Amanda Stillwagon As Chief Marketer for Small Business Trends, Amanda oversees online marketing, email marketing and social media marketing for the Small Business Trends group of sites.

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  1. That’s true. Cause when it comes to selling, branding is everything. So if you can increase the retention of your brand in your customer’s minds even by just 5% then they will be more likely to get more sales.

  2. How much does it cost you to get one new customer, if you have lost one old customer?

    • not much, i think. because of the endorsement/word of mouth publicity you get from your satisfied old customers.

  3. The Bain & Co study you cited was published in 2000, which makes it 14 years old at time of publication, and 16 years old now. Not to mention that the study’s methodology is based on a previous study done 10 years before that, so really we’re dealing with marketing strategies developed from studying customer behaviour in 1990. Actually, if the study was published in 1990, it’s reasonable to assume they had collected the data over a period of time before then, so you’re actually basing this on consumer behaviour from the late 1980s. At this point, do we really want to trust that consumers behave the same now as they did then?

    • Doug, while you’re right about old data, most of what is being quoted is simple math. More churn, lower profits; it’s unassailable. And, Fred Reichheld, the Bain source evolved the same concept into the most widely used measure of “customer success”, the Net Promoter Score methodology…which is based on this unassailable math. Now, if what you choose to say is that the way buyers communicate today is different that 20 years ago, you’re absolutely right. In fact, your promoters and detractors have an even greater influence on new buyers due to the efficiency of communication and the use of peer information by evaluators. So, while your post is 2 years old, I would imagine that my feedback applied equally two years ago as it does today. Apparently, you read and are familiar with the Loyalty Effect work, so why are you so negative about what most would think is more-or-less intuitive. If you wanted to criticize this article, I would have thought you would have leaned on the fact that it fails to deliver much in the area of new concepts or original thought and synthesis of ideas. But, to suggest that the information is invalid I suggest may be misjudging if not also misleading.

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