Businesses are always focussing on lead generation and targeted advertising for customer acquisition. However, customer acquisition is something that demands focus! Customer retention is a particularly important concept where businesses use different strategies to retain their existing customers.

B2B companies will have to bank on customer retention as a key strategy to achieve long-term growth. Customer retention is also an important driver of sustainable business value. The math is quite simple – the more customers you retain = the more value and growth you have.

Considering this, B2B companies need to have fail-proof customer retention strategies. In this blog, we have discussed the top 10 customer retention strategies for B2Bs.

Top 10 B2B customer retention strategies

1. Focus on customer onboarding

You will have to remember that your customer’s journey does not end when the customer purchases your product. For a B2B company, it is always a good practice to have a customer onboarding process in place. This process should be designed in such a way that it educates and familiarizes the users beforehand. The onboarding process can include video tutorials, welcome emails, educational guides, etc. Using these, you can make sure that the customers get to familiarize themselves with the product/service and thus earn their loyalty.

It becomes even better if you can come up with a personalized onboarding process that caters to individual customers.

2. Emphasize providing quick resolution

B2B consumers, especially when dealing with SaaS products, have a lot of questions about the product/service. They have several questions and seek quick resolution, even as they are experiencing them. Dedicating resources that provide quick and engaging solutions will help you boost your customer retention. You can have inbound content such as informative blogs, e-books, white papers, etc.  You should also offer live chat platforms to make the responses immediately. It will also make them feel taken care of.

3. Make efforts to ensure that your customers do not drift away

Using data and analytics, make sure that you keep track of your customers – maintain a record of the people purchasing from you, the return customers, and the ones who have stopped purchasing from you. Find out the reason behind this and come up with methods to get them back on your sales track. Do this at regular intervals to see an increase in customer retention.

4. Focus on building a community

Brand or business communities are especially important for B2B companies. These communities serve as the platforms for a point of interaction for both customers and industry experts to interact and share knowledge. These communities are also a source of free and valuable content and some insider knowledge on the product/service. Communities serve as a terrific way to interact with old customers and make new ones.

Communities can also be a great platform for collecting feedback, gathering customers with a similar mindset, and creating content according to customer needs.

5. Surprise your customers from time to time

Surprise is something that can bind your customers to your brand. Make sure that you keep offering them surprise gifts, and that too at unexpected times. These surprise gifts can be sent on their birthdays, your business anniversary, or when introducing a new product/feature. You may have to sit with your teams – customer engagement teams and the finance teams to come up with a gift idea. Take inputs from these teams and also find out what your competitors are doing to treat their customers. Discuss different ideas and come up with something valuable – this boosts customer loyalty and fosters customer retention. You could also consider developing strategies with other popular channels such as Facebook YouTube, Instagram and A2P SMS.

6. Bank on solid customer support

As we have already discussed, B2B customers often seek immediate resolutions to their problems. You must start from the ground route from customer onboarding to post-product delivery service to facilitate this. Ensure that you have a proper customer experience workflow with central access to the sales process, customer information, and technology. All the data should be available at a central location and is accessible to your customer-facing employees. Automation of these processes is a clever way to build strong customer support that you can bank on.

 You will also have to provide educative and engaging material that helps the customers taking cues from the data. At the same time, they should also have access to platforms like live chat, email support, and one-on-one calls. Customer service should solve not only customer grievances but also collect feedback.  

7. Highlight your value proposition

Offering customers, a unique value is a way to get concrete business results! Customers look at the value proposition offered to determine the uniqueness of the product. An excellent value proposition is remarkably simple and easy to understand.

Highlighting value proposition from time to time is a healthy way to encourage your customers to continue purchasing from you. Additionally, it also helps remind your customers of what they are getting, and what they would be losing if they drift away from your business.

8. Design a reward program

Offering rewards to loyal customers is one of the best ways for customer retention. Recognize and reward your loyal customers for staying with you for a good amount of time. It is the best way to let them know that you value them for their support.

What is more, loyalty and reward programs are beneficial for both you and your customers. For your company, it will help create loyalty, and it also provides trackable information on what is working and what is not. Additionally, it will also increase your sales and customer interaction. For customers, these programs are beneficial in terms of finance or value.

9. Keep updating and releasing new versions

You have delivered an excellent product keeping user requirements in mind; you have also offered them excellent customer service and take regular feedback from them. What should be your next step? It is to keep upgrading the product and releasing new versions based on the feedback and evolving customer needs. This is one of the best ways to make your customers see that you care for them. This lays the foundation for customer retention. 

10. Share customer reviews

Customers prefer to read reviews before making a purchase decision – they perceive the reviews shared by other customers to be more trustworthy. Thus, they are more inclined to make a positive purchase decision.

Sharing genuine customer reviews from time to time serves as an excellent customer retention strategy. When a loyal brand shares its reviews about the product and the experience, other users, who may be new or one-time customers, tend to stay back and purchase again. In addition to this, sharing positive reviews also helps know the positive community that the brand has. Thus, sharing customer reviews works well for customer retention.

Conclusion

While there are several ways to approach customer retention, adopting and implementing a customer-first strategy is a sure shot way to customer retention and long-term business growth.

Always keep your customers first – understand and address their needs, seek and work on their feedback and keep working on your product. This way, customers see that you care for them, fostering customer loyalty and retention.

Along with the customer-first approach, it is also important that you use the right B2B customer retention strategies. Hope that the strategies we have discussed in the article help you create a robust customer retention plan for your organization. Follow us for more such articles.

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