What customer retention is, with nothing fancy in it

Customer retention, with nothing fancy in it, is knowing when each customer should be back and doing something small and human when that date arrives. Everything else in the field, the segments, the automation, the prediction, exists to do this for thousands of people without forgetting anyone.

What does retention look like in practice?

A customer comes in. Before they leave, you know when they should be back. Six weeks for a haircut. Six months for a dental check-up. Thirty days for a bag of dog food.

On that date, if they have not booked, someone sends a short note. From a person, with their name, about the thing they actually had done. If a week passes and there is still nothing, someone calls.

That is the whole core. A haircut shop can run it on a paper diary. A pet food shop can run it on a spreadsheet. The only thing that scales badly is the memory of the person doing it, which is why software gets involved later.

Why is a monthly newsletter not retention?

Because it has no date in it. A newsletter goes to everyone on the same day, whether they bought yesterday or a year ago. A customer who is due this week hears the same words as a customer who is not due for two months.

Most businesses skip the very first step. They never write down when each customer is due, so a reminder has no date to fire on. Then they send one monthly newsletter to everyone and call it retention. In my experience the newsletter is the most expensive way to feel busy.

I am not saying newsletters are useless. They keep your name in people's heads. But the thing that brings someone back is a message that arrives when they are about to forget you, and about something they care about.

What goes in the "next due" field?

A date. The only trick is where it comes from.

• If the product has a natural cycle, use it. A bag of dog food lasts about a month, a check-up is booked twice a year, a service has a schedule.
• If customers order irregularly, use the person's own rhythm. Take the typical gap between their last few orders and add it to their last order date. Someone who orders every five weeks is due at five weeks, whatever the average customer does.
• If there is no cycle at all, pick a sensible follow-up point after the purchase, such as two weeks for "how is it going", and treat it as a first guess you will correct later.

Do not worry about accuracy at the start. A rough date you act on beats an exact date nobody uses. After a few months you will see which dates were wrong and fix them.

What are the parts of retention?

I find it easiest to think of four parts, and every tool you will ever see maps onto them.

1. A date. When the customer should be back.
2. A message. What you say when the date arrives, in the words of the thing they bought.
3. A person. Who sends it, and who calls if there is no answer.
4. A check. Later, did the people you contacted come back more often than similar people you did not contact?

The fourth part is the one that gets dropped, and it is the only one that tells you whether the other three are worth the time. I come back to it in how to know a campaign worked.

Where does software come in?

When the list outgrows a person's memory. A retention CRM is a system that keeps the dates, picks the customers who are due and puts them in front of someone with a suggested action. I wrote down how that works for online casinos in what a retention CRM is. The industry is specific, the idea is the same for a clinic or a shop. I build software for this, so you should know I have a view.

If you already have a CRM and want to automate parts of it, I wrote about what to watch so CRM automation does not break as you grow.

My advice for a small business is to hold off on buying anything until the four parts above work by hand for a couple of months. A tool that automates a process you do not yet have just sends the wrong messages faster.

What if I sell to people who never come back?

Then retention for you is mostly a referral and review question, and the next-due date becomes a date for asking: how did it go, would you tell someone. It is a smaller game, but it is still a date, a message, a person and a check.

What can you do today?

Open your customer list. If you do not have one, open whatever holds your orders: a booking system, an invoice folder, a payment export.

Add a column called "next due" and fill it in for the last fifty customers. Use the rules above. It will take an afternoon at most.

Then sort by that column and look at the top of the list: the people who were due and never came. They are your first campaign. You do not need software to write each of them one honest line.

If you change one thing this week, change this one. A spreadsheet column is enough to start.