Keeping customers for longer is almost always the easiest route to increased profits.

The business case for investing in the retention and growth of existing customers is made based on powerful statistics.

Assuming that you deliver what you promise, your long-term customers will deliver the majority of your income/profit. 

Your retention strategy should focus on three priorities:

1. Taking your recruited customers and move them up the loyalty ladder until their are clients.
2. Then working hard to keep them for as long as possible.
3. While selling them as many products and services as you can during that period.

Most companies are still quite exceptionally bad when it comes to sending regular (added value) service messages to customers.

Creating or expanding a customer/business relationship is about establishing trust, rapport, and value creation without selling.

Engage, add value, solve customers’ problems, create opportunities for them, educate and inform. Once the relationship is established, sales will follow.

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To develop your strategy you will need to do most/all of the following:

1. Segment your customers, and get as much insight on them as possible in order to understand why they are buying from you, and what will keep them buying.
2. Understand what they want.
3. Understand their buying behaviour.
4. Understand their needs and how these may change (and why).
5. Research which positioning and test which proposition works most successfully for which segment, for which buying decision/opportunity, at which time of year.
6. Update your database accordingly.
   
   

Understand what media they trust and respond best to.

1. Incentive your staff to come up with ideas that will make customers happier.
2. Develop an appropriate communication strategy so that you keep in constant touch with each customer, within each segment, (with their permission) so that when they are (individually) ready to buy again, they will choose you.

   Understand what added value should be supplied to which segment in order to grow/maintain the relationship.

3. Understand why previous customers have stopped buying from you.
   
   

See also:

Customer Lifetime Value

A simple customer loyalty strategy.

A more sophisticated Key Customer Management campaign.

How should referral marketing be part of your strategy?

Why do higher retention levels improve profitability?

Brand loyalty.

Tactical loyalty techniques in sales promotion marketing