If you’ve ever run a partnership marketing campaign, you know its success depends on the strength of your marketing partners.
Are your partners:
- Driving sales?
- Encouraging customers to renew your services or buy new products?
- Generating excitement among existing customers?
- Helping you to build a loyal following?
The only way to know is to monitor your customer retention analytics.
Ready to learn how?
Here is our full breakdown on customer retention analytics and why they’re so important.
What Are Customer Retention Analytics?
When we talk about customer retention, we’re talking about the ways you keep existing customers and turn them into brand loyalists.
Customer retention analytics measure those relationships.
By studying key metrics, you can ensure that you’re doing all you can to keep customers and continue to sell them new products or services. These analytics include ways to predict customer behavior and discover purchasing patterns.
By studying the numbers, you can put yourself in a better position to drive new and better outcomes.
Why Do Customer Retention Analytics Matter for Advertisers?
Not sure if your brand can benefit from these metrics?
Here are five key reasons why customer retention analytics matter.
1. Customer Analytics Drive Profits
How?
Customer analytics provide insight into which marketing partners are contributing to your business. Partner insights can make a big difference in your bottom line.
2. Customer Acquisition Costs More than Customer Retention
It costs more to acquire new customers than it does to retain existing customers.
In fact, customer acquisition can cost five times more.
You’ll always have a better chance of selling to an existing customer than to a brand new one. Putting your time into a retention strategy can lower your advertising costs and produce more profits in return.
It’s also easier to sell to loyal customers that support your brand. Marketing a new product to your core customer base costs less than marketing to a new customer who’s never purchased from you before.
3. You Can Measure Customer Experience
Customer retention analytics are also used as a way to measure the customer experience.
Are customers:
- Leaving positive feedback?
- Referring other customers?
- Consuming content on your website?
- Following your social media pages?
It’s easier to maintain customer satisfaction when you have a full picture of their overall experience.
4. You Can Track the Customer Journey
The customer journey goes hand in hand with the customer experience. Every customer behaves differently, so it’s important to understand the points throughout the journey if you want to increase customer success.
Did the customer purchase a new product through an affiliate or partner?
Are you driving sales through direct emails or online ads?
By knowing what marketing efforts have the most impact, you’ll be better able to understand which retention methods are working best.
Understanding customer insights allows you to predict how they may act in the future.
5. You Can Create Sustainable Growth
The more customers you retain, the more your brand will be able to enjoy sustainable growth.
For example, let’s say your average customer buys one product from you per month. As long as you can continue to engage with them and build customer relationships, it’s likely that they will continue to purchase one product per month.
Related: What are Incremental Sales?
What Are the Best Ways to Measure Customer Retention?
Ready to learn how to start measuring customer retention analytics?
Here are five ways to do it.
1. Follow the Formula
Do you know how many customers you’re actually retaining?
With a simple math formula, retention analysis can be easy:
- Pick a specific time, like the end of any given month, and look at your total number of customers.
- Subtract the number of customers you acquired during that month.
- Divide that number by the total number of customers you had at the beginning of that month.
- Multiply that figure by 100.
The result is your customer retention rate.
2. Take a Prescriptive Approach
Analyze prescriptive metrics to learn how to restructure your marketing efforts going forward. These describe and summarize data from the past to help you make future decisions.
3. Study the Predictive Analytics
Predictive metrics use models, historical data, and forecasting methods to figure out what could happen in the future.
You’ll never be able to predict customer behaviors with 100% certainty. But you can use KPIs from the past to make logical conclusions about what may happen next.
4. Look at the Descriptive Analytics
Descriptive analytics provide information and data on things that have already happened. You can use them to summarize different aspects of your business, such as customer purchasing behaviors.
5. Monitor Your Consumption Analytics
Also referred to as outcome analytics, these metrics allow you to understand how customer behaviors relate to certain outcomes. For example, you can gain insight into how customer behaviors are directly related to purchases and sales.
Related: What is Partner Channel Management (and How it Can Boost Profits)
Why You Should Hire an Agency to Monitor Analytics
With so many metrics to analyze and customer data points to track, the best way to monitor your retention analytics is to hire an experienced agency to do it for you. An experienced agency can compile data and analyze the various metrics for you.
With this information, you’ll be able to:
- Determine which marketing partners are producing the best results
- Identify where and how you should shift your marketing efforts
- See where you’re having the most success
- Pinpoint where you’re coming up short on customer loyalty
Related: Should You Hire an Affiliate Marketing Agency?
Customer retention is key to maintaining a sustainable, healthy business.
If customer retention analytics aren’t already a part of your business, it’s time to integrate them. The more information you can arm yourself with, the easier it will be to make decisions for your brand going forward.
Contact Streamline now for more information on customer retention analytics, partner channel management, and affiliate strategies.