Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer. Getting new customers is very important. But getting 50,000 new customers and losing 45,000 is not a sustainable business. Retaining users on a monthly membership is about the value that you provide, delivering the value, and how your value improves the lives of your customers and builds their community.
Building value is usually straightforward and simple for entrepreneurs, but what most of them overlook is the delivery of value and how customers use and benefit from it. Understanding your product and its positive impact might be unclear to the customers and requires a more straightforward explanation because what you offer has no value, until customers understand how they can benefit from it. Membership is not just about what you offer; membership is about the experience. Think about Harley Davidson. While it is more expensive than its competitors, Harley Davidson represents more than 50% of the market share of bicycles. It is not because Harley's bikes are the fastest or most feasible, but because of the feeling riders feel when they're riding a Harley instead of any other competitor.
From your first encounter with your customer through a thank-you email for subscribing to the service, be sure to maximize the positive emotional impact on your new customer. You will only be able to gain loyalty from your customers if you made them the center of every sentence and paragraph. Do not write about yourself and what you offer. Instead, write about your customer and how your product will solve a problem for them. There is a marketing rule called "What's In It For Me"? What will I gain? This rule helps the entrepreneur to think about the customer's logic and focus on the benefit the product offers instead of the feature. For example, instead of saying "these Ethiopian beans are harvested from wild coffee trees in the heart of coffee's historic birthplace", you can say "Coffee that provides you with energy to nail your day!" Experiment and switch up the benefits to choose the most successful and impactful one. You can also use A/B testing to compare any email campaign or marketing content that has the highest customer lifetime value effect (CLV)
How can you tell if you are successful at retaining customers? The key to retaining customers is when customers miss your presence. For example, if your customers get used to receiving weekly emails from you, and the emails suddenly stop. You will receive messages asking about the service and why it ended.
Retaining customer strategies are endless, but the core is achieving excellent service and communication with your customers about your value, the delivery of your value, and how your value will benefit the customer.