Apple’s iPhone 14 Launch Focuses on Customer Retention

The iPhone’s new features include the Always-On display, the first-ever 48MP camera on iPhone, Crash Detection, Emergency SOS via satellite, and an innovative new way to receive notifications and activities with the Dynamic Island.

Sound impressive? It is!

And a line from the Apple press release gives insight into the primary target of the iPhone 14. “Our customers count on their iPhone every day, and with iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max, we’re delivering more advancements than any other iPhone.”

The primary target for Apple is current customers and customer retention.

Why customer retention? With U.S. smartphone sales declining 6% YoY in Q1 2022, focusing on current customers is critical to Apple’s sales (the iPhone accounted for more than half of Apple’s sales last year). The product launch can make or break a year for Apple and nobody does a product launch quite like Apple!

All companies can learn from Apple and how they approach customer retention. At the center of optimizing your customer retention rates is the alignment of product, marketing, and sales. A few keys to effective customer retention strategies are:

1. Provide customers with a smooth onboarding process (think marketing and sales alignment).
2. Create a customer feedback loop.
3. Keep your products and services top of mind and keep innovating (Apple knows how to do this better than anybody else).
4. Reward promoters and loyal customers.

The State of Marketing and Sales Alignment study, by the research firm Ascend2 and SharpSpring, found that the top KPI to gauge marketing and sales alignment is customer retention. Without a high level of marketing and sales alignment, it is impossible to optimize your customer retention rates.

Customer retention is critical because the cost of acquiring new customers is much higher than retaining existing customers. Retained customers are also more likely to engage in word-of-mouth marketing or become brand ambassadors.

While customer acquisition relies on your ability to reach and attract new audiences, customer retention is more about ongoing engagement, personalization, and value provided over time. Your martech stack is a vital tool that allows you to optimize your retention rates.

(Download the 24-page research report, The State of Marketing and Sales Alignment 2022.)

Many times marketers think about providing a great customer experience as part of the acquisition process but it is equally important (it not more important) as part of your customer retention strategy and It should be consistent across all channels (email, website, social, etc.) and departments (marketing, sales, customer service, finance, etc.).

For companies to improve customer retention, they must have the technology to support their strategy.

How SharpSpring Helps Improve Customer Retention

The SharpSpring all-in-one platform aligns your marketing automation, sales automation, and CRM to provide a seamless customer experience that you can track and optimize.

What are the benefits of an all-in-one platform? With an all-in-one platform, you can personalize each customer experience, improve product education and adoption, and provide feedback loops. No two users are the same and having the right technology in place allows you to automate processes and workflows.

Tools that are unified allow for a better customer experience. A few of the strategies that you will want to unify are:

• Email: Use email to deliver product updates, provide training materials, send evaluation surveys, follow-up messages, etc. Email is an excellent tactic to keep your brand top of mind with your customers.
• Marketing Automation: Use automation to create onboarding material, highlight new product features, and send targeted messages to customers.
• Landing Pages: Build landing pages and landing page funnels specifically for existing customers.
• CRM: Use your CRM to build a Customer Journey. Most of the time, we think of a Buyer’s Journey for customer acquisition, but you can also create a journey for existing customers with the goal of improving customer retention.

A centralized, holistic platform will open new opportunities for you to implement your customer retention strategy and maximize your retention rates.

Learn more.