15 Resources for DIY Retention Strategy
If someone came to you and said they could increase your profits between 25 and 95 percent, you would probably ask, “Where do I sign up?” That kind of growth is what an increase in customer retention by only 5% can achieve. This information comes from a landmark study by Bain & Company’s Frederick Reicheld, who is most well known for inventing the Net Promoter Score. Reicheld believed that there was real value in focusing on customer retention, rather than always trying to acquire new customers, and when you stop to think about it, the reasons are pretty obvious:
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- Retaining customers can be much cheaper than acquiring new ones
- Existing customers are more likely to buy from you again because they’re already familiar with and have an affinity for your brand
- Current customers make the best marketers if you keep them happy!
What Does A DIY Retention Strategy Even Look Like?
To get started, let’s set a baseline for what the word retention strategy fully means. Retention strategy refers to all of the things you do in your business to create happy, loyal customers. This means the customer service you provide, being open when you say you are open, keeping a supply of products that satisfy your customers, etc. If you’re always out of stock, or you have rude cashiers, or you’re closed when Google says you’re open, no amount of marketing effort can overcome that, so it’s important to set that foundation first.
Once you have your foundation established, you can layer on some retention marketing efforts to enhance the good business practices you’re already doing. That’s where the below suggested resources come in.
There are some core marketing tactics that we recommend to promote loyalty and repeat business. They start with the moment someone becomes a first-time customer, and can last indefinitely, with the goal of converting them into raving fans and loyal brand ambassadors that can act as a megaphone for your business.
Below, we’ve listed some of our favorite tools and resources for social media, email marketing, blogging, etc. Use them to start to build your DIY retention strategy for your business.
Social Media Resources
Social Media Today is a leading publication following the social media industry with analysis of trends, up-to-date news about each major social media platform, and tips for how businesses can use each platform to reach and engage with their customers. Check it out for articles like “Meta Adds Lead Generation Tools on Facebook” and “How Real Customer Reviews Can Influence the Purchase Process.”
Hootsuite is one of the most popular tools on the market for social media management. Users can create, schedule, and respond to posts all within Hootsuite’s dashboard on all of their social media platforms at once. Their blog is just as powerful as their app. If you subscribe to their newsletter, you’ll receive advice for social media success straight to your inbox. We love their strategy section of their blog that includes articles like “7 Tips to Create an Efficient Social Media Workflow” and “How Often to Post on Social Media in 2023.”
Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri
Adam regularly posts on his Instagram account updates that are coming to the platform and implications of those changes. If you want the most up-to-date information, this is where you’ll find it. However, he’s not always super forthcoming and there is still some inferring you’ll need to do to understand how it might affect your own business. Check out this video about editing Stories after you’ve already posted it.
Email Marketing Resources
If you’ve googled ANYTHING about marketing for your business, it’s likely you’re already familiar with Mailchimp. It’s one of the most popular softwares for businesses to build a contact list and send beautifully designed emails with tons of free templates already built in – no template coding experience required.
It’s free to use with 1 Audience up to 500 contacts, which is plenty of room for you to get started communicating with your customers. On the free tier, you can also create a sign up page, as well as 1-step automations, which are handy for things like “thank you for signing up” emails or lead magnet emails.
We understand that Mailchimp can be a little overwhelming to some, because of its robust offerings that you may not need right away when you’re first getting into email marketing. Constant Contact is a Mailchimp competitor, and it has a free 60-day trial that will allow you to play around, feel it out, and see if you prefer it as your main email marketing software. Many other businesses prefer it due to its slightly more stripped down offerings that makes building a contact list and sending emails pretty straight forward.
We love looking for inspiration but email marketing is a little hard unless you subscribe to a million companies and who has time to sift through all that. Luckily Really Good Emails curates the best ones for us. They even categorize them by type and purpose. We love the Customer Appreciation and Loyalty categories when we’re considering ways to use email marketing for customer retention.
Blogging
How to know what to write about – Quora
We get that one of the biggest obstacles to blogging besides an aversion to writing is knowing what the heck to write about. Our best suggestion to solve that problem is to visit the places on the internet where people hang out to ask questions and gather information. A great example of this is Reddit, but Reddit can be intimidating with its special vernacular and rules and etiquette. So, a great alternative that we recommend is Quora.
Quora is a question and answer style forum website, filled with tons of different topics that people are curious about. A great way to learn what to write about for your business blog is to sign up for a free Quora account and search for terms related to your business. Are people talking about it? And if so, what questions do they have that you could provide answers to? Write blog posts about that and better yet, link to those blog posts in Quora to help drive traffic to them.
Simple SEO Analysis – ahrefs Free Website Tools
Ahrefs is a popular suite of SEO tools for website owners that gives a limited number of its capabilities away for free. You can get a limited number of keyword ideas, see if your keywords could possibly rank in the top 10, read what the top 10 articles already are on the internet for your keyword, check for broken links and your website’s authority, and sign up for Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT), which is their competing version to Google Search Console (also free, but a little more robust and complicated), which will perform an SEO audit on your website.
Google Analytics is one of the best ways you can analyze what your current customers want from you. It can take a little bit of time to learn how to read the data and turn it into actionable insights, but you can explore things like which blog posts encouraged folks to eventually end up on the sales page, or which ones made them leave your site. Then you can create more blog posts like the successful content.
Design
Canva is one of the biggest things to come out of the internet in the last 10 years in terms of democratizing a specialized skill for the masses. Created in Perth, Australia, Canva is a free-for-individuals web-based design studio that allows you to very quickly design flyers, graphics, and many other types of content. You can pick from their huge library of pre-designed templates, or quickly drag and drop to create your own template using their built-in tools. Depending on what content type you select, it should be sized already to exact what you need, and you have options for downloading your designs and printing them.
Whether you pronounce it GIF or JIF, you likely have sent or received hundreds of these little moving pictures over the years. Gifs are a fun way to add personality to your website, social media, and emails, and you can use the Giphy Gifmaker to make GIFS out of video files and even from existing Youtube or Vimeo videos.
One of our favorite places to get excellent and free stock photography to use in our designs is Pexels. Like with most things, you’ll need to be super specific with your search keywords but there are some hidden gems in there.
Miscellaneous
Courier – General New Business Help
Courier is an online and in-print business magazine dedicated to helping people with a passion for owning their own business succeed. Currently owned by Mailchimp (see above), you can sign up for their newsletter, or visit them online to view industry deep-dives, case studies, trend analysis, and tip articles like “How to Make Sure Your Invoices are Paid On Time” and “When to Extend Your Product or Service.”
If you have a Google account for your business emails, then you already have access to Google Forms. Just visit the grid symbol of 9 dots in the top-right corner of your Google account to access it. You can create simple surveys with Forms to solicit feedback from your customers. All survey answers populate into Google Sheets and they even provide simple visualizations like pie charts so you can quickly analyze your data.
You didn’t think we were going to get all the way through a list of resources and not mention our own stuff, did ya? Of course, our blog has lots of free tips and ideas and we also send out a weekly email newsletter and post some great stuff on Instagram as well.