Hope is Not a Customer Retention Strategy

Customer retention is the new acquisition. More and more these days customers are willing to shop around and find a better deal or not buy at all. Many business owners know that customer loyalty is dwindling but have not put together a customer retention strategy to compensate.

The smart business owner who is willing to focus on keeping what they already have will be at an advantage over their competitors who ‘hope’ that their customers come back.

McDonalds has systems for everything. A system to open the restaurant, a system to close the restaurant and systems to everything in between – that is why there is Hamburger U. So that you can learn The McDonalds way. What you don’t realise is McDonalds also has a marketing system a way to get new customers in and to get existing customers to come back – they have a complex and very sophisticated customer retention strategy.

You don’t need anything as complex as what McDonalds uses. But considering the economic climate you do need a customer retention strategy. It will be far cheaper to spend 50 or 60 dollars a year to keep an existing customer rather than spend hundreds of dollars or possibly more getting the phone to ring with a new customer.

Think about it for a minute. If you are unwilling to spend a pittance keeping the customer then why would you bother to go out and get them in the first place?

In the report “Getting More Repeat Business and Referrals Simply and Easily in the Next 12 Months,” you can read about a simple customer retention strategy that almost any business can implement. Yet most seldom do.