🥗 Do this to make more money. The Mini Retention Playbook 💰

Heyo, and welcome back for another bite to chew on

We hope you're having one hell of a weekend and are ready to slam the week ahead.

But before you go ahead and do that, let's talk about one of our favourite topics…

Drumrolls, please…

Retention

Now, a lot of people (including ourselves at times) are good at saying, "Oh, retention is the name of the game."

But…

Few actually give you their battle-tested and proven ways of increasing retention.

So we figured… that's what we'll do today.

But but but but but but….

Before we dive in - we just wanted to let you know that our 3rd co-founder Ankit is launching his brand new newsletter this week.

… and you really don't want to miss out on this

Ankit is the genius behind all of our branding and UI/UX strategy at Obvi, Paw Rangers, and Chew On This.

Do yourself a favor and click here to join his newsletter. (Tbh: it has the potential to be one of the best newsletters in DTC. Ankit is nothing short of a genius)

Also, btw - we know we said we would send the free resource in this week, but as things got hectic we couldn’t get to it.

You’ll have it in your inbox tomorrow though, so watch out for that

The Mini Retention Playbook - Part 1

First of all, there are tons of retention plays out there.

… and we won't be able to cover all of them in this one newsletter

So instead, this is part 1 of a series of actionable retention tactics that you can use to keep your customers longer.

Retention Play #1 - Actually caring about your customers

"If you actually care about your customers, you'll already be miles ahead of your competition" - Wise old man.

No, but seriously.

Actually, caring will get you very far. And what do we mean by that?

We mean:

A) How fast do you respond when customers need help?

B) How well do you respond when customers need help?

For some reason, Customer Service is the least talked about retention play in the DTC space right now.

But it's also where you can probably increase the likelihood of a customer returning the most.

Why?

Because they'll first be like, "wow, they are fast at responding" and then "wow, they really took time to help me".

These two sentences are invaluable.

Sometimes, a lot of you forget that even though we're doing business online - we're still dealing with humans.

But if you just optimize for making your customers say those two sentences about you - we promise you there'll be a higher chance of them coming back.

We’ve written a little bit about how you do this practically in previous newsletters but it basically comes down to two things

A) Having the right people on your CX team and B) Choosing the right CX platform

In this newsletter issue you can read our thoughts on how to build your CX team. As for the CX platform, we’ve been very happy with Gorgias - who is one of the leading CX platforms for eCommerce.

Retention Play #2 - Give them a damn good reason to come back

We often see founders be so heads down in trying to increase retention and LTV by testing this email vs that email. This SMS vs that SMS.

… and even though that's all important

There's something even more important than that, which is:

Giving your customers a goddamn good reason to come back and buy from you

Here are a few good ways to give them a goddamn good reason

- Launch a new and exciting product

- Launch an exclusive offer, only for VIP customers

- Launch a similar and complementary product to the one they already bought

The first one has been super important for us.

Just last year alone, we launched 26 new products, which means one every second week.

So once every second week, we gave our customers a damn good reason to come back and buy again.

If you want to read our Step-By-Step Product Launch Playbook - go here.

Retention Play #3 - Be unconventional when everybody's playing conventional

One of the best ways to make your brand stand out in the customers' eyes is by doing things differently than everybody else.

Period.

Now, this is easier said than done.

But one way we've seen great success is by using direct mail to send personalized postcards to our customers.

You might think, "Direct mail, are you serious?!."

… and yes. We are.

Direct mail can be a hyper-profitable channel to reach your existing customers and get them to buy again.

To be exact, we got a 1000% ROI on our first direct-mail campaign with PostPilot.

So yes, we're serious when we say it works.

One of the reasons why we think it works so well is that a lot of brands haven't really started doing it yet.

Which means…

When we land in the customers' mailbox, they'll be like wow "that's different."

And therefore, they'll actually notice it.

...Unlike the 10000's of Facebook ads and emails that go unnoticed daily.

Check out the latest podcast episode

If you haven’t gotten time for it yet, remember to check out our newest podcast episode with the one and only DTC guy - Nik Sharma (Sponsored by TapCart)

Thanks for reading along

As always, we appreciate you for reading along and look forward to serving you again on Wednesday

All the best,

Ron & Ash