How to:
Maintain Customer Retention—Even During a Pandemic
Customer retention is an important concept for every business out there, but especially for customer-service based businesses like yours. As a beauty pro, you rely on your customers for your bread and butter, so it’s crucial to keep them happy, satisfied, and coming back time and again.
Building a network of regular, retained customers isn’t just a nice, customer loyalty perk, it’s actually vital for beauty businesses to survive, meet their bottom line, and make a profit.
Why? Because customer acquisition—you know, attracting a brand-new customer—is substantially more expensive than customer retention. So, you can understand how cost-effective it is to focus on keeping your current customers instead of always pouring in your valuable resources to attract new ones.
This concept is challenging enough in a normal social and economic climate—add in the COVID-19 pandemic and it feels nearly impossible.
Luckily, that’s not the case.
Customer retention in a pandemic is absolutely doable, it just takes some creativity, some commitment, and a little stamina.
There are thousands of unique strategies you can try, but if you’re looking for a little customer retention inspiration to get you started, we’ve laid out some must-try techniques below to get the ball rolling for you.
The Top Tips for Customer Retention During a Pandemic
Ready to retain those customers but aren’t sure where to start? You’re in the right place.
Read on and use these tips as a jumping-off point for your own customer retention ideas. Remember, this is just the start—there are plenty of creative, unique ways for you to retain your clients. The sky is the limit!
Flaunt Those Loyalty Programs
Loyalty programs—often called referral programs or reward systems—are tried-and-true, incentivized strategies that are designed to keep your clients coming back for more. Technically, a loyalty program is a reward system that you set up for your business to offer an incentive for returning customers—it can also act as a way to attract new customers (so, you’re kind of killing two birds with one stone here).
Now is the perfect time to maximize your loyalty program and really get the word out. Think about updating your current referral program—and if you don’t have one, now is the perfect time to build one!
Not sure how to go about setting up a loyalty program? Check out our post here that gives you all the details on creating a loyalty program that makes sense for your business.
Spend Time Promoting Your Brand
Now might seem like a weird time to focus on your brand—you’re probably thinking, “why should I worry about branding right now? I need to get my regulars back in my salon ASAP.”
Believe it or not, spending time promoting your brand initiatives is a great way to retain your existing customers.
Why? Because clients are more likely to stick with and purchase from brands (that’s you) that they believe in, feel personally invested in, and feel connected to.
Focusing on promoting the why behind your company right now can help make those connections between your brand and some of your almost-regular customers—this could be that final link that connects your customers to your brand for good.
Need a little branding run-down? Check out our post here that differentiates brand, branding, and brand identity.
Offer Valuable Virtual Services
No, you can’t do someone’s hair through a computer screen, but you can offer tutorial videos, step-by-step how-to guides, online consult appointments, and even product buying content that can offer your clients serious value. There’s no harm in adding in some affordable online services for your clients.
You can also consider promoting great free content, too, that doesn’t occupy too much of your valuable time—blog posts, Q&As, product reviews, etc.
Upsell Retail Products
The pandemic forced us all to rethink our business strategies—we weren’t able to rely solely on client services anymore and many of us had to scramble to figure out what our new focus needed to be.
For a lot of beauty pros that meant a substantial switch to focusing on product sales.
Listen to Your Customer’s Experiences
You’ve heard the phrase “straight from the horse’s mouth,” right? Asking your customers directly to give you their honest feedback might seem scary and too transparent, but it’s one of the best ways to get a real feel on how you could better retain your existing customers.
Creating a direct line for your customers’ feedback is the best way to ask them specifically what you’re doing right, what you’re doing wrong, and what you’re missing the mark on.
When you prioritize your customers’ honest feedback and then make real, tangible steps to give them what they want, you can adjust their experience and provide them with what they need in order to stick with you.
Feeling a little more comfortable with the concept of client retention despite the current COVID-19 pandemic? We hope so—that’s the goal.
Listen, we’re not claiming this is going to be easy, but as a beauty pro, you know how to hustle and work hard, so we’re not worried about you. We hope some of these strategies can be a solid start for you superstars out there.
Have some customer retention tips and tricks of your own? Share the love, you guys!
Our community is all about helping each other out and building each other up—if you’ve got customer retention strategies that work and you’re willing to let your community in on the secret, drop a comment below!
