We know using the word ultimate can sound like hyperbole, but our goal here is to share a massive list of ideas so it may inspire you to get excited about growing your small business through marketing. 

We’ve broken up the list into sections based on how much control you have and how much they might cost you: Owned, Earned, and Paid.

Here are a few highlights from each of the posts in this series that we think work well for customer retention marketing.

Owned Marketing Tactics for Customer Retention

Email Marketing: In addition to emails about orders and event registrations, you should also send regular business updates through a newsletter, celebrate birthdays and holidays to build a deeper connection with your subscribers, and send abandoned cart reminders for folks who put something in their cart but didn’t finish the purchase. You could also do reorder reminders if someone purchased a consumable item that they could replenish a couple months later. Emails like this can encourage them to come back to engage with your business, increasing customer lifetime value. If you want easy templates that are automatically added to your Mailchimp account, we have lots of these in our store.

Content Marketing: Content is more than just a blog or editorial calendar for your social media channels. Consider if some sort of calculator, tester, analyzer or other interactive tool might be helpful for your customers. Primary research through polls or surveys may also be cool to share, or even secondary research or syndication of other great content you love. Much of your content could be upselling or expanding how your customers interact with you. If you need additional ideas, we offer more than 50 in a guide in our store.

Loyalty Program: Sandwich cards, battle passes, merch perks, however you celebrate your best customers, make sure it’s an awesome experience for them so they want to hit the next milestone with you and so that others want to get in on the goodness.

Earned Marketing Tactics for Customer Retention

Testimonials and Referrals: You should ask your customer for reviews on relevant sites like Google, Board Game Geek, Untappd, ClassPass, Net Promoter Score and so much more. And also on social media. Inviting customers to share user-generated content is incredibly powerful. Just be sure to ask for permission before using their words on your website or resharing their content on social media. You can also invite them to bring a friend next time as a thank you.

Social Media: Obvious, right? But we wanted to take a moment to clarify that you don’t need to be everywhere. Choose a couple platforms that you can do really well, building an engaged community every day, then stick to that. Posting once a month on all social media isn’t going to get you anywhere fast. Instead, build profiles on each platform but then in a pinned post, you can direct folks to the platform(s) you use most often so they can join in on the fun. Maybe you are only on Instagram and Twitch live-streaming your events. That’s a great start!

Paid Marketing Tactics for Customer Retention

Sponsorships: Demonstrate your values as a company by sponsoring or endorsing a cause or community organization. Partnerships like these can show your customers who you really are and what you care about. 

Digital Advertising: Sometimes called pay-per-click, you can set lots of parameters for who sees your ads based on almost anything: location, interests, search history, etc. You can also build social media advertising campaigns that reach thousands of eyeballs in order to grow your accounts, but retarget folks who recently visited your store or website, and get customers to follow you so they remember to visit again soon.

You can check out the rest of the series on our blog: Easy Owned Marketing, Cheap Earned Marketing, Quick Paid Marketing.

Interested in having us do some of this work for you? We’d love to put together a proposal that fits what you need to grow.