How do I retain customers?

Grant Leboff: One of the important aspects of marketing for any business is to retain the customers they have. From a marketing perspective - obviously there's operational things that a company must do - but from a marketing perspective, what do you think drives retention?

Simon Hall: Not ignoring them? I know that sounds like a very obvious thing. A customer I was talking to you last year... we basically talked about what were the ways they were communicating with their existing customers and they said the only way they ever talked to the customers, or when, is when they raised prices. It was a B2B company and we actually said, well then why do you think our relationship with our customers isn't as good as where it needs to be and they  worked it out that they needed to think about the way they communicated and what they communicated. So yeah, not ignoring them but also talking to them in a positive way and updating them on what they need to know.

Grant Leboff: And how does a business start to drive that program? Because in some ways,, oh, I know what I want to tell prospects give them the benefits, tell them the solutions we've got... but when you've got a customer already using our products, already using our services - obviously changes like pricing or changes in offerings or whatever, that's obvious, I can communicate that - but how do you put some sort of program together where you're communicating and it's meaningful for your customers, when they're already using you?

Simon Hall: You get one extreme where some companies really over communicate and we  all know examples of those. Then on the flip side, I think it's really just basically reaching out to them, whether it's through account managers or directly, understanding what are the types of things they want to hear. Certainly to avoid things like suppression requests of emails and these sort of things, but also at the same time really tap into what they're looking for when they're getting updates.

Grant Leboff: And how would you measure that? Because again, if you're marketing to acquire new customers, the ultimate measurement - isn't it - is how many customers have we acquired in the last quarter, half year, whatever. But if you're retaining,  if you don't have a high attrition anyway, how do you start to measure whether our attention communication is delivering for us.

Simon Hall: You could do it different ways. One way is just looking at how they engage on emails, their open rate and click through rates. Another way is actually give them a different area of the website that's accessible for retention customers, which is one thing that a lot of companies fail to do, is dividing up the website into; for new customers and retention customers. Or just giving them an extra portal that they can go in and find different information, which would be different to acquisition customers.