We touched briefly in our last blog on the topic of customer retention and I thought I’d share some other interesting statistics today that point to the value of increasing your customer retention rates:

• 68% of customers will leave you if they perceive you to be indifferent to them
• A 5% increase in customer retention can increase business by 25-125%
• Repeat customers spend 33% more than new customers

And it’s long been known in marketing circles that it costs a lot more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain one. I’ve seen and heard statistics ranging from five to 30 times more. And, of course, we all know that whether a customer is satisfied with your product or service or not, they are going to tell other people. It’s worth the effort to keep them on board, and a newsletter can help you do that.

Why else would you consider investing in a newsletter? Think about this – a newsletter can:

• Increase lead generation opportunities
• Provide opportunities for cross selling
• Help solidify your relationships with your customers
• Remind customers how to get in touch with you – and why they might want to
• Support your other marketing efforts
• Provide measurable results, particularly if you send it out via an email provider and post it to your website
• Increase your online visibility in general
• Communicate your company’s unique strengths and attributes
• Tell the stories that demonstrate your company’s values and culture
• Differentiate your company from others in its niche
• Help your customers and prospective customers find you more easily online
• Help people form positive opinions about your company’s customer service, creativity and product performance
• Know and understand that you have a sound business capability, an outstanding hands-on skill set and strong leadership
• Feel inspired by the example you set for other companies in your niche

In other words, a newsletter allows your business the opportunity to give prospective customers reasons to trust you, and do business with you. As a business owner I understand the reluctance many business owners feel when it comes to spending money on something that doesn’t appear to have a direct line-of-sight to new revenue.

If you’re bidding on a contract, you can quantify all of the costs involved in getting your sales people in front of the decision-makers and you know how big the contract is and how much profit is likely to come out of it. That calculation is a little harder to make with a newsletter or, indeed, with any other content marketing initiatives. I address this in a little more detail in my chapter on measurement, but for the moment I invite you to look at the cost of setting up your newsletter as an investment. Your content marketing initiatives all work to form a matrix of “convincer strategies” that together draw your ideal customers to your sales people so they can have the conversations that might lead to a sale. More conversations = more sales.

Let me know if you’d like some help with that – there are a number of ways of going about it and I’d be pleased to bring my team’s resources to the task of supporting you with this kind of project!

(Source: http://www.slideshare.net/custthermometer/22-customer-retention-stats)