Customer Acquisition & Retention: Why You Need to Focus on Both to Grow Your Local Business

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<a href="https://www.podium.com/texting-templates/">Texting</a> regular communications to your customers can also help with retention. For example, reminding customers of annual or seasonal services, like tire rotations, carpet cleaning, or haircuts, and then making it easy for them to call and schedule those appointments right from their phone, can increase repeat purchases.
For Real Salt Lake, an American professional soccer franchise, text has become a powerful tool to communicate with fans. With <a href="https://www.podium.com/campaigns/">Podium Campaigns</a>, RSL uses text to send match day notifications, promote ticket and merchandise sales, and build its brand by showcasing community events and team updates–all leading to a more personalized experience for fans and increased fan engagement.
<h3>Loyalty Programs: Reward Your Best Customers</h3>
Loyalty programs play an important role in customer retention. Not only do <a href="https://www.annexcloud.com/blog/10-benefits-of-implementing-customer-loyalty-program/">83% of customers</a> say loyalty programs make them more likely to continue doing business with companies, data shows that 67% of consumers spend more when they are part of a sustained customer loyalty program.
If you’re looking for how to set up a loyalty program for your local business, there are a number of different models you can use. One of the most simple is offering a free product or service after every 10 purchases. This can work great if you offer lower-cost products or services. You can also send special offers that are exclusive to loyalty program members. Offering gift cards in exchange for referrals or online reviews is another way to reward your best customers.
<h3>NPS &amp; CSAT: Measuring &amp; Responding to Feedback</h3>
The net promoter score (NPS) and the customer satisfaction score (CSAT) are both ways to measure how customers feel about your business.
<a href="https://www.qualtrics.com/experience-management/customer/net-promoter-score/">NPS measures the loyalty of customers</a> to a company. NPS scores are measured with a single-question survey and reported with a number from the range -100 to +100, a higher score is desirable.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-24299" src="https://cms.podium.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/10.png" alt="nps survey" width="837" height="482" srcset="https://cms.podium.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/10.png 837w, https://cms.podium.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/10-300x173.png 300w, https://cms.podium.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/10-768x442.png 768w, https://cms.podium.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/10-600x346.png 600w, https://cms.podium.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/10-360x207.png 360w, https://cms.podium.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/10-160x92.png 160w, https://cms.podium.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/10-350x202.png 350w, https://cms.podium.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/10-100x58.png 100w, https://cms.podium.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/10-596x343.png 596w" sizes="(max-width: 837px) 100vw, 837px" />
CSAT measures customer satisfaction by asking customers how they would rate their overall satisfaction with the goods/service they received (i.e., very satisfied to very unsatisfied). The metric is typically scored as a percentage—with 100% the best possible score and 0% the worst.
Customers appreciate that you care enough to ask for their feedback. In one study, <a href="https://www.podium.com/guides/local-business-customer-experience/">77% of people</a> said they have a more favorable view of brands that collect and accept customer feedback. For younger generations, it is even more important to ask for feedback — 82% of those aged 18 to 34 say they have a more favorable view of brands that ask for feedback.
The biggest benefit of collecting customer feedback though is that you’ll know what customers like about your business and what they don’t. With these insights, you can change areas of your business that may be causing customers to churn.
<h2>Tools: How to Scale Customer Retention</h2>
Like with customer acquisition, the right tools can streamline customer retention campaigns. They can also offer more personalized, engaging experiences that will allow you to build stronger relationships and collect more customer feedback about your business.
Here are the key tools local businesses need to support their customer retention efforts:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.podium.com/article/crm-examples/">Customer </a><a href="https://www.podium.com/article/crm-examples/">r</a><a href="https://www.podium.com/article/crm-examples/">elationship </a><a href="https://www.podium.com/article/crm-examples/">m</a><a href="https://www.podium.com/article/crm-examples/">anagement (CRM)</a>: Whether you’re acquiring or retaining customers, a CRM is a foundational tool for any business, allowing you to keep track of all your customer data.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.podium.com/article/how-relationship-marketing-inspires-customer-loyalty/">Customer </a><a href="https://www.podium.com/article/how-relationship-marketing-inspires-customer-loyalty/">l</a><a href="https://www.podium.com/article/how-relationship-marketing-inspires-customer-loyalty/">oyalty </a><a href="https://www.podium.com/article/how-relationship-marketing-inspires-customer-loyalty/">p</a><a href="https://www.podium.com/article/how-relationship-marketing-inspires-customer-loyalty/">rogram</a>: Running a customer loyalty program will be much easier with a tool that lets you store loyalty program data, automate the delivery of rewards, and track customer behaviors to help you personalize reward offers. Depending on the type of loyalty program you create, there are a number of different tools on the market that can help.</li>
<li>Gamification: Gamification tools create game-like experiences in order to boost engagement. Some of the gamification features tools might offer include leaderboards, virtual currency, redeemable points, achievement levels or badges, and performance graphs to show performance over time.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.podium.com/article/personalization-sms/">Personalization</a>: Personalization tools allow you to customize your website, emails, and other content and interactions based on customer purchasing data, website behavior data, and other psychographic or demographic data.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.podium.com/article/sms-customer-service/">Customer </a><a href="https://www.podium.com/article/sms-customer-service/">s</a><a href="https://www.podium.com/article/sms-customer-service/">ervice and </a><a href="https://www.podium.com/article/sms-customer-service/">s</a><a href="https://www.podium.com/article/sms-customer-service/">upport </a><a href="https://www.podium.com/article/sms-customer-service/">s</a><a href="https://www.podium.com/article/sms-customer-service/">oftware</a>: Customer service tools enable you to collect, organize, respond to, and report on customer support requests. Integration with other tools, such as your CRM, Customer Feedback, and Personalization tools, can enable customer service agents to provide a more personalized and seamless customer experience to your customers.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.podium.com/article/customer-feedback-examples/">Customer </a><a href="https://www.podium.com/article/customer-feedback-examples/">f</a><a href="https://www.podium.com/article/customer-feedback-examples/">eedback</a>: A customer feedback tool should make it easy for customers to provide feedback and for you to monitor that feedback and extract insights. One key feature is the ability to send surveys via text.</li>
</ul>
The goal with whatever tools you choose to use is to allow you to make the customer experience as seamless as possible while creating more efficiency for your business. Your customer retention tools should allow you to consolidate all customer information – conversation history, purchase history, reviews, and customer feedback – in one place for a single record of truth for the entire customer journey. This way, when a customer contacts your business, the customer experience is frictionless, and will keep the customer returning.
<h1>Final Thoughts</h1>
Communicating with your customers on their preferred channels is a critical part of the customer experience for customer acquisition and retention. But you not only need to be on these channels – you need to be able to deliver and manage the experience on these channels in a cohesive manner.
When you can connect the customer experience across the entire customer journey—you’ll not only attract more new customers, but you’ll build increased loyalty in the customers you already have, allowing you to continually grow your business.
Acquire new customers and retain the ones you already have with Podium.
<ul>
<li>Save more time: Manage all your customer acquisition and retention channels through a single, secure platform that lets you turn phone calls and chats into texts.</li>
<li>Convert more leads and incentivize repeat purchases: Attract and retain more customers by using the channels and tools your potential customers prefer to communicate with you on.</li>
<li>Elevate the customer experience: Have the visibility you need into your leads and their interaction history to respond quickly and in an informed manner to your customer&#8217;s request.</li>
</ul>

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Customer Acquisition & Retention: Why You Need to Focus on Both to Grow Your Local Business

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