Retaining customers can be quite difficult, especially for startups that are still validating their idea. But once you do get customers to stick around, the chances of your startup thriving become much higher than before. This is the reason customer churn is a key metric in determining how successful your business is.
Some churn is inevitable, but most of it is preventable by engaging with customers and making sure that they are satisfied with the products and services that you offer. In this blog post, we discuss some cost-effective and proven strategies that startups can use to reduce customer churn.
1. Publish engaging, educational content on LinkedIn
A study from Harvard Business Review indicates that 6% of customer churn can be prevented by providing customers with short tutorials and guides related to your product. This shows the importance of pushing engaging, educational content to your target audience regularly and LinkedIn is a great platform for such content.
While it can be tempting to just market your startup with salesy content on social media, the same doesn’t apply on LinkedIn where the audience is looking for engaging, insightful content instead. Putting up some thought-provoking, fresh content can actually help you keep customers interested and reduce churn by highlighting how useful your product can be to them.
There are various types of educational content that you can publish on your LinkedIn including:
- Short tutorials and guides that teach customers how to make best use of your product. For example, you can publish content like ‘How to set up your account’ and ‘How to start using X’ that will help customers better understand your product and make onboarding easier for them.
- Tips and tricks on how to maximize value from your product. For example, you can post things like ‘Did you know that you can do X to achieve Y’ – the goal is to show customers that they can achieve even more with your product.
- Infographics and success stories that show how others are benefitting from your product and services. This can help increase the perceived value for your startup and reduce churn rates.
However, when posting content on LinkedIn, you should not restrict yourself to text-only content. Visuals are important and statistics show that adding images to your posts can drive six times more engagement.
But creating high-quality media such as images and short videos can be challenging for startups, especially if you do not have an in-house designer. Fortunately, there are some excellent design tools out there such as PosterMyWall that can help you out.
Poster My Wall has a great variety of LinkedIn templates available that you can choose from, customize with a few simple steps, and export for making your LinkedIn posts much more visual and engaging.
Here is a good example from Microsoft on how you can share success stories for your products on LinkedIn:
2. Keep customer satisfaction in check
There is no better strategy for customer retention than making sure that your customers are satisfied with your startup. The goal is for you to show customers how much you value them and what they mean to your business.
There are lots of low-cost, small gestures that you can make to put a smile on your customer’s face such as:
- Give recognition rewards to customers who are actively engaged with your business. These awards can be something as simple as a digital certificate that says ‘Best Customer Award’, ‘Most Valued Customer Award’ – just be sure to personalize these awards to make sure you show customers how much they matter to your business.
- Send out handwritten thank you and apology notes to show customers that you care about them. For example, if a customer leaves a complaint or feedback for one of your products, you can send out a personalized, handwritten apology or thank you note to them – this is a small gesture but it can go a long way in increasing customer loyalty. Chewy, an online retailer for pet food, is known for its exceptional customer service because they send out handwritten notes to customers on special occasions such as birthdays. You can take this appreciation post from a customer to Chewy as motivation for how to up your customer service game.
- Offer discounts and promotions to repeat customers to get them to purchase again. The goal with this is to award customers when they are loyal to your business – if a customer has been using your products for some time, it is a good idea to offer special discounts and vouchers to them to show that you value their contribution to your startup.
3. Ask customers for feedback regularly
Asking customers for their feedback regularly and proactively can help you better manage customer churn. If you know that customers are not happy with your product then you can quickly address the issues before customers start leaving you.
Based on the feedback you get; you can iterate your product to be the best version it can be. When customers see their valuable feedback being incorporated, they will feel more involved with your business and this will greatly reduce the chances of churn.
Now that you know why collecting feedback is important, let’s look at some of the ways that you can collect feedback accurately and effectively:
- Send out emails or direct messages (on social media) to customers who have stopped using your product(s) in the past and ask them why in a nice, polite manner.
- Create a survey to collect feedback from customers – be sure to ask specific questions about your product and services to make sure that you learn how customers feel about your startup. You can refer to this great guide on Hubspot on how you can create a feedback form for customers.
- Post open-ended, discussion posts on social media and let customers share their thoughts. For example, you can post something like: ‘What do you like and dislike about our product?’. This gives you a great opportunity to interact with customers in real-time and learn about their likes and dislikes.
Once you have enough data, you can categorize the feedback and then take action to improve your products, customer service, or business processes accordingly.
Say goodbye to customer churn
The first step towards anything new is usually the hardest and if you are looking to start managing your customer churn, it is important that you do not get stuck in the analysis paralysis stage. Start taking action today by making use of the tactics and strategies that we have shared in this blog post to slowly, but surely reduce customer churn for your startup.
