• Restaurant Marketing

Customer Churn Rate in Retail: What it is, and how to use it

by: Robin Johnston
3 min read

No business wants to lose customers, but it happens. People unsubscribe from your mailing lists, stop visiting your store, and return your products. It is a fact of business. However, if you aren’t tracking those instances, you are missing out.

Defining Loss

When a customer ends his relationship with your store, it’s called “churn,” and it’s usually represented as a percentage called the “customer churn rate.” There are lots of different churn rates. Some include the present value customers bring, while others refer to the lifetime value of a customer. Examples include the percentage of customers who don’t come back, the percentage of sales you lose from those customers not returning, the percentage of people who unsubscribe from your email list, the percentage of people who unlike your Facebook page, and the percentage who stop following your company on Twitter or Instagram, but there are many more. And it all matters.

The Importance of Churn Rate

Churn rate matters for many reasons. For one, there is the cost of acquiring a customer. Marketing can be expensive. If you are losing customers soon after acquiring them, you may not be seeing a return on your marketing dollars. You also have to remember growth. Simply holding steady on revenue means that you will eventually go in the red as your expenses increase with inflation and the general cost of living in your area. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, tracking your churn rate helps you spot issues before they become problems.

Customer Churn Rate in Retail

Using Retail Churn Rate

This last one is extra important in retail. You can use your customer churn rate in a couple of ways. You can use it to see whether you are meeting customer expectations — that’s a given — but you can also use it to see whether the efforts you are taking are working. For instance, if you change the format of your email newsletter and your churn rate rises, it is a sign that your subscribers are not a fan of the new format or content.

Difficulties With Churn

However, there are some difficulties in using churn rates in retail. Unlike some other businesses, tracking your customers can be tricky. For example, certain types of businesses have account managers and salespeople who have direct relationships with clients. In these cases, you have a point of contact for talking about what your customers like about your business or what efforts you could take to retain the business of a customer getting ready to churn. Most retail businesses do not have this luxury.

Depending on your business, you could have a large amount of foot traffic or customers who pay cash. As such, in order to use churn rates in retail, you must rely on sources of business intelligence information, such as having staff survey visitors, or more subtle ways, such as free WiFi.

Improve Your Retail Churn Rate

Solving the Retail Churn Dilemma

When you use an intelligent business service like Bloom Intelligence to provide free WiFi service to your patrons, you get a range of marketing and analytics tools that are perfect for brick-and-mortar locations.

The Bloom Intelligence dashboard displays a wealth of data like how often customers visit, how long they stay, and what time of day they shop by WiFi logins. It also includes a Churn Rate Indicator. Monitoring customer churn and ensuring that the rate stays low is one way to ensure that your customer base grows and adds to sales and profits in each successive period.

Restaurant Marketing FAQs

What is Restaurant Marketing?

Restaurant marketing is the process of getting people to visit your restaurants. Restaurant marketing creates loyalty, provides data to research, analytics, and allows restaurants to gain a better understanding of their ideal customer profile. It utilizes all customer channels: guest WiFi, website, social, rating sites, mobile apps, email, text, and advertising.

Learn More About Restaurant Marketing Here

What is WiFi Marketing?

WiFi marketing is a marketing technique that uses guest WiFi to collect & clean customer data such as names, emails, phone numbers, customer behavior, and demographics. This data is used to personalize marketing campaigns to increase customer loyalty, build online reviews, and save at-risk customers. The performance of every campaign can be tracked down to the tangible ROI of a customer walking back in your door.

Learn More About WiFi Marketing Here

What is Restaurant Reputation Management?

Restaurant reputation management is the process for restaurants to manage customer feedback and creating systems to improve customer experiences, passively build positive online reviews, and save at-risk customers. It is a very important aspect of running a successful restaurant business.

Learn More About Restaurant Reputation Management Here

How Does Bloom Identify and Bring Back Lost Customers?

Bloom Intelligence uses machine learning to identify at-risk customers. When one is recognized, the system will send them a message with an incentive to get them to return and re-establish their visit pattern. Bloom users are seeing up to 37% of churning customers return.

Learn More About Saving At-Risk Customers Here

SAVE TIME, INCREASE CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUES, CREATE NEW CUSTOMERS

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“Working with Bloom Intelligence has been amazing. They assist you every step of the way and work with you hand in hand to make sure you are optimizing your advertising potential. We are excited to use this tool to help learn more about our customers so that we can personally engage with them and understand our strengths/weaknesses.”

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“In these challenging times, it has been a pleasure working with Bloom Intelligence to help facilitate our service offering to our clients. They were extremely responsive and provided support to mitigate risk and minimize revenue loss. Great partner!”

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