The entire success of any B2B eCommerce platform depends on how many customers it can bring to the business. With a good B2B eCommerce store, you might convince some customers to buy your products or sign up for your services.
But in the long run, you need loyal customers who come back to your eCommerce store to renew their services or buy more products. That is where you get a steady profit from. The two key factors in determining the number of your customers are customer churn rate and retention.
This blog is a guide, where we will help you understand what customer churn rate and retention rate are. You will also get some tips to reduce customer churn rate and improve customer retention on your eCommerce platform.
Understanding Customer Churn Rate and Customer Retention Rate
What is Customer Churn?
Customer churn or churn rate is the rate at which people stop doing business with an organization or entity. In general terms, it is expressed as the percentage of customers who stop or cancel their subscription to a service in a given amount of time. In simple terms, it measures the loss of customers in a particular period.
For example, let’s say Netflix or any other OTT platform adds new content to their platform and people don’t like it. As a result, they unsubscribe from Netflix or any other OTT platform. Then all the customers who cancel their subscription within that month(let’s say) will be contributing to the customer churn rate.
A simple formula for calculating customer churn is:
(Lost Customers ÷ Total Customers at the Start of the Period) x 100
For example, if your business had 500 customers at the beginning of the month and it lost 15 customers by the end of the month, then the churn rate would be (15÷500) x 100 which is 3%.
“The bottom line is, you need a low churn rate if you want your business to grow and have more customers.”
What is the Customer Retention Rate?
Customer retention rate is the percentage of pre-existing customers who remain customers for your business after a given time.
Retaining a customer in business is crucial. No one wants one-time customers. If you have people revisiting your eCommerce platform for doing business, it is a good sign.
This indicates that people love doing business with you. For your business to grow, you want people coming back to you and hence you need a better customer retention rate.
How to Reduce Customer Churn Rate and Improve Customer Retention: 6 Tips
Tip 1: Always Ask for Feedback and Act On It Aggressively
Honest Feedback is As Valuable As Gold
As Elon Musk said in an interview, “Honest feedback is as valuable as gold”. If taken in the right context, customer feedback can help you understand your shortcomings. You never really know the problems your platform or business has until someone points them out.
Feedback from fresh eyes can give you an idea of how customers are seeing your products and services. This gives you all the opportunities to improve them. So always seek customer feedback and try to act on it as soon as possible.
Proactive Communication is Always Good
Just don’t wait for the customers to reach out to you for feedback. As a business, it is your responsibility to ask for feedback proactively. With new social media platforms and messaging apps on the internet, it is way easy to interact with customers.
Many businesses organize regular meets with their customers where they listen to the customer problems and resolve them.
Just try to be proactive when it comes to customer service. Give power to your customer service reps so that they could solve customer issues and not stall them. Your customer service plays the most important role in reducing customer churn rate. All you have to do is ensure that it is world-class.
Offer Incentives
An interesting thing with people is that they forget about the incidents with time but they never forget how it made them feel. As a business, one of your top priorities is to make sure that a customer never feels cheated. This gives a wrong brand image which you always want to avoid.
If a customer gets a defective product or is dissatisfied with your service, you should offer them incentives or replacements. The customer should never feel betrayed by you because if that happens, the customer will never return to your B2B eCommerce store. Chances are, you might get into legal trouble too.
Tip 2: Provide Easy Methods to Reach Out to You
Website
Let’s say if a customer wants to reach out to you, it could be for anything. Maybe they want to place an order or submit feedback, or anything else. What you want to do here is be easily reachable. Your website should have all the pages to connect to you.
Your phone number, email, and postal address, etc. Along with that, many sites also use chatbots to solve basic queries for customers.
Social Media
Social media is taking over now. People are now doing business over Facebook, Instagram, and many other social platforms. Missing out on social media is a disadvantage for you.
All you have to do is create your social media presence. That way people will interact with your business more often. This makes you easily reachable.
Tip 3: Create a Good ecommerce Store
UI
UI stands for User Interface. It is all the visual aspects of your site. Creating that first impression is vital. What you want here is, to make your site look legit and trustworthy. There are whole courses on how colors and images affect our decision-making.
You should create a stunning UI that is welcoming for the customers and the customers feel that your site is worth their time.
UX
UX stands for User Experience and it is how users feel using your site. This counts several factors. From the ease of use to how quickly a site loads, is it mobile-friendly, does it have a good product catalog, etc.?
Your site should be easy to shop from, make sure it has the latest security features and transaction methods. It should load fast. Just remember if the customer doesn’t feel good after using your site for a purchase, he/she is not coming back and that is not good for your customer churn rate.
Tip 4: Always Be Competitive
Brace Yourselves for Change
Changes happen rapidly on the internet and if you are not up for it, you won’t survive here. You should keep an eye on the new trends that are likely to pick up and try to align with them. Also, be ready to make any necessary changes to your b2b eCommerce store so that you can keep up with the competition and provide full services to the customers.
Monitor Your Competition
Monitoring your competition isn’t a bad thing at all especially if you are fighting for rankings and customers every day on the internet.
You can monitor and observe the things other sites are doing for customer retention and what are the things that your B2B eCommerce platform is missing. You can also ask your customers what they want. If those things align with your policies and values, you should give them a try.
Tip 5: Monitor Your Churn Rate and Act On It Instantly
Unless you mess up big time, you are not going to lose customers in a very short period. The churn rate increases gradually and that is why it is crucial to monitor it all the time and take measures to check it at an initial stage.
As soon as you see your churn rate increasing, you have to take all the necessary steps and give it full attention. Reach out to customers who canceled your services and ask them what improvements they want. Try to stop it in the initial tracks itself, that way you can save a lot of damage to your b2b eCommerce store.
Tip 6: Make It Easy for New Customers
New customers can find it overwhelming to start with a new b2b eCommerce platform. And that is one of the reasons why people avoid moving to different services. Because the transition could be a little difficult.
As a business, you have to make it easy for new customers to start with your products and services. Make sure you have good technical content that helps users with your products. How-to guides, product walk-throughs are always good to have.
Closing Phrase
That is all about how to reduce customer churn rate on your B2B platform. By reducing the customer churn, you automatically promote customer retention. In doing so, you will have a solid base of customers who always come to you for products and services. This will help you grow exponentially. I hope this guide helps you in increasing the customer churn rate on your b2b eCommerce platform.
