Client Retention
Now, let’s look at a few statistics related to Client Retention –
- If a customer has previously purchased from your company, there is about a 60% chance of them making at least one other purchase.
- Meanwhile, a new site visitor on your company’s website has only about a 20% chance to become a paying customer.
- As opposed to their first year of being your customer, the average consumer spends 67% more in the third year.
- Businesses lose up to $1.6 trillion per year as a result of customers moving away from them.
- As a rule of thumb, 20% customers of any given company are the source of 80% of the company’s profits.
- The average global value of a lost customer is $243
- Despite the importance of customer retention, less than a third of business executives consider it a priority.
Numbers don’t lie. All these statistics go to show that retaining customers is a smart way of ensuring a larger turnover for your business in the long run. Repeat customers spend more money and require less marketing and advertising cost for desirable responses.
B2B Client Retention Starts With Primary Data-Quality Solutions
In order to retain a client, you must first have the right client intelligence at your disposal. This intelligence is heavily reliant on your overall data-collection efforts. Your customer outreach efforts are either inbound or outbound. No matter where your data comes from, some things remain common. There are a few basic steps that you can monitor to ensure a general uplifting of your database
Some Statistics That Will Make An Impact
- A hoard of data coming in from all collection channels contains both, useful as well as junk entries. The first step to ensuring only clean data enters your system is to verify and purge junk entries. Do this even before such entries make their way into the organization’s client database.
- Once you have established that only pertinent data is entering your system, this incoming stream of information must be categorized and compiled in a useful and friendly format. This step ensures that your marketing/sales team can utilize this data optimally in an efficient manner.
- Once everything is in place, you ought to track failed attempts at client outreach. This means that all the contact information that led to no responses or bounced emails should be cleared from your database at once. This step ensures the integrity of your data on a daily basis.
Even if you dedicatedly undertake these activities with a view to maintaining your data’s optima, the threat of data ageing is still a possibility. No matter how clean or relevant the data was at the time of collection, it will become old and lose significance with the passage of time.
How This Affects Client Retention
As specified earlier, there are various expected as well as unexpected reasons that accelerate the rate at which your data gets old. Some of the most common factors that eventually affect B2B client retention rates are-
1. Letting data in without checking
The fundamental reason behind having wrong information or irrelevant records in your database is that you’re probably letting all the incoming data directly to your database. While linking your database to incoming data may seem like a trick that saves time and effort, a majority of incoming data is junk that won’t ever yield results.
2. Leaving data unmonitored for prolonged durations
It goes without saying that achieving a milestone makes you feel gratified. Obtaining a client’s data may certainly seem like an achievement if you worked hard enough to get it. But if you think that is all it takes to call it a day, you’re in for a rude shock. Simply having a client’s data is not the end of the process. Monitoring your database records periodically to account for changes in information is an important factor in maintaining database health.
3. Not making corrections to data based on the response received
When a marketing team has deployed a campaign, focusing on the positive responses is essential. After all, these responses will bring in revenue. However, the ‘negative’ responses shouldn’t be completely avoided. Be it emails that bounce back, contacts that unsubscribe from your mailing list, rude replies or any other undesirable customer exchange; make sure to align it within your database. Ignoring this step can land you in many unpleasant situations that can be anything from being blackballed to landing yourself in legal trouble.
4. Not updating a contact as a client-
Once your prospect has become a client, their details ought to be updated within your database. Your database is used as the primary source of information regarding what communication is sent to which market segment. If you haven’t updated the status of your client, there are chances that he or she may end up receiving messages and content that isn’t applicable to them. Marketing approaches meant for prospects should obviously not go to existing clients. This can impart an unfavorable image of your organization in the market and affect your sales in the long run.
Ways to Ensure Only Quality Data Enters your Database
Even if you have deployed all preliminary measures to stop junk data entering the systems and to keep the database updated, you cannot stop data from getting old. With the passage of time, data is bound to lose its relevancy. When this happens, you need to deploy even more advanced techniques to ensure client retention.
In addition to the basic steps detailed above, here are a few practical and trustworthy practices to employ –
- Check data-health periodically using a dedicated in-house team.
- Ensure that not even a single entry is left unmonitored from the entry point to your records until the prospect gets converted into a client.
- Manually get your data verified using your in-house team on a regular basis.
- Never buy email/leads lists for your marketing approach/campaigns from data vendors who deal in bulk data.
The Way Ahead For Your B2B Marketing Strategy
Quality data is the driving force behind a successful organization. However, it does not come easily and maintaining a database requires at least half the effort. In such a scenario, B2B data cleansing services by BizProspex is the guaranteed way to ensure only quality data lives in your database. Here are a few questions to ask yourself in order to ensure excellent returns from your marketing activities.
Answer These!
Can you maintain and afford a full-time, in-house team of Data Professionals to check every bit of data entering your records? Our Take: Usually, the average B2B company cannot afford to hire a specialized team to handle database maintenance. The focus is usually on improving sales for a higher ROI.
Will your Sales and Marketing team keep a track of all the leads that get converted to paying customers and mark them as a client once the deal is closed successfully? Our Take: While this may sound like an easy task, it is highly improbable for these teams to do it, until and unless you want them to burden with an added responsibility. Having your sales and marketing team monitor database entries takes away from their productive time. This will eventually show up on the bottom line.
Is it possible for your organization to mine and scrape data organically instead of relying on readymade email lead lists to grow your business? Our Take: Although this may be a dream situation, it is impossible to scrape and mine data in-house using a full-time team on payroll. The expertise required to do this task well does not come cheap and dedicating an entire team to simply mining data is cumbersome, to say the least.
The Bottom Line
No B2B marketing strategy is complete without highly specific lead information, curated to suit the needs of your organization. However, you simply cannot afford to have a dedicated in-house team that meticulously mines, scrapes, cleans, enhances and de-dupes your database. It has been established that higher client retention rates are linked to a clean and regularly updated database. So in a situation where you can’t do everything by yourself, who should you trust with your data-hygiene needs?
At Bizprospex, we have an edge over the industry when it comes to data solutions!
Manual data processes including data verification, de-duping, mining, cleaning, enhancement and merging are our forte. Backed by an impressive team of professionals skilled in research techniques, we are the right choice for when your B2B organization demands nothing short of the best!
Read Our Blog
Here is a list of highly informative articles explaining various aspects of Data Accuracy and Manual Data Services offered by BizProspex.