Studies show that acquiring new customers can cost five times more than retaining existing ones. This means a small dip in your retention rate can significantly impact your bottom line.
But why do customers churn? It’s not always a sudden decision, but often a combination of factors:
- Unmet expectations: Customers who feel your product or service doesn’t deliver on its promises are more likely to leave.
- Forgotten value: If customers don’t actively see the value you offer, they might forget about you and look elsewhere.
- Lack of connection: Businesses that focus solely on transactions but forget the human element struggle to build loyalty.
As a result, businesses sometimes struggle to identify when a customer is at risk of churning, making it even more challenging to prevent.
Fortunately, SMS marketing is a proactive tool that helps combat churn. In this blog post, we’ll explore several ways to use SMS marketing to reduce churn and increase customer retention.
What is Churn?
Before getting into the solution, let’s first understand churn.
Customer churn refers to the percentage of customers a business loses over a specific period of time. Whether due to dissatisfaction, better offers elsewhere, or simply neglect, churn can significantly impact a business’s bottom line.
How to Prevent Churn with SMS Marketing
Proactively Engage With Your Audience
Traditional marketing often waits for customers to reach out, but by then, it might be too late. SMS marketing helps you to be proactive and re-engage potential churners before they slip away.
Here’s how:
- Set up automated “welcome back” messages for returning customers, reminding them of your brand and its value.
- Send personalized reactivation campaigns based on customer inactivity. Offer specific discounts or highlight new features they might have missed.
- Run targeted drip campaigns to rekindle interest and encourage engagement.
Continue to proactively engage with customers at key touch points. This includes follow-up messages after a purchase, reminders about upcoming appointments, events, or renewals, or personalized offers to re-engage past customers.
Proactively engaging your audiences creates stronger relationships and lowers the risk of churn.
Send Personalized Messages
Personalization is key to capturing and retaining the attention of customers. In fact, 70% of people say that how well a company understands their individual needs impacts their loyalty.
Personalizing messages to show that you understand people’s wants and needs will keep customers longer.
How do you personalize text messages? Reference customer insights, such as demographics, communication history, purchase history, preferences, lifecycle stage, etc. To further help, segment your audience. That way it will be easier to write highly targeted text messages.
By segmenting your audience and sending targeted messages, you help customers have a better experience with your business. This often results in repeat purchases and prevents them from churning to competitors.
Automate Reminders
Send customers notifications and reminders to keep them informed and engaged. Let SMS marketing do the heavy lifting and set up automated SMS reminders for:
- Upcoming renewals
- Expiring subscriptions or memberships
- Abandoned carts
- Upcoming appointments or events
- When billing is about to expire
The bottom line is that automating your reminders improves your business process. It keeps customers around, saving you time and making you money.
Provide Excellent Customer Support
Your customers won’t love you if you provide bad service, but your competitors will! Customer service makes or breaks your business. Simply put, bad service will make customers leave.
Providing excellent customer support is the best way to positively impact your customer retention. Using SMS marketing, you effectively provide support to your customers, resolving problems and addressing concerns in real time.
With SMS, you can provide support in ways like:
- Providing immediate support for questions or issues
- Offering proactive troubleshooting tips based on customer behavior, preventing problems before they start.
When using SMS, your customers can also reach out for help directly from their mobile devices without the need for a phone call or email exchanges. Whether it’s troubleshooting technical issues or answering product-related questions, texting is a highly efficient channel for quickly resolving customer questions.
You build trust, loyalty, and advocacy by providing excellent customer support with texting. This reduces the likelihood of churn and increases customer lifetime value (CLV).
Related: 7 Conversational Customer Service Texting Tips
Build a Community
Create a community among your customers. Use SMS marketing to share exclusive content, tips, and “insider” updates. Community-building messages help customers remember the value your business provides.
Also, encourage customers to refer their friends to your business by offering referral incentives. This helps turn customers into brand advocates who drive new business for you.
Stop Churn with Skipio
SMS marketing is about more than just sending texts. It’s about building relationships and creating a positive brand experience. Skipio, a conversational text messaging platform, helps you do just that. Build relationships with Skipio’s automated texting tools and you’ll boost replies, increase show rates, reduce churn, and grow revenue.
Learn more about how Skipio helps businesses like yours grow. Schedule a quick demo today!
