comes to how they receive their purchase, the more likely they will buy and keep buying from you.
4. Encourage repeat purchases
Customer retention lowers your long-term marketing costs and boosts profits over time. Two ways to increase customer lifetime value are through discounts or a customer loyalty program. With discounts, you lower the price of a product in exchange for a higher item count or longer transaction term. Offering 20% off of an annual subscription is a classic example of a discount, as is offering a 2-for-1 deal for groceries. However, use discounts sparingly as they can backfire and train your customers to only buy from you when there’s a sale.
Reward programs encourage loyal customers to buy more and more through points and perks. For example, a fashion retailer might offer points for each item sold. After reaching a certain threshold, an existing customer might be able to redeem those points for freebies or money off their next purchase. An incentive program that rewards customers for continuing to patronize your business creates a buying loop that benefits the company's bottom line and strengthens brand loyalty.
Some best practices for reward programs include:
Gamifying the experience: For example, you might offer a reward after the first purchase and a slightly larger reward after the fifth one.
Offering multiple ways to earn points: You might offer points for in-store purchases, buying online, or referring a friend.
Creating urgency: Use phrases like “Redeem in 30 days” to spur faster repeat purchases.
5. Personalize customer support interactions
Customer experience is an important indicator of a company's success. Happy customers are more likely to refer their friends and colleagues, give positive online reviews, and renew their purchases. Conversely, shoddy service harms customer loyalty and leads to negative reviews (which spread faster) and churn.
You can offer customer support before and after the sale. Before the sale, customers may want to find out pertinent info about your product and how it can help them, so be sure to answer any questions they may have. After the sale, customers may need help implementing your solution or dealing with snags that come up. The quality of your after-sales process will determine whether customers continue paying for your product.
You can offer customer support through email, phone, and live web chat. The more of these channels you offer, the easier it is for customers to reach you with queries. You can also offer customer support according to different customer tiers, such as 24/7 phone support for enterprise customers and limiting entry-level customers to email support.
Some best practices for customer support include:
Avoid repetition: Customers dislike repeating their problems to each new rep on your customer support team. Avoid this by training your reps to refer to previous contact notes and conversations when handling support calls.
Use real names and faces: In the case of online support, use the real names and faces of your customer support staff to humanize the process and make your team more approachable.
Inject emotion into your messaging: Show empathy through phrases such as "We’re not happy with this outcome, and we’ll do everything to solve this problem for you.”
6. Mitigate customer objections to pricing
There are three key moments where customers balk at buying your product or service.
Before the sale
Sticker shock is when a customer learns that the price of your product is much higher than they expected. You can mitigate sticker shock by front-loading your landing pages with information about the value of your product and including customer testimonials before showing the price.
After the sale
The second moment customers balk at pricing is when it’s time to renew. If you’re delivering great value for their money, this shouldn’t be a problem — but low-usage customers might churn when reminded about an upcoming renewal or after they see a credit card deduction. The best way to mitigate this is to track product usage through an open-source product analytics tool like PostHog and look for customers who might need reminders or extra training to get value from your product. You can also offer a discount in advance of a long-term renewal to encourage continued use of your product. The ideal solution, of course, is to build a product experience so great that the customer is happy to renew without a second thought.
During use
The third moment customers may reconsider their patronage is when you raise your price. Price increases can cause a squeeze on customer budgets, so mitigate this by honoring older subscription plans for loyal customers or offering a transition period at a lower, locked-in rate before switching everyone over to the new price.
7. Grow your customer base through social proof
Before customers buy, they need to be convinced they’ll benefit from doing so. Social proof is a strong proxy for this: your social following and reputation give a sense of how much other customers trust you. Growing your audience on LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram can give your business credibility across the board and encourage customers to buy. You can also leverage your followers to attract new customers by offering referral bonuses. Lastly, work on your reviews on sites like Capterra, G2, Yelp, ProductHunt, and other product rating platforms.
Customer acquisition and retention is a long game
Your success as an entrepreneur depends on whether you can successfully build and scale your business. Your customer acquisition and retention strategy play a big role in that — and following the above best practices will ensure you can attract, delight, and retain more customers for your brand.
Ready to learn advanced client retention techniques? Join our marketing sprints today to learn how to acquire the right leads for your business — and get access to a helpful Slack community of other founders just like you!
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