Understand why it’s important to pay attention to this stage of the buying journey

There is a certain unconscious relief when the customer finally swipes their card. Goal achieved. Role fulfilled. We’ve already mentioned Kotler’s maxim in another article here: “It costs between 5 and 7 times more to win a new customer than it does to keep a current one”. Therefore, thinking about after-sales is thinking about sales.

If the father of marketing hasn’t yet convinced you to have a lasting post-purchase strategy, here are three good reasons why:

• Buyback

Happy customers buy again. Retaining customers should be a top priority for companies because, as mentioned, there are huge cost savings to be made. Research shows that satisfied customers buy 10x more than new customers, and a 5% increase in the retention rate can increase profits by 25% to 95%.

There is a name for a metric that assesses value in the customer lifecycle, it’s called Lifetime Value, otherwise known as LTV. It measures how much your customers invest in your products or services during their time with your company. In other words. LTV assesses how much your customer has spent with the company over the course of the relationship.

• Decrease customer churn rate (B2B)

For B2B businesses in particular, it is essential to work on customer retention. The idea is to avoid contract cancellations, or churn, as much as possible. The graph below, from HubSpot, shows that a 15% increase in retention in the first week can lead to rates up to 50% higher from the tenth week onwards.

• Chance of turning the customer into a brand promoter

Good after-sales service has the opportunity to turn satisfied customers into fans of the brand, into true missionaries for the business. And the effect of word of mouth is undeniable.

A customer who spontaneously defends the brand is the most effective commercial a business can have.

This is undoubtedly the last step in customer relations that can be reached. This begins and ends with the sale.