First up, let’s start by looking at what customer retention is. Customer retention is a business’ ability to turn consumers into repeat customers, ensuring they don’t sway to a competitor. Long term consumers are crucial for every company, whether that be e-commerce retailers or service-based providers. A business uses customer retention as a metric to measure customer loyalty over time and gauge overall success.

Retention campaigns heavily rely on two dominating factors:

Loyalty

These customers know the value of a product or service and keep coming back, again and again. They are already advocates.

Referrals

Satisfied customers are more likely to recommend a company to their friends and family — this ultimately brings in new customers without additional spend.

At ATM, customer retention campaigns have been the number one focus for many of our clients throughout 2023. Not only does it make good business sense to look after an existing customer base, but it is also more cost effective.

Ensuring our clients’ customers are accurately educated about their brand, offer and products is our number one objective, when building an effective retention campaign. A customer who is satisfied with their purchases or the level of service they have experienced, will be encouraged to return to a brand. Bottom line, retention leads to more revenue in the long run. It is an indicator that a product or service is meeting demand and can ultimately lead to increased customer acquisition due to word-of-mouth recommendations.

When we look at creating a robust retention campaign strategy, at its heart is always a process that fosters communication, trust, and growth. We are focused on the customer’s journey and our compliance. Our brief from a client usually starts with identifying a different cohort of customers we will engage with; we will then create promotion matrix tables to develop how to maximise resolutions that answers the client brief.

If we look at company revenue and budgets, it is always more cost-effective to retain existing customers than to build acquisition campaigns and capture new ones. It’s cheaper to offer a loyal customer a more lucrative deal and reward them for tenure.

In the last 9 months we have:

• Successfully saved around 50,000 customers annually with our ‘win back’ strategy plans
• Reduced leakage on the FTTP estate by around 20% with focus and knowledge directed to customers leaving
• Saved just under 100k customers annually through our retention activity

For one of our leading telecommunications clients, we have:

• Increased save rates from 9% to 30%
• Reduced credit spends whilst increasing sales performance
• Increased saved customers from 25 to 1000 per week