So, you’re a marketer or business owner, and you want to grow your website. One of the first things you’ll learn in the wide-open world of online business is that online retailers often struggle with keeping customers engaged after their initial order.
Some people will stay committed to your brand for years, while others will stop opening your emails and browsing your website after their first purchase. It’s your job to find ways to keep consumers engaged in your brand across platforms like email, social media, and of course, on your website. You can improve your engagement across the board by focusing on customer success.
Essentially, customer success is when your customers achieve their desired outcome from their interaction with your business. Sometimes your site will have a short period of time before the customer finds success. In other cases, they may have to work with your product or service for an extended time.
Today we are going to talk about customer churn, which describes the number of people that stop interacting with your brand after a pre-determined time. Specifically, we are going to look at ways you can ensure customer success to keep fewer people from disengaging with your site.
Let’s get started!
Identify Your Target Audience
The first thing you need to do is to identify your target audience. If you want to reduce your churn, you have to make sure that you’re targeting the people who can benefit most from your products or services.
For instance, if you own a niche-specific fashion website, you’re going to want to find what all of the people that shop on your online store have in common. Let’s say you find out they are mostly female, between the ages of 25-45, and spend most of their time on the social media platform Instagram.
Now you have the framework to build customer persona sheets, which are essentially profiles that fit your target audience. Depending on the size and scale of your business, you may have one or two persona sheets, or you could have 20 or more! There’s plenty of flexibility here.
If you want the best results, make sure you do a detailed analysis of your Google Analytics so you can see your core audience’s demographics and habits. Once you know more about their personalities and behavior, you can start making smarter, targeted marketing decisions to boost customer success.
Reach Out to Customers First
Our next piece of advice will help you reduce customer churn and secure more new sales on your website. When someone stops by to check out your online store, they may have some questions. The problem is that many of these people don’t bother asking for help.
You can convert many of these people by adding a chatbot to your website that asks customers if they need any help. This simple prompt can encourage folks who would otherwise leave to stick around and get their questions answered.
Business owners and marketers will often program their chatbots to take the customer’s inquiries step by step for accurate results. So if someone says they need help changing their password, the bot can help walk them through the process. Similarly, if they want to know about pricing or specific products, you can program your chatbot to send them the right information instantly, which improves the odds that they will stick around.
If a problem is so complicated that the chatbot is unable to assist, it can send the customer to one of your live chat agents, who can help the user on the spot. Prospects and current customers all appreciate a business that goes out of their way to help their audience customers find success.
Implement a Killer Content Marketing Strategy
There’s a good chance that you’ve already created a blog for your website. If you haven’t, we can help you create your first blog. It’s worth noting that content on your website is one of the best ways to ensure customer success. This rule is particularly true if you have a SaaS business with tutorials and guides.
However, even regular eCommerce stores can benefit from adding a blog to their website. For example, an online pet store could make a guide about caring for different animals and include guides for first-time pet owners.
Including valuable content on your website is an excellent way to achieve customer success. Let’s say someone comes to your site after buying your software, and they want to know what features they could benefit from using. A step-by-step guide showing all of the most popular features of your product will help them meet their goals, which fuels customer success.
You can take it a step up an create a subscription-based content model designed to drip out to users that have bought something from your website, or subscribed to your email list. When you consider that 76% of businesses claim that a subscription-based model helped with retention and building long-term customer relationships, the connection becomes clear.
The more information users have to enjoy their product or service, the higher their chance of finding success. As a result, they are likely to stick with your business so they can continue reaching their goals.
Ensure Email Deliverability
Email marketing is another great way to make sure that customers are finding success with your brand. You can send out a whole host of emails, including discounts and promotions, exclusive content, and much more. But you have to make sure that your emails are reaching your intended audience.
Research shows that only 79% of people you send an email to will receive it, which means you could be leaving a ton of your customers out of the success journey. Ensuring email deliverability means you’ll have a much easier time reaching your customers, and as a result, more people will be able to engage with your brand.
If you’re looking for a way to ensure your email deliverability with WordPress, we suggest using WP Mail SMTP. This plugin allows you to change the way your emails are sent. WordPress uses a PHP format, which can cause some complications when you’re emailing subscribers. Instead of using PHP, your email will be sent using SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol), which causes less confusion between email service providers and improves deliverability.
No doubt, growing your email list and sending valuable information can help you with customer success, but you have to make sure your messages are arriving at their destination.
Look for New Opportunities
Finally, it’s important to look for new opportunities to build on your existing customer success strategy. There are plenty of ways you can get started today, but we like implementing customer feedback forms.
In these short surveys, we ask customers what they liked about their experience and where we can improve. Using the information we gathered, it’s possible to identify and plug success gaps before they become a problem.
Looking for new opportunities will benefit existing customers, but it also ensures an all-around smoother experience for people experiencing your brand for the first time.
You’re going to find plenty of great opportunities to work on customer success. The key is to actively engage with your audience across all platforms and find out what you can do to take your brand from ordinary to extraordinary.
Syed Balkhi is an award-winning entrepreneur and online marketing expert. He is the co-founder of OptinMonster, WPBeginner, MonsterInsights, and WPForms.