Your most valuable customers are the ones who keep coming back. How can you keep customers engaged enough to choose you again? How easily can your customers reorder or get practical information and education (guidelines) about products? Do you have dedicated client applications aimed at keeping them updated with useful information such as shipping status and new product updates? Make the following considerations about your B2B customer retention efforts.
Don’t hand customers off to sales and walk away
You’ve put in the work, won some new business and watched that first sale come through. Time to pass everything along to sales and customer service, right? Wrong. Don’t think that marketing’s role is done after the first sale – you’ll be missing out on targeting an already captive audience.
Don’t reduce attention to customers once they’ve purchased
It’s commonplace to think that once you acquire and convert a customer, you can spend less time worrying about them. Don’t let up on the gas just because someone purchased. Not focusing even more attention on your top customers will mean massive missed revenue opportunities.
Do integrate marketing and content with sales to meet customer needs
B2B customer retention starts with seamless data integration. Your email service provider and campaign management platform needs to be integrated with your enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, content management system – the works. If your entire team, including marketing, sales, customer service, and executives can’t see what’s actually happening at every stage of the customer journey, no one is going to know who’s responsible, or where and when value is being driven. Do make sure that marketing and sales stay connected at the hip long after the initial transaction, so they can continue to provide value and imbue trust – ultimately turning your customer into a brand advocate and repeat purchaser.
Do put more effort into current customers than the leads you don’t know or haven’t sold to
The best customer is the one who’s already purchased from you. The old adage, “Spend 80% of your time on the top 20% of your customers,” is true for a reason. The amount of data and experience you have with a current customer is typically much more detailed than with an unknown user. Learn from what worked, cater to the known customer needs, and do everything you can to “land and expand” by building trust, loyalty, and ever-maturing personalized experiences. You’ll gain more revenue and future business focusing on B2B customer retention than you ever will from new leads.
For more do’s and don’ts for interacting with your B2B customers, download our free guide, The Do’s and Don’ts of B2B Customer Engagement.
