Leads, customers and sales are the bread, butter and celebratory high five of anyone wanting to grow their business, and have been for centuries.
But what if there was a strategy cheaper than sourcing your next lead, and that offered a higher return?
Enter retention.
It costs at least four times more to secure a new customer than to retain one, so let’s look at five tactics you can add to your marketing strategy that will help grow your business.
Your customers expect great service at a great price, but what if you surprise them with a birthday message? Or a personalised Christmas card?
The world is moving towards personalised marketing, and here’s an opportunity to appear in your customer’s inbox with a message that tells them you care. It’s only a short message, but it adds value to the relationship and could pay dividends when it comes to remortgaging.
To make the most of building relationships with any number of customers, check out our guide to choosing the right Customer Relationship Management (CRM).
How do you get customers to trust you? We know that’s a pretty big question, especially when you’re in a commission-based profession. But there are opportunities to communicate with customers in ways that don’t come across as being too sales-focused. For instance, you could send them a newsletter featuring educational content around mortgages, latest news on savings, or even lifestyle content such as tips on how to decorate a house on a budget.
The more value a customer gets out of the content you send them, the more likely they are to come back to you for future business.
Customer feedback gives you valuable insights to improve your business and overall customer experience. Listening to what existing customers have to say, and then acting upon the recommendations, increases loyalty to your brand.
Feedback also allows you to identify the happy customers who can become advocates, whereby they might recommend you to their friends and family or share your content and business on their social media accounts.
When people trust a brand, they will consider all the purchases available from that brand. Think about how many travel companies offer the option to book flights, hotels and even taxis through one website. Adding products to your loan business offers customers the chance to source finance for something other than their home. As long as offering more products is manageable, you should see an increase in revenue from loyal customers.
Inbound marketing allows you to apply a customer retention culture across the whole business so that sales, marketing and customer services work seamlessly together to create memorable customer experiences. It’s not one team’s job, instead it’s the whole business that contributes to retention.
Whereas the funnel model turns leads into customers and then forgets about them, the flywheel model brings customers full circle and keeps them engaged with your brand, thus building the momentum that can propel your business forward.
It might all start with a friendly birthday card, but a strong customer retention strategy for mortgage brokers isn’t an impossible mountain to climb. Check out our comprehensive guide here: How brokers can increase customer retention.