Reaching potential customers and driving conversions are among the top priorities for every entrepreneur. You’re likely already running a few marketing campaigns to attract new customers.
But what happens after a customer makes their first purchase? If you don’t make a conscious effort to retain them, you’ll miss valuable opportunities to drive future sales and grow your business. It’s hard to over-emphasize the importance of building lasting customer relationships through effective retention strategies, especially for service businesses, where trust and affinity are such important factors. And that’s where vcita’s new Reports feature comes in handy for small business owners.
Powered by Google’s Locker tools, vcita Reports offer a 360-degree view of your business with robust reporting and visualized dashboards. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at how you can enhance customer retention with Reports. Let’s jump right in.
Most SMBs focus on expanding their reach and attracting more customers. However, it’s worth noting that the costs of retaining an existing customer are far lower than those associated with acquiring a new one.
Once you convert a lead into a customer, you don’t have to invest in expensive marketing campaigns on multiple platforms to retain them. Instead, you can delight them with top-notch customer service and personalized offers. That makes customer retention more cost-effective.
Also, existing customers are more likely to trust your brand when you launch new products/services. They might even recommend your business to their contacts, thus helping drive more sales.
In the long run, retaining customers helps you win their affinity and boost revenue through repeat purchases. Considering that small businesses are often strapped for capital, it makes sense to prioritize customer retention strategies.
While most businesses understand the importance of customer retention, they still struggle to achieve it. As an entrepreneur, you have to identify products/services and marketing campaigns that resonate with your customers. Also, you must figure out why certain customers return to your business while others don’t.
That, in turn, requires you to use whatever data you have access to so you can monitor and understand customer behavior. In this sense, it helps to have access to sophisticated business intelligence (BI) and reporting tools to understand and utilize the collected data.
Unfortunately, most BI software solutions are expensive and require specialized technical know-how. That makes them unaffordable for SMBs. Even if you use a few standalone tools to monitor website traffic and marketing campaigns, combining different data sets and generating actionable insights is challenging.
In the absence of concrete analytics, your sales and marketing teams have to rely on their instinct to build customer retention strategies. That, in turn, makes the process complex, time-consuming, and above all, ineffective.
With the new Reports feature, vcita helps you gain a deeper understanding of various business aspects, including payments, marketing, customers, and staff performance. The feature is easily accessible from the vcita dashboard and doesn’t require any additional setup or configuration.
Instead, Reports source data from all other vcita features you might already be using, including the client portal, the appointment scheduling tools, or the invoicing and payments modules. Therefore, you need zero data skills to use Reports.
vcita Reports cover five broad categories - Bookings, Clients, Marketing, Payments, and Staff. When it comes to customer retention, the reports available under the Clients tab are a goldmine. You get three reports in this category:
The Clients by Source report helps you evaluate different customer acquisition channels and identify the best-performing ones. On the other hand, with the Clients by Status report, you get a breakdown of your existing clientele. You can determine what percentage of your customers are inactive and deploy suitable strategies to re-engage them.
The most powerful tool, however, is the Client’s Last Activity report. It gives you a closer look at each client’s most recent interactions and transactions with you. Whether they click on an SMS promotion or booked their second appointment in a month, you have all the information at your fingertips.
That, in turn, helps you identify the most active clients and delight them with personalized offers. Let’s say you run an online fitness coaching business. If you notice that a client recently attended a webinar on weight loss and browsed similar articles on your blog, you can offer a customized package combining different weight loss programs on your website.
Alternatively, you can send them personalized content recommendations related to weight loss and then ask them to join one of your programs. Knowing what strikes a chord with each client helps you avoid one-size-fits-all retention strategies. It’s crucial, considering that 78% of consumers are more likely to make repeat purchases from brands that prioritize personalization.
With the Client’s Last Activity report, you also get a deeper insight into what caused specific clients to churn. You can use that data to reconnect with them through tailored content and offers.
The end result is a powerful data-driven retention strategy that delivers a personalized experience for each client. It helps strengthen customer relationships and drives more sales.
Whether you’re looking to re-engage inactive customers or retain your most loyal customers, vcita Reports can be of great value. They’re easy to use and understand, and they offer extensive insights into your existing customer base. That, in turn, helps you delight customers with customized offers and drive repeat purchases.
