Retention Is The New Acquisition
March 11, 2010 – 12:36 am | by Daryl Tay
Customer Retention - Seafood
Two nights ago, a friend brought a couple of us to this little coffeeshop that sold seafood in Serangoon. The food was pretty good and to our surprise, the owner gave us a free dish (fish head curry, to be precise) for us to try. The owner made an intentional effort to come out twice during the night (although he also cooks the food) to make sure everything was fine.
Over dinner, I made the point to my friends (both business graduates) that this really is the way businesses should market themselves.
Why spend all that money on the bus ad or print ad that people see and forget in an instant, with the hope that it will serve as an acquisition strategy and bring in new customers? Instead why not delight your customers who have already voted with their wallets to buy from you and encourage to come back time and time again?
Needless to say, in the two days since then I’ve told four other people about it and will soon be bringing my family to check it out.
So what are you doing to get your customers to come back? Or are you letting your competition put in that little bit of extra effort to enhance the customer experience and win them over?
Ps: The idea of using retention isn’t new (nor mine) and you can read Joseph Jaffe’s new book Flip The Funnel to find out more, but I thought this was a great case study to practically illustrate how it can be done.
Pps: The address of said coffeeshop is Blk 153 Serangoon North Ave 1 #01-512 (and no, I was absolutely not incentivised by the store to share this with you.)
[image credit: jensen_chua on Flickr]
Tags: acquisition strategy, bus ad, business graduates, coffeeshop, fish head curry, flip the funnel, joseph jaffe, print ad, serangoon
4 Responses to “Retention Is The New Acquisition”
By Isman Tanuri on Mar 11, 2010 | Reply
Spot on, Daryl! Till this day I don’t understand why some businesses can be so grumpy and alienate their customers.
It’s just that little touch of humanity that makes said difference between a casual customer or a lifetime patron.
By Daryl Tay on Mar 11, 2010 | Reply
@Isman: Thanks! Yes it’s a well-known statistic that it’s cheaper to retain customers rather than attempt to acquire new ones, but yet organisations continually throw money down the drain in hopeless acquisition strategies.
By XR on Mar 13, 2010 | Reply
Yes, retention is definitely the way to go. I think much has been said about how retention is key, but to actually go about implementing decent service that will attract customers to come back might be a little difficult.
Eg. Vendors can strive to provide good service, but if one of the staff fouls up, all previous efforts at trying to retain customers would have been reduced to nought. I’ve personally experienced good service, went back.. and then service is subpar (because service providers are humans and are bound to suffer from the occasional PMS).
PS. I think organisations should “throw money” (in your words) down the training institutions’ drains, perhaps then service standards might improve. :p
By Daryl Tay on Mar 14, 2010 | Reply
@XR: Yeah and that’s where I’m coming from with it.. Sometimes the problem with big corporations is that not everything is under their control (ie which employee is having a bad day) which is different from the example i gave with the shop owner. But yes, throwing money into training would probably be better than yet another bus or taxi ad!