In order to retain customers a company first needs attention

There are three distinct sources of revenue in both Business to Consumer as Business to Business:
- New customers
- Existing customers
- Lost customers

New customers

New customers require marketing and lead generation in all possible forms, formats and methods.
Marketing will be mainly by spending significant amounts of money.
The road from marketing spending to a paying customer is long and uncertain.

Existing customers

Existing customers had previously a good reason to buy your products or solutions.
Thus the chances of repurchase are high.
Existing customers can generate a revenue at a lower cost as the marketing can be:
- Addressing the known people in the companies that can make and take the decisions
- Addressing their existing problems
- Proposing the exact matching products or solutions to the problems

Thus there will be fewer costs involved for the same amount of revenue. Research have shown that retaining customer costs 5 times less than acquiring a new customer.

The goal is to achieve customer retention by:
- Good customer service
- Different marketing means:
   o Drip marketing
   o Calling on regular times
   o Visiting regularly
   o Advertising supporting the brand or products

These different marketing means are about getting the attention:
- Drip marketing: the addressed people need to read your newsletters
- Emailing: open and read your emails
- Calling: decision makers need to come on the phone and have a chat with you
- Visiting: decision takers need to accept the appointment with you

Lost customers

This type of customers used to have or had once a good reason to buy.
Regaining their attention and interest is the goal as they can return as a client.
All methods for retaining current customers can be used to regain lost customers.
Reacquiring a lost customer is several times less costly than acquiring a new customer.

Measuring retention by customer

In order to know how well or effective your retention marketing is running, you need to measure your customer retention.
Most companies measure retention after the facts: when the number of existing customers have declined.
Then it is too late to react or to repair.

In order to be pro-active is to measure the visits of your existing customers on your website.
Reasons for visiting:
- Looking for information on their initiative
- Reading your newsletter on your website
- Clicking the link in your email
- Reading your blog posts

If you notice a decrease or just less interest, then chances are your customer retention is slipping.
Time to act proactively.

This is all about getting customer attention that gives an indication of the to be expected customer retention.
People buy, not companies. People visit your website, not companies.
You need to identify your visitors by company name and preferably by individual or unique visitor in B2B in order to be able to measure your retention by customer based upon changes in:
- Pages visited
- Duration of visit
- Time on pages
- Repeat visits
- Origin of visit: direct hit or reference

How many times your acquisition costs are higher than retaining customer and reacquiring a lost customer?
How and when do you measure customer retention?