How to Improve Customer Retention Through Marketing Tactics

Whether you sell a one time product or a long term service, customer retention needs to be a top priority. After all, you’ve spent tons of time and money to get people to buy your product, why would you throw all of that away?

Loyal customers are valuable not just for their ability and willingness to provide you with good praise and support—but also for their ability to significantly impact sales. Not only are existing customers more likely to buy, they’re also more likely to spend more than a first-time customer.

Yet, many companies fall flat when it comes to retaining customers, especially businesses that sell one time products. They assume that have a customer service department is all you need to retain customers, but that’s only the first step.

What does it take to retain your customers month after month? Is it as simple as offering a cutting-edge, market-leading product?

Some people still seem to believe that “if you build it, they will come” (or, in this case, stay). But that’s not enough. Often, the market-leading products aren’t the “best” products – they’re just the products that have more money, greater distribution, and, almost always, better marketing behind them.

Remember Betamax? It’s widely believed that the eventual market leader, VHS, was inferior to Sony’s videotape format. However, a lack of support from hardware companies, limited distribution, high costs, and limitations with the technology itself (primarily, the initial 60-minute recording limit) meant that Sony quickly lost that round – despite producing the superior product.

These lessons are even more pertinent today – especially for the majority of SaaS companies, where competition tends to be especially fierce.

Stick with me, and we’ll take a look at over two dozen strategies that’ll help you to stop churn in its tracks and keep your customers right where you want them – with you.

1. Develop your brand

I’m going to start with a point that sounds obvious. Everyone knows that developing a brand is a good thing. Fewer people fully understand how important it is, and what, specifically, they should be striving to achieve.

If a customer can’t remember your name, even if they love your product, it won’t help you out in the long run. If somebody asks for a referral and your customer draws a blank, it does you no good. Your company branding needs to be on point, and that branding needs to resonate with customers.

First, you need to take a hard look at how effective your branding is. An engaging brand story explains why your product exists and maybe even evokes a higher purpose (helping people, helping the world, etc.)  A great brand story helps your company become memorable.

It’s not just your company that needs good branding, your products need it too. That can help you stand out in a person’s memory and make it easier for them to describe it to others.

The aim here is to become synonymous with your industry.

Think for a minute, about a company that offer a range of easy-to-use SEO tools combined with a fantastic support network.

Who’d you think of?

I’m going to hazard a guess that most of you will think of Moz. Along with this guy:

Why? Moz isn’t the only SEO tool out there, by any means, but you can almost guarantee that everyone who has ever had anything to do with building or optimizing a website knows it.

Moz is, arguably, completely synonymous with SEO. So much so, that in 2013, they changed their name from “SEOmoz” to simply “Moz”. They became so recognizable as an SEO brand, that they superseded any need to confirm the association in their name.

If you can follow in their footsteps and build a brand that people can’t help but think about when someone mentions your industry, you’ll naturally find that it’s not only easier to acquire customers, but that they stick around longer too – simply because your product becomes the product for your industry.

2. Attract the right customers

I’m going to let you in on a little secret: churn often begins long before a customer actually leaves. In fact, it often begins before they’re even a customer. Why? Because they’re the wrong customer.

I know what you might be thinking – how can a customer be “wrong”? So long as they pay their bills and don’t cause you any trouble, then that’s money in your back pocket; why does it matter if they go as quickly as they come?

Two reasons:

• Customer acquisition costs money, so, if a customer costs more to acquire than they generate in revenue over their lifetime (as a customer, not literally), that customer has actuallylost you money.
• A business model based on high customer turnover is rarely sustainable. Losing customers as quickly as you gain them leaves you in really vulnerable position. Maybe you can scrape by as long as you’re acquiring customers at a similar rate at which you lose them, but what happens if your acquisition rate drops suddenly?

Successful companies aren’t the ones with the infrastructure and campaigns to quickly attract lots of new customers (even though, on the surface, they might seem enviable). Instead, it’s the companies that are able to keep those customers, long-term, that eventually win.

Begin by identifying exactly what type of customer you want to attract and focus your marketing efforts on securing their business – not just any business. Stick with this strategy, and I can almost guarantee that you’ll see a drop in your churn rate.

3. Educate your customers

Rarely will a customer stick around for long if they don’t actually know how to use your product. Sure, some people are pretty self-reliant when it comes to wrapping their heads around a new system, but most need a little more guidance.

Content is a great way to get the basics covered – think illustrated how-tos and video demonstrations. Just make sure to point a new customer in the right direction once they join.

That said, live webinars can also be crazy valuable, as they give you a chance to demonstrate how your product works while your customers are able to ask questions about anything they’re unsure of.

Alternatively, you can take this one step further and offer each new customer a one-on-one conference call to talk them through the product and answer their questions. In any case, an educated customer is one that’s less likely to churn.

4. Underpromise and overdeliver

Or, at the very least… manage your customers’ expectations. One of the worst things you can do for your SaaS business (or any business, for that matter) is to overpromise and underdeliver – in other words, to let your customers down.

Of course, it’s not uncommon for companies to make tenuous claims about their products. It’s called advertising.

Some brands can get away overpromising and under-delivering – many more cannot. McDonalds manages it because, although the delivered product bares little resemblance to the advertisement, it still, by all accounts, tastes pretty good.

If, however, you claim your product will save your customers X amount of money, or X hours of time, and that promise doesn’t pan out, they’re going to feel let down. Lied to, even. And they’re probably going to act on that feeling by taking their business elsewhere.

Thankfully, there’s a simple solution. Establish what your product can reasonably achieve, and promise your customers a little less than that. This gives you a bit more wiggle room to ensure you, at the very least, meet your customers’ expectations. All being well, you’ll exceed them and earn your customers’ continued business.

5. Make it hard for your customers not to use you

Find out what other products your customers use and establish a way to hook your product into them. This isn’t the easiest hack to pull off, but if you can integrate your product with other key tools that your customer base rely on, you’ll make it all-the-more difficult for them to leave. Sneaky? Maybe. But very, very effective.

This strategy was an essential ingredient in PayPal’s early success. They integrated their payment processor so succinctly into eBay that they actually squeezed out eBay’s own, in-house payment option.

By the time eBay acquired PayPal in 2002, more than 70 percent of eBay listings were accepting payment via the platform, and around 25% of closed listings (purchases) were being settled using it.

PayPal had succeeded in making themselves almost indispensable to eBay sellers, who were essentially forced to offer PayPal as a payment option, for fear of losing sales. If possible, you should do the same.

6. Make your product the greatest ever

The easier it is for your customers to access and use your product, the more likely they are to stick around for the long-haul.

Here are three ideas you can use to create unforgettable product experiences that drive your customers to return to your store again:

Tactic #1: Invest in and streamline multi-channel selling. As I mentioned earlier in this post, in order to build customer loyalty and drive more repeat sales, you have to make it incredibly easy and convenient for customers to buy products from you. For a lot of ecommerce businesses, that means selling your products on other marketplaces where your customers go to shop, like Amazon and eBay. Investing in multi-channel selling can help you connect with and market to customers on sites and channels where they feel most comfortable.

Tactic #2: Include special offers and thank you’s in your packaging. To delight and surprise customers, consider stuffing surprise offers, exclusive promo codes, and handwritten thank you’s when you send out products to first-time customers. It’s a small, but impactful way to show your customers that you care, and it will help you differentiate from your biggest competitors. It’s essentially the same strategy you’re using when you optimize your order receipt emails, but in this case it’s offline and something that your customers can actually hold in their hands.

Tactic #3: Create an amazing and unforgettable unboxing experience. Along the same line as the previous tactic, you should also consider put money into creating amazing packaging for your products to create a memorable unboxing experience for your first-time customers.

This goes back to the idea that you don’t get to be there with your customer when they receive your product, so instead, you need to create an amazing, exciting experience for them that doesn’t involve you. If you can create an exciting moment in time for customers each time they receive a product delivery from you—one that makes their day a little bit better—your customers will want to buy from you again.

Tactic #4: Make your product as accessible as possible

To build customer loyalty and increase repeat sales, you have to create amazing, unforgettable experiences for anyone who purchases a product from you. In ecommerce, we don’t have the luxury of being able to interact with customers face-to-face when they’re buying from us—so we have to delight them through the ordering and delivery experience.

Tactic #5: Create a community around your product

People love to feel like they’re part of a community. This is simple human nature at play – we want to feel supported, and we want to feel like we belong.

Moz is one example of a company that’s done an awesome job of developing an active and engaged community around their brand. They manage a buzzing Q&A forum which is frequently the first port of call for site owners and SEOs looking to get quick, informed answers to their queries.

Of course, you have to be a “pro” user of Moz in order to ask or answer questions in the forum (anyone is able to view and search it, however), ensuring that members have to stick around if they want to retain access to the resource – whether or not they utilize any of the other tools available to Moz Pro members.

7. Get non-users hooked

Can non-customers access your product?

If you answered no, you could be letting some highly-qualified, potentially long-term customers pass you by.

An excellent way to get a customer hooked on a product is to offer a free trial. Another is to offer the customer free, unlimited use ofpart of your product.

Moz does just this with their Q&A forum (mentioned above). Anyone can search the forum and read posts, but to actually ask questions, they have to sign up.

Buzzsumo does the same. Non-customers can perform a few basic searches with the tool, but the results they can access and the features they can use are limited unless they sign up for a Pro plan.

If anything, offering limited access is even more effective than offering a free trial. It means users aren’t restricted to a day or a week of use. They can use the tool as much as they want. The consequence is that the tool becomes ingrained into their life and workflow.

If they ultimately become a paid customer, you can rest assured they’re going to stick around, simply because they already understand and are actively utilizing the benefits of the product.

8. Prove your product’s value as quickly as possible

Most new customers will join on the promise of the value your product can offer them, meaning that you won’t get them hooked until you’ve delivered on your word.

If you take too long to demonstrate that, yes, your product does live up to the claims, very few new customers will stick around, and your churn rate (and your pride) will suffer.

The trick here is to establish two key things:

1. What do you need to prove to your customers in order to convince them to stay?
2. How can you accelerate the speed at which that point is proven?

Twitter did an awesome job at this. They discovered that new users who followed lots of other users from the get-go were more likely to stick around than those that didn’t. Consequently, Twitter made following people part of the sign-up process.

8. Make your website a hub of sales and branding

To begin transforming more one-time customers into repeat buyers, the first place that requires attention is your website itself. As a general rule, you should always be working to improve, optimize, and test new ideas on your website. Other types of businesses can afford to have slightly out-of-date websites, but not in ecommerce. In order to continue building a sustainable and profitable business, you have to constantly be working to ensure that you’re always providing your customers with the best experience possible whenever they decide to visit your website again.

You also have to be willing to use your website not only as a place to showcase and sell products, but also as a tool and platform for driving more sales.

There are three tactics you can implement on your website this year to get customers to buy again:

Tactic #1: Make your website fast and the shopping experience easy. If your customers do decide to return to your website again after purchasing from you, it’s essential that you create a fast, easy, and positive experience for them. Remember: if you can get them to buy from you more than once, their lifetime value is going to continue increasing steadily over time.

To ensure that your one-time customers have no trouble buying from you again, make sure:

• Your website is accessible across all devices.
• Your homepage hasn’t become overly cluttered or too unfamiliar since their last visit.
• Your website loads fast across all devices. You can check by using the PageSpeed Insights tool from Google.
• Your customers can easily find the account sign in button anywhere on your website. This can enable them to save more time during the checkout process.

Tactic #2: Use pop-ups to give returning customers a reason to buy again. Pop-ups can also be a great way to encourage past customers to buy from you again. A lot of pop-up tools give you the ability to target visitors based on whether or not they have purchased from you in the past. With that in mind, consider building pop-up campaigns that allow you to:

• Tell returning customers about special offers only available to them.
• Direct former customers to newly released products or newly stocked inventory.
• Encourage them to sign up for your VIP email list to receive special deals and early-access invitations to new products.
• Cross-sell related items that you think they’d be likely to buy based on past purchases.
• Remind them of any items that were left in their shopping cart during their last visit.
• Perform surveys that help you better understand what products your customers are looking for.

Example from Fabletics

Tactic #3: Understand your customers better by incorporating list building opportunities everywhere. You can also add opt-in forms throughout your website in an effort to get to know your returning customers better. Instead of adding the same standard email list building form in multiple places throughout your website, consider creating unique forms that incentivize people to sign up for different reasons. This will allow you to gain more information about the interests of your customers.

For example, if you ran a men’s outfitter ecommerce store, you could create different forms for based on the different categories of products that you sell. In this example, customers might only want to receive updates and information about hunting clothing. Or, they might only be interested in fishing gear. To find out which customers are interested in which products, create separate list building forms for each primary product category in your catalog.

10. Encourage your customers to follow and interact with you on social media

If you’re already investing a lot of time and energy into email and website tactics, the next area you can turn to do drive more repeat sales is your social media channels. Aside from email, social media is one of the best tools you can use to communicate and engage with your customers and loyal advocates. It’s all about getting in front of your customers as much as possible, and to do that, you need to go where they are.

Establish which social networks your audience are most active on and, if you’re not already using them, set up a new account and begin building your following.

You will, of course, need to encourage your customers to follow you. Following them is a start, however you can also offer incentives such as access to exclusive tips, discounts, or competitions. if you’re successful, you’ll benefit from the fact that engaged customers spend an average of 30% more with the brands they follow:

Here are three tactics you can try in order to engage your customers and drive them back to your website again.

Tactic #1: Post user-generated content. Your Facebook and Twitter followers don’t want to see your perfectly staged product photos all the time—they want to see your products being used in real-life. One of the best ways to remind customers how great your products are is by encouraging everyone who buys from you to share photos of themselves using your products on your social media pages.

To drive this type of user-generated content, you can:

• Create a custom hashtag for customers to use when posting photos of your products, or looking for photos of your products that have been taken by other customers. The goal here is to create a movement—a platform for customers to interact with each other and share their excitement and experiences using your products. You can also incorporate the photos you get from customers into your product pages. This is done most often through Instagram using apps and tools that connect seamlessly with your merchant platform.
• Run a contest that asks customers to post a photo in order to enter to win a prize.
• Collect stories from your best and happiest customers, then feature those stories with your social media followers on a regular basis—like every Friday afternoon.

Tactic #2: Invest in social advertising. You should be willing to allocate some of your marketing budget toward Facebook and other social network ads that get your products back in front of your customers.

Tactic #3: Launch exclusive offers. Don’t be afraid to share exclusive offers and promo codes with your loyal audiences on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. Your customers are connecting with you because they support your business, but they’re also connecting with you to stay up-to-date on your product offerings. Reward them by creating limited-time-only and VIP deals that drive them back to your website and into the shopping cart.

Though not ecommerce related, GrubHub presents a great case study for how you could be using Snapchat to share exclusive offers and promo codes with your most loyal customers:

11. Ace your email marketing

Email can also be an incredibly powerful tool for driving one-time customers to visit your store and buy from you again. At a minimum, you’re probably sending a few transactional emails out to customers when they purchase products from you, and maybe a few offer emails that goes out to your entire list of subscribers, but there’s a lot more that you could be doing to drive one-time customers to buy from you again.

Tactic #1: Turn your transactional emails into sales emails. If you’re sending standard order receipt and shipping confirmation emails out to first-time customers, you’re missing out on a huge sales opportunity. In most cases, the time at which a customer receives an order confirmation email is when they are most excited and interested in your products. Not to mention, these emails have amazing open rates!  It’s the perfect time to provide customers with the information and incentive they need to make another purchase from you. You can build sections onto your transactional emails that include:

• Information about related products
• Special limited-time only offers
• Featured recommended products that could support the product they just purchased
• Opportunities to add more products to the same shipping order before it gets processed

Example from Dollar Shave Club

Tactic #2: Build out a lifecycle marketing program. You can also drive customers to buy again by creating a lifecycle marketing program that allows you to send emails based on certain triggers or actions that your subscribers take. Example of emails you could send include:

• Cart abandonment emails
• Replenish stock emails
• Item back in stock emails
• Special offer email that gets sent out a certain number of days after a purchase
• Win-back emails

To learn more about how to create an effective lifecycle marketing program for your ecommerce business, read through this helpful guide from Rejoiner.

Tactic #3: Share value with customers for free. You can also use email to provide free, educational value in an effort to drive past customers back to your product pages. It’s a great way to nurture relationships with customers, build loyalty with your biggest fans, and leverage your brand as an influencer in whatever space you’re operating in and in relation to whatever pain points your products solve for your customers.

Harry’s, for example, sends email marketing campaigns that educate subscribers about face-washing. It’s not as aggressive as most typical promotion emails you see, but it still gives Harry’s the opportunity to feature their products and drive subscribers toward action.

Example from Harry’s

Tactic #1: Use trigger-based emails.

Trigger-based emails occur when an email is automatically fired off after a customer performs a particular action.

They’re most often used to encourage customers that have placed items in a basket but not checked out to come back and complete their purchase, but they can be a useful customer retention tool too.

For instance, you could use them to:

• Encourage customers to test out a feature they’ve not yet tried.
• Remind a customer that’s not used the product in a while what they’re missing out on.
• Point a customer who may be having trouble using parts of the product towards a resources section or to somewhere they can get assistance.

12. Remind your customers how much value you provide them

Customers rarely understand how a product or service is benefiting them unless you tell them explicitly.

Design a campaign that’s distributed regularly (and automatically, if possible) and includes statistics on how your product has saved (or made) your customers money, helped their business, or improved their lives in some way.

It may scream self-promotional to you, but remember that nobody else is going to communicate your product’s best features for you.

13. Eliminate dead ends

A “dead end” occurs when you provide your customers with an update or key metric (as above), but fail to include detail of what they can to do to improve on this or exploit the information offered.

Whether you’re providing your customer with good news or bad news, the one thing you shouldn’t do is simply say “this happened” and leave it at that. Tell them what to do next; explain how they can use this information to improve a bad situation or make a good situation even better.

This works because you’re going above and beyond simply providing what your customers have paid for – you’re offering incredible value by helping them to make positive changes that contribute to the growth of their business as well.

14. Offer dedicated account managers

What happens once a new customer comes on board? Do you send them a welcome email and then leave them to it?

Quick tip: don’t do that!

Customers stick around if they feel wanted and valued. They also stick around if they have fast and easy access to friendly and helpful support.

If resources allow, assign each customer a dedicated account manager that has the authority to deal with issues as quickly, efficiently, and effectively as possible, and (most importantly of all) in a personalized, one-to-one manner

If that sort of service is too big a stretch for your business, all’s not lost. Offering a responsive, helpful, and personalized support network should be enough to encourage most customers to stick around.

15. Show your customers some love

This hack ties into the one above – it’s all about making your customers feel valued. Offering a timely and personalized customer support network that actually gets things done is a big, big part of this.

But you can always do more.

Random acts of kindness are a surefire way to not only keep your customers, but potentially turn them into brand advocates, too.

Send personalized, handwritten thank you letters. Or a surprise gift. Pay special attention to birthdays or holidays. These are small and simple gestures that might seem insignificant to you, but that make a huge difference in the way customers perceive you and your brand.

16. Be smart with your customer notifications

Have you ever noticed how, when Facebook notifies you about something happening on your account, they provide you with minimal detail in the notification email?

This certainly isn’t accidental. Facebook knows that if you receive an email saying “[X] tagged you in a photo” and you can’t see that photo, you’re going to click through to the site to check it out.

This strategy can really help to boost customer retention, because each time a customer is “forced” to visit your site, they become that bit more acquainted with it and that bit less likely to leave.

17. Market to your existing customers

Most of the time, when we think about marketing, we think about marketing to new customers. But what about your existing customer base? Is there a way for you to up the profitability of your current customers and increase the length of time they stick around?

Short answer: yes.

HubSpot does this all the time. They’ve “got more products that might strike your fancy, additional services that would make you squeal, and who knows what we’ll roll out in the future.”

You don’t even have to market to your existing customers with the aim of extracting more money from them. If all you really want to do is reduce your churn rate, you can use content to market to your customers by educating and informing them.

The more adept they become at using your technology, and the more exposure they have to your brand through mediums such as content, the longer they’re likely to remain customers.

18. Implement an entrance survey

Ask each new customer what made them decide to sign up, and what they hope to get out of your product. This will help you to tailor the service you offer them, ensure that you’ll know what questions to ask in future conversations, and be better positioned to pre-empt their queries.

Best of all, this knowledge could help you to retain their business, should they try to cancel.

19. Implement an exit survey

At the same time, if a customer leaves, you want to know why, right? This strategy might not help you keep a customer that’s already set on leaving, but it will provide you with priceless knowledge and information that can help you to retain other customers, reducing your churn rate overall.

20. Don’t let payment details expire

This one should be obvious, but it’s so often overlooked. And that’s worrying, because it plays a huge role in increasing SaaS churn rates.

Begin communicating with your customers about their upcoming expirations at least 60 days before their card’s actually due to expire. Don’t be afraid to be a little bit aggressive here; email them, call them, send them a letter… whatever it takes (within reason). Once those details expire, it’s far more difficult to get that customer back than it would have been to retain them – they now have to repeat the decision to become a customer.

21. Offer exclusive perks

Offer your paying customers additional extras that are completely exclusive to them. This might mean extra content, access to a community (see point six), specialist webinars, or a bonus tool.

The general idea is to expand your offering as much as possible. The more cool stuff you provide your paying customers with, the more reasons they have to stick around.

22. Include existing customers in your offers

Have you ever noticed how some brands make their best offers available to new customers only? It sucks, doesn’t it? I’ll hazard a guess that it also makes you feel completely devalued as a customer, too.

Preventing existing customers from taking advantage of your best prices and offers is a sure-fire way to drive those customers to the competition. If you don’t act loyal towards your customers, why should they act loyal towards you?

Instead, allow your existing customers to enjoy the same benefits as new customers (with a condition if necessary, like a short term contract).

23. Learn what your customers do before cancelling

Customers tend to perform the same sort of actions shortly before they hit “cancel”. They might start downloading data, deleting users, or, needless to say, visiting the cancellation page.

If you can establish what actions your customers usually perform before they cancel, then you can track your customers movements and intervene once they start showing signs that they’re intending to cancel. And once you can do that, you may be able to step in and prevent them from leaving.

24. Offer alternatives to cancelling

Not every customer who cancels will truly, 100%, want to cancel. Some customers might cancel because they weren’t using the product as much as they thought they would. Some might cancel because the product was too expensive. Others might just be looking for ways to temporarily curb their costs.

A percentage of these customers could be “saved” if you offer them an alternative to cancelling. This might mean offering the opportunity to downgrade their account, offering them a discounted price, or allowing them to place their account on a temporary hold.

Sixteen Ventures tried this and almost overnight, saw a 15% drop in cancellations.

25. Work with your customer service and marketing teams

People only contact customer support when something is wrong, but just because the product works as intended doesn’t mean you’ve retained them.

A customer who is actively interested in your company is one who will refer others to you and, if possible, buy other products. Customer support isn’t enough; your marketing team must get involved. You need to learn more about their situations. What are their struggles with your product or services? Are they leaving your company? Are there concerns you can address?

To gather that information, meet with those working the front lines with your customers. For some, that might be customer support; for others, it’s client managers.

These departments can help you gain insight into the needs of customers and how they vary from leads or your target market as a whole. They should also be able to provide you with hard data if they’ve been performing customer satisfaction surveys. That way, you aren’t just creating content on assumptions.

26. Give them reasons to stay in touch

It’s a hard sell to get people to sign up for weekly email newsletters, especially after they’ve already bought from you. Getting a follow on social media is equally difficult, because nobody wants to see blatant advertising for a product they’ve already bought. Yet, if you want to retain customers, you have to stay in touch in some way or another.

Make sure that the content you’ll be providing for customers is actually something they want. If the emails they get are the same sent out to potential leads, all you’ll be getting is extra people unsubscribing.

Curate and create content that is relevant to them, especially around the product or service they’ve purchased. Some good starter ideas for content could be tricks or tips on getting the most out of the product, showcasing what other customers have accomplished, or simply content that would be interesting to your customer base.

Then, once you have that content created, showcase it when asking people to join a mailing list or follow you on social media. A request alone isn’t effective, but if customers know what they’ll be getting in exchange and it is interesting to them, they will sign up.

27. Provide continued incentives to sticking around

Incentive programs are a great way for encouraging return customers or even future referrals. It’s why nearly every sandwich and coffee shop has a punch out card where the 10th sandwich or coffee is free. It gets customers to come back and build loyalty. Incentive programs can play a major part in retaining customers.

As part of your marketing to them, offer incentives to customers that match what you want from them. Looking for more referrals? Have a reward system for when customers refer people to you that matches what they want. Want to get repeat customers? Offer discounts for multiple purchases or even send little freebies to thank them for their continued business.

The wrong way to do incentives though is to have a sweepstakes or raffle. With those, all you do is make one or a few customers very happy and the rest disappointed. An incentive program should give each person who participates a real reward they can work towards.

28. Never stop adding value

Your product might be the best on the market today, but what about tomorrow? Next week? Next month? Or next year? Markets change. Products evolve. If you sit back and let the competition overtake you, you can be damn sure your customers will leave.

If you want to remain as competitive in a year as you are today, never stop improving your product and adding value.

What other methods have you used to slow down or stop churn in its tracks?