How To Fix Customer Retention in 6 Steps (#3)
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Today, I want to show you how to improve customer retention for your online business. If you are a product creator, an executive, or a SaaS entrepreneur -- this is for you!
Recent studies have shown a giant 70% increase in customer acquisition costs since 2020. This is one of multiple reasons why retention strategies are essential for having a sustainable business.
Dani is right:
Solving the right problem Vs. Building something no one cares about
My approach is to help you validate before you build a solution for your customer retention problem. A solution could look like a new offer, or even shifting to new business model, as I've helped clients like Sofar do in the past. In my experience gut feelings can be wrong. My intention is to help you to reduce the "risk" to ensure you don’t waste time, and money, by building the wrong thing.? ?
Here's my 6-step framework to solve this issue that took me 4000 hours and four years of mistakes to learn.?
I'll teach it to you in 3 minutes.?
Customer retention framework
1. Gather customer insights: Survey customers to understand their needs, gathering insights into their core pains and preferences. I often see the opposite of my intuition, so don't go around this step. Learning how to run a quantitative survey can be done with an online course like this?one—and online survey platforms like?Google Forms and Typeform.
2. Research trends: Study how others are making money from new offers that your customers are asking for. I look within the category at what competitors are doing. And it's essential to look in adjacent categories for fresh thinking that could inspire something new and exciting.?TrendWatching,?The Future Lab, and?Gartner?are sources for quality research.?
3. Ideate: Create new offers to find the white space in your category and make your competition irrelevant. Combine ideas from customer insights and trend research. Bring together people from all parts of the organization to contribute ideas: product, tech, customer support, content production, and marketing.?Miro?is a tool that makes it easy to whiteboard with remote teams and capture ideas and artifacts all in one place.?
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4. Prototype: Create a non-technical prototype to get customer feedback on a short list of offers. Get scrappy. I had to unlearn getting things "pixel-perfect" and be okay with messy prototypes, and the trade-off is learning faster and speeding up the process.?Figma?is a tool that makes it easy to do this. Make changes to your prototype, and get more feedback to narrow and validate a direction forward.?
5. Build and implement: Recruit a small group of customers to help with user testing. Get feedback early, and fine-tune your product and marketing. Recruit additional users to give feedback that matches your target audience through an online platform?UserTesting. Get a self-serve customer service offering dialed in before you launch, to ensure people can help themselves and you minimize firefighting.?
6. Go to Market: Bring your offer to existing customers wherever they hang out and find more like them. Your email list and educational emails could be a primary conversion tactic. Continue to ask for feedback about how you can make this thing better.?VideoAsk?is another helpful tool for getting feedback from users/customers.?
That's it.
Cheers,?friends.
Noah
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