B2B market research is usually seen as a way to discover ways to reach untapped audiences and sell more products or services.
But it’s also a powerful way to boost customer retention by strengthening current client relationships, increasing their satisfaction, and reducing your churn rates.
Let’s take a look at some key data points and the benefits of using B2B market research to understand your current customers better.
Why customer retention is essential in B2B
Losing existing customers can be catastrophic for any business. An increase in customer churn rates has both obvious and more hidden impacts, such as:
- Loss of revenue as existing customers take their business elsewhere
- Decreased sales means a reduction in overall profits
- Reduction in the lifetime value of that customer – with longer-term effects on the business
- Cost of research, advertising and marketing to find new, replacement customers
- Lower staff morale, possibly leading to decreased productivity
- Possible hit to company reputation as brand perception is tarnished
- Lack of an efficient sales cycle, as there’s a constant stream of onboarding putting pressure on operations
- Depresses innovation and growth as the focus is on constant customer recruitment
Quite simply, it’s cheaper to keep happy customers than it is to find new ones.
Quick statistics:
- Customer acquisition costs have gone up by 60% in the last 5 years: Statista
- 30% of subscribers make up almost 80% of providers’ revenue: PYMNTS
- 2 in 10 of those same subscribers may cancel if they don’t add features to sustain engagement: PYMNTS
The role of market research in understanding current customers
B2B market research isn’t just for new markets, prospective customers and future products.
It helps you really deepen your relationships with your existing customers by hearing what they think of your brand, offerings, communication, and customer service. And you’ll see how these feelings influence their behaviour as buyers.
You get an absolute goldmine of data that informs efforts to strengthen the emotional bonds between you and your audience, like:
- Opportunities for personalisation across the customer experience: messaging, lead magnets and offers
- Actively seeking feedback that makes them feel valued and heard
- Improvements to products or services based on customer suggestions
The insights you get from b2b market research can inform your business messaging, new markets, product/service development, and lead generation strategy.
The benefits of gaining data about your current customers
Understanding, empathy and communication are the pillars of any successful relationship. ScoreApp market research quiz insights are how you embed all three in your connections with current customers. There are so many business benefits to this investment, like:
Proactive customer success
Fix your customers’ problems before they even know they have them! Fulfil their needs with the speed, discretion and smoothness of The Savoy waiting staff. No, it’s not as obvious as refilling the layers of an afternoon tea cake stand in your B2B circumstances. But your data helps you anticipate any issues with your product or service.
For example, your analysis shows that a client isn’t using certain features that could be incredibly valuable. It’s likely that this indicates a knowledge gap. Your customer support team can send the right resources or training, scaffolding their success before they even get around to Googling it.
Personalised engagement
Continual market research into your customer’s needs and usage patterns underpins effective personalisation efforts. It means you can segment target audiences based on various criteria, including industry, buying history, role in the buying team, and stage of their customer journey.
There are key points along the customer buying journey that have common challenges. Creating content to answer these hurdles puts in guardrails for each of your customer segments, to keep them moving in your direction – including post-purchase.
Feedback-driven product development
By establishing an ongoing feedback loop, you continually involve customers in product development. Not only does this make them feel part of the process, but it also shows you value their opinion – not just their payment! This communication strengthens your relationships and promotes customer retention.
It also signals their interest and product-market fit for new products, services and features – before you’ve spent a penny on development.
You launch things your customers have asked for, they buy them, and keep coming back because you keep listening. If you’re really lucky, they’ll drop a new idea no one else has thought of yet!
Examples of key data points to gather that will help increase customer retention
So, what should you be tracking?
Customer satisfaction scores
With ScoreApp, you can track key market research metrics that demonstrate how happy your customers are with your product or service. Such as:
Churn rate
You decide on a particular period of trading and apply the churn rate equation to give you a percentage of how quickly customers are leaving.
Equation: Churn rate = (Number of customers lost ÷ Customers at start) X 100
Customer lifetime value (CLV)
There are 2 steps involved in calculating this equation:
Customer value = Average purchase value X Average number of purchases
Customer lifetime value = Customer value X Average customer lifespan
This puts a figure on how much a client is worth to the company during the course of your long-term relationship.
Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
Calculating your customer satisfaction score begins by asking your clients the following question: ‘Overall, on a scale of 1 to 5, how satisfied are you with your [product/service]?
The scores indicate a range of responses from ‘5 very satisfied’ to ‘1 very unsatisfied’.
Calculating your percentage of satisfied customers includes only ‘4 satisfied’ and ‘5 very satisfied’ responses.
Equation: % satisfied customers = (Total responses 4 + 5 ÷ Total number responses) X 100
Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
Customer acquisition cost is how much your company spends attracting new customers.
Equation: CAC = (Sales costs + marketing costs) ÷ Number of new customers
Net promoter score (NPS)
This metric gives you an idea of how likely your customers are to promote you to other people. It’s based on one question: ‘On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend [brand/service/product] to your colleagues or friends?’
The answers are then organised into 3 groups:
- Score 9 / 10: Promoters – ‘Yay, we love you!’
- Score 7 / 8: Passives – ‘You’re OK’
- Score 0 – 6: Detractors – ‘Won’t be coming back here again’
NPS equation: Promoters – detractors = NPS %
You’re looking for as high a percentage as possible, as a ‘good’ NPS score.
Usage data and patterns
Do you know which of your product’s features are the fan favourites with your different audience segments? What do they never use?
Tracking what products, features and services are most and least used by your customers is crucial so you know how to keep them coming back for more.
B2B market research like conjoint analysis, pricing sensitivity studies, and customer needs surveys give you trackable measures of how people use your products and services. Why would they look anywhere else when you keep delivering exactly what they need?
Feedback Loops
ScoreApp is brilliant for gathering qualitative data about your customer’s experiences, preferences, pain points, needs, and aspirations.
Establishing active feedback loops shows your customers you’re actively listening to them. You show that you value their business by implementing their praise and constructive criticism into the next iterations of your offerings.
Using a ScoreApp quiz for feedback means you can go deeper than a straightforward ‘How did you find the sales process?’ and ask detailed questions that provide you with actionable insights. It also gives your audiences something of value in return, with a relevant, personalised lead magnet.
Customer lifecycle and engagement
Customer retention isn’t about blocking all the exits so they can’t run away. (Strong serial killer vibe!) It’s about making sure you’re at the right place, at the right time, with just the right thing all the way along their customer journey.
You must monitor every touchpoint, so you can spot bottlenecks or loss of engagement quickly. It’s complex for B2B companies to do this successfully without a market research tool like ScoreApp. You’ll likely be cajoling a whole team of buyers, with different perspectives and aims, and you need to engage all of them.
And this isn’t just about sliding them from the top of the sales funnel to your checkout. You need to track what happens after that first sale.
How are you nurturing customers to their next purchase, maximising opportunities to upsell or cross-sell, or giving them valuable content that strengthens your long-term relationship? That’s where whole customer lifecycle metrics help you stop happy customers from shopping around.
Conduct useful market research for your B2B company with ScoreApp
The answer to maintaining high levels of customer retention isn’t found with any one metric. Regularly analysing a range of data points with ScoreApp gives you invaluable insights into your existing clients. This knowledge informs business-critical decisions that help you prepare the perfect customer experience and protect your bottom line.
What do you want to know about your customers? Create a B2B market research quiz right now, for free, and ask them!
