Digital Marketing For Retention: Best Strategies for Growing Your Existing Customers

User acquisition often feels much more exciting than retention does. It’s much easier to track. Plus, you’re expanding the company by bringing in brand-new customers. What could be more important than that?The fact is that the cost to acquire new customers continues to rise, especially in our hyper-competitive digital world. Scratching and clawing the competition for each new customer is important, but time and cost-consuming. Many companies are starting to find that their greatest opportunity for growth lays not in user acquisition, but in retention and relationship management.Here are four important strategies that will help your digital customer retention:

1. Email Campaigns

Email is perhaps one of the strongest CRM tools available. You’ll have a veritable bounty of data available about your existing customers - registration date, source, purchases made, interests based on purchases and history, etc. Use this data to create very specific customer segments and personalized email campaigns. In these emails, give increasingly valuable and intriguing content, focused on what you know your customer cares about. The best way to organize these campaigns is by starting with an end-goal in mind and carefully steering customer segments toward the finish line.

2. Social Media

Social media platforms are a great way to engage with your audience lightly over and over again. The key is getting them to connect with you. Make it a focus to drive existing customers to follow you on Twitter, like you on Facebook, etc. One good way to do this is by offering promotions or content only available on social media and purposefully educating customers about those offers and driving them there.Once you have their attention, it’s important to keep it. Make sure to occasionally send additional offers and valuable pieces of content via social in addition to lighter engagement messages. Track how many likes, shares, and comments you receive and use that information to understand what type of content is resonating.

3. Facebook Retargeting

Facebook is a powerful platform to advertise directly to your existing audience even if they haven’t given you a like or a follow. Simply place Facebook pixels on your website and you’ll be able to track people who have visited specific pages and deliver them a personalized ad. Not only does this help you remarket to people who have visited your website once and navigated away, it also allows you to advertise to your existing customers. If you have a mobile app you can offer even more powerful ads, such as delivering a promotion on a product you know somebody has already purchased once in the past.

4. Communication Calendar

The only way to ensure that you don’t lose touch with your customers is by physically planning out how often you’re going to reach out to them and sticking to it. Develop a sequence of touches via a variety of different communication channels - emails, push notifications, physical mailers, phone calls, etc. Use whatever you have. Reach out to them at specific times like two weeks after a purchase with some helpful intermediate usage tips or at the point when you know most customers tend to drop-off completely. This automates both your physical and your digital customer retention strategies and keeps your relationship strong at all points of the process.Are you eager to make content a key part of your digital customer retention strategy? Click here to learn about 5 Ways to Make Your Content Shine.