Successful businesses understand that their best customers do not just buy their product or service once, they come back again and again for more purchases. They also know that signing up a new customer costs from 5-30 times (depending on your industry) as much as keeping an existing one. And a mere 5% increase in your customer retention rate can increase your profits from 20% to 90%. Yet, unfortunately, many companies do not realize the vital importance of customer retention and they end up focusing on new customer acquisition at the expense of increasing customer satisfaction and retention.
To further support this, here are five benefits your company can expect from an increased focus on customer retention efforts and programs.
Increased Profits
Loyal customers will spend more money on your products and services. In fact, a company’s existing customers are up to 10x more likely to purchase from you than a cold lead.
Reduced Marketing Expenses
Companies that find a way to retain, upsell, and cross-sell their existing customers are often able to achieve their revenue goals with a lower marketing spend than those businesses that rely heavily on new customer acquisition to hit their revenue targets.
Premium Price Opportunities
Your happy, existing customers are likely to be willing to pay more for additional products and services from your company. Because they have had a good experience with your brand in the past, they often feel there is less risk in continuing to buy from you and may therefore be willing to pay a premium price.
More Word-of-Mouth Advertising
Loyal customers also have a tendency to tell their friends and families about the brands they like, thus creating free advertising for their favorite brands through viral and word-of-mouth marketing. This can be extremely valuable to your business.
Testing and Feedback Network
Successful companies also tend to leverage their existing customer relationships to gather feed regarding existing or potential new products and services. This feedback can help your company to take the guess work out of product roadmap development, thus minimizing your costs for introducing new products and features to the marketplace.
eLearning-Based Customer Training for Customer Retention
For many companies, a major element in their success for retaining existing customers is in offering them online training or “eLearning” programs to speed their product understanding and implementation and help ensure they are deriving the greatest possible value from each of your products and services.
The core technology that supports all types of eLearning programs, including customer training, is a Learning Management System, or “LMS”. An LMS is the application for building, delivering, and tracking your online customer training program.
While LMS technology has been around for many years, two relatively recent developments have made the use of these systems well-suited for customer training.
Cloud-Based LMS
A cloud-based LMS, offered by a third-party vendor, provides you with the features and bandwidth you need to support comprehensive customer training programs. Working with a cloud-based system eliminates the need to buy and manage large amounts of infrastructure and allows your company launch its online customer training program right away.
Multi-Tenant LMS
A multi-tenant LMS architecture supports your customer training program and retention efforts by allowing you to launch and manage private eLearning environments (portals) for each of your customers. Each portal can be branded for a specific client and can include the specific categories and courses that are relevant to that customer.
LMS Portals for Customer Training and Retention
LMS Portals offers a cloud-based, multi-tenant learning management system that allows our clients and partners to launch and manage private eLearning environments to support customer training and retention efforts. Each portal can be launched and branded in minutes and includes powerful tools for course building, category management, user onboarding, messaging and collaboration, analytics, and more.
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