Customer acquisition is complicated, and customer retention is more challenging. Well, we said it! A customer often signs up or buys a product based on the hype of your brand. The influencing factors include your paid marketing tactics, the customer's needs, or peer pressure. But what makes the customer repurchase the product is based on customer experience and quality.
But at the same time, retaining a customer and selling them your products is much more cost-effective than acquiring a new one. It costs 5 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain one!
Customer acquisition vs. retention – where should you put your focus
Customer acquisition is acquiring new customers for your brand/business, while customer retention is all about retaining the existing ones.
While all this is related to dealing with the customers, the departments involved in customer retention and acquisition vary.
Teams involved in Customer Acquisition
For customer acquisition, the marketing and sales team puts in the effort. The marketing team markets the products and brings in new leads. These leads are then converted to paying customers by the sales team.
Teams involved in customer retention
As far as customer retention is concerned, customer success, support, and service teams are involved. The customer success team ensures that the consumer gets the product's full benefits and has a satisfactory experience with the product. The customer support team helps the customers in the eve of any clarifications or doubts they have regarding the product.
The customer support executives act as touchpoints for customers to get in touch with your brand. Finally, the customer service teams address any faults/complaints regarding the product. They are responsible for being the touchpoint to address any return complaints or mend the product when a fault occurs.
At times, your marketing team has to make an effort to ensure you retain your customers. It could be by keeping in touch with them through personalized emails, getting them early access to your big sales/offers, or offering them news on new releases.
Both customer acquisition and customer retention are essential for a successful business. Therefore, you need not ponder over the customer acquisition vs. retention debate. It should be customer acquisition and customer retention.
How to improve your customer acquisition
To improve your customer acquisition, you need to improve your visibility. Your online visibility or offline brand awareness could be if you have a physical store.
ECommerce businesses' website is the primary touchpoint wherein customers learn about new products and conduct basic consumer research. Therefore, your website should be up to date. Here are some quick tips to improve your customer acquisition percentage as an online business.
- Employ search engine optimization tactics to increase organic traffic to your website
- Venture into the world of paid searches to get more visitors with minimal effort and time
- Make your website content rich and consider content marketing
- Follow up on leads frequently with concise emails (email marketing still works!)
- Try out referral programs that involve the existing customers
How to improve your customer retention
Customer retention is about how you treat your customers after purchasing your product. For a business to be successful, you should have a fair percentage of trusted, valuable, regular customers who vouch for your products. Additionally, word-of-mouth marketing comes into play when these customers rave about your products to their peers. In short, the more customers become your ambassadors, the more steadily your profit will increase.
Here's how to improve customer retention:
- Provide excellent after-purchase support
- Reach out to them after a week or two of purchasing to see how well the product is working for them
- Offer the customers tips and tricks to make the maximum use of products (through email or calls)
- Offer discounts to regular customers
- Reward the customers for bringing in referrals
- Employ chatbots on your website to assist 24X7
- Have a live agent at all times to address any pressing concerns the customers have
- Deal returns with due diligence and show the customer you value them
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