GI Insight and YouGov’s research reveals that the large majority of challenger brands and SMEs do not know how many customers they lost in the last financial year. This is a significant issue for SMEs when a five per cent increase in customer retention rates is estimated to equate to approximately 25 per cent increase in profit.
SMEs and challenger brands need to take retaining customers as seriously as they do gaining new customers, copying the success models of the household name businesses they wish to displace. GI Insight enables SMEs to do just that, by providing simple mar tech solutions and support that gives challenger brands the data collection edge and real time direct marketing capability that blue-ribbon brands take for granted.
Managing director of GI Insight, Andrew Adkins, ‘Any SME wants to win new a customer, but as our research shows they really need to focus more on retaining them. They should start by knowing how many they’re not keeping hold of. We believe that marketing should be simple, and it should work. That means helping you attract more customers, but equally it means holding on to the ones you’ve got.’
Director of Ashworth, Jonathon Grove, adds, ‘Once we recognised retained customers were significantly more valuable than new ones, we went ‘all in’ on making the ones we have happy, and directly marketing to them. We found that six per cent of lapsed customers equated to 55 per cent of total lost revenue from prior year, we just needed to reach out to them. Simple when you think about it – and it had a big impact on the bottom line.’
Further reading on retaining customers
