Stop Being a Tight A$$ With Your Retention Budget 🤬

As you might know, it is 6-7x more expensive to acquire a new customer compared to retaining an existing customer. So if that's the case, why don't we see more companies allocating a larger portion of their marketing spend on producing "WOW moments" to their existing customer base?

Below, we brainstorm 10 ways that companies could provide surprise & delight moments to their existing customers.

But before we get into things, let's have a laugh!

DAD JOKE OF THE WEEK 😆

I was visiting my son the other night when I asked if I could borrow a newspaper 🗞

“Dad, this is the 21st century,” he said. “I don’t waste my money on newspapers. But if you like, you can borrow my iPad.”

I can tell you this: The spider didn't know what hit him 🕷

Improving Customer Retention: 10 Ways To Surprise & Delight Your Customers 🤩

Let me ask you a question.

How much does your company spend on customer acquisition every year? We bet it's in the millions.

Let me ask you another question.

How much does your company spend on customer retention every year? We bet it's significantly less.

Let me ask you a final question.

What would happen if you re-allocated some of your marketing budget to focus on customer retention activities? In other words, what would happen if you focused on stopping the funnel from leaking instead of trying to continuously re-fill the funnel?

We strongly believe that a lot of companies are too heavily focused on getting customers in the door, but not as focused on keeping them around. Below, we have listed 10 ways that your company could surprise & delight existing customers, ensuring they stay with you for longer, and spend more!

Before we get into our 10 suggestions below, we want to make it extremely clear that surprise & delight offers are usually manual and personal in nature. They should not be "scalable", nor should they apply to all customers. The manual effort involved in a lot of these offers is what makes them so great.

These offers should be personal in nature and should be used sparingly to ensure that the surprise element remains.

If you can get these offers right, trust us when we say that you will only need to provide these offers to <1% of your customer base. The public recognition & referrals that you obtain off the back of the offers will produce ROI in next to no time.

#1 - Wish Them A Happy Birthday 🎉

This is pretty self-explanatory but there's a big difference between doing this the right way VS doing this the generic way. We see no value in sending a mass email out to every customer wishing them a happy birthday. This is what every company currently does and it adds no value to a customer.

Alternatively, we see massive value in having a team who is responsible for calling 5-10 customers a day and giving them a call to wish them a happy birthday. You can use that call to check in on how their experience has been to date with your company and you can weave in a little gift if you feel that it is relevant.

#2 - Send Them An Uber Eats Voucher 🎟

Today, we wrote this email at lunch time. We were working from home and didn't have the time (or energy) to walk down to the local shopping centre to get some food. This is a common problem for 50%+ of the workforce at the moment.

We remember how happy it made us feel when our workplace provided free Uber Eats vouchers through COVID. Why can't your company do the same thing for a few customers each week? It would literally cost $200-$300.

Just imagine the story that your customers could tell to their family & friends and across their social channels. What a great way to create customer loyalty, but to also acquire free user-generated content from an advocating customer!

#3 - Call A Promoter ✅

We often talk about the need to "close the loop" with Detractors i.e. those who are most dissatisfied with your business.

What if you actually started to show some ❤️ to the customers who advocate for your company? Calling 5-10 promoters per week to thank them for their great feedback and their continued support will go a long way.

Happy customers will stick with your company for longer and will generally spend more. It's just as important to nurture those relationships as it is to deal with disgruntled customers. Trust us, it'll pay dividends in the long term.

#4 - Recognise A Milestone 👏

Put your hand up if you've ever spoken to a customer who demands more respect because of the amount of money they've spent with your brand 🙋‍♂️.

What if your company proactively began to recognise key customer milestones, and rewarding these customers for them?

For example, recognising a customer when they spend >$XX with your brand. Or recognising a customer when they have a tenure longer than XX period. The skeptics in the room will claim that their loyalty program recognises exactly this however we would argue that there's a better way to do it.

Sending personalised emails or making phone calls to a subset of your customers to recognise these milestones (and reward them with a small gift) will go a long way to holding onto more customers in the long-term.

#5 - Reward Them For Calling Your Contact Centre 📞

A core focus for 99% of companies right now is call deflection i.e. reducing the amount of customers calling into the contact centre.

Whilst we understand the premise behind this, we want you to think about this situation a little differently. Customers often don't want to call into contact centres but they're generally forced to do so. So how can we make it a pleasant experience for them?

What if you could empower contact centre agents to surprise / delight customers with small tokens of appreciation when they feel it is necessary to do so. For example, provide every contact centre with a budget of $100/month that they can spend on their customers.

In any situation where they feel a customer deserves to be recognised (a long wait time, a crappy situation or maybe because it was an enjoyable conversation), the agent will be empowered to spend some of their monthly budget on this customer.

What a way to make someone's day!

#6 - Recognise Customers You've Annoyed 😡

When was the last time you apologised to a customer for having to wait on hold for more than 3 minutes? Or when was the last time that you produced a targeted email campaign to apologise to customers who have recently had a complaint resolved.

Dissatisfied customers are often left with a sour taste in their mouth even once an interaction has been "resolved".

Without any further intervention, these customers are likely to remember their previous experience and consciously (or sub-consciously) choose to transact elsewhere in the future.

Some form of recognition (either via email or phone) could be the difference between this customer shifting to a competitor, or giving your business another shot.

Where possible, try to recognise sub-par performance and accept responsibility for the situation after the dust has settled.

#7 - Pay For Their Petrol / Groceries 🚗

Cost of living is rising. Things are getting tighter. Imagine if your favourite company sent you an email telling you that you didn't need to worry about the cost of groceries this month. Now that's a WOW moment.

These initiatives will pay themselves off quickly thanks to the virality of social media platforms. Additionally, your company can feel good knowing that it has made someone's life easier. Sometimes it's the small things that have the largest impact.

#8 - Recognise Repeat Purchasers 🔁

Repeat purchasers are the lifeblood of any organisation. They ensure you don't have to spend as much on acquiring new customers and often begin to advocate for your brand to their friends & families.

As such, it's extremely important to recognise repeat buyers and thank them for their contribution. If you're able to see that the Lifetime Value (LTV) of a customer exceeds a certain threshold, there'd be no harm in personally rewarding that customer for their loyalty in the form of an email, call or handwritten letter.

Where possible, try to gamify repeat purchasers. There's no harm in creating a public leaderboard to recognise the most valuable / loyal customers to your brand. It would be a badge of honour that they're proud of, and likely something that other customers would aspire to.

#9 - "Customer Of The Month" Program 🙏

We create employee of the month programs to recognise great employee performance, right?

Why can't we build "customer of the month" programs to recognise superb customer performance?

Superb performance is a criteria that your business will have to define however the premise remains the same - recognising & rewarding customers for the contribution that they have made to your business.

The customer of the month program should be publicly visible and shareable across all relevant social platforms. It should focus on celebrating & appreciating the achievements of individuals who have helped your business get to the point that they're at today.

#10 - Have "Care packages" ready 🌸

There will inevitably be instances where you become aware of a key event in a customer's life. These events may be positive, but they could also be negative;

• Positive: Weddings, Anniversaries, Graduations, Birthdays, Newborn

• Negative: Deaths, Divorce, Surgery, Illness, Job Loss

All of the above events pose a great opportunity to delight your customers and demonstrate how you truly value the relationship that you have with them. In all of the abovementioned circumstances, your company should be prepared to arrange a care package - something that is personal and recognises the respective occasion.

Treat your customers like they're a family member and you will reap the rewards in the long-term.

Graph of the Week 📈

• Chance of acquiring a new customer = 5%

• Chance of turning an existing customer to a repeat purchaser = 60%

Where would you focus your efforts?