6 Landscaping Customer Retention Strategies That Work

Long-term success in the landscaping industry requires finding new clients and generating repeat customers by building lasting relationships. Customer loyalty is critical because it turns existing clients into brand ambassadors, increases profits, builds trust, creates fans, and generates reliable business.

This article discusses six landscaping customer retention strategies:

1. Exceed Customer Expectations Consistently: Deliver excellent service and quality.

2. Personalize the Customer Experience: Tailor services to individual client needs.

3. Stay in Touch with Customers: Keep in contact with SMS and newsletters.

4. Get Customer Feedback: Use feedback to improve services.

5. Use Customer Loyalty Programs or Referral Incentives: Encourage repeat business and referrals with rewards, perks, and incentives.

6. Offer Ongoing Maintenance Plans: Keep your clients engaged long-term.

Try these, and you’ll see a significant increase in customer retention rates.

1. Consistently Exceed Customer Expectations

Setting expectations means clients know what to expect from the start. Delivering excellent service above and beyond that for your current customers defines your brand image.

Good communication helps you understand and meet customer needs and leads to higher client satisfaction. Use Aspire’s cloud-based CRM to track client preferences and deliver personalized landscaping services that go above and beyond.

Exceeding expectations helps build customer loyalty, prevent clients from moving to competitors, and keep them satisfied even in the off-season.

Now, let’s look at how to personalize the customer experience in your landscaping business.

2. Personalize the Customer Experience in Your Landscaping Business

Personalizing the customer experience is critical to building loyalty and getting repeat customers.

If your customers love lawn maintenance services, you might want to offer them landscape design services.

But how do you know if they would need it?

This is where Aspire’s CRM comes in.

Aspire’s CRM manages your client base and tracks their service history. Your sales team has all the relevant customer data they need—client budgets, past proposals, invoicing, and forecasted projects—to upsell and streamline sales to secure more work.

Let’s talk about staying in touch with customers to improve retention.

3. Stay in Touch with Customers

Staying in touch with customers is key to strong relationships and customer loyalty.

Use email newsletters, social media, and personalized messages through digital marketing to remind clients about your lawn care business. Digital marketing is an excellent way to advertise services relevant to a particular area to existing and potential customers.

Aspire’s Marketing Pro can help you automate targeted ad campaigns to your existing client base. Consistent communication of your services, pricing, and off-season activities maintains a continued customer relationship all year round.

Now, let’s look at gathering customer feedback to improve your services.

4. Gather Customer Feedback

By collecting and implementing customer feedback within services, business owners can build a culture of continuous improvement to stay at the forefront of their markets.

Having strategies for handling difficult landscaping customers makes it easy to seek out and receive customer feedback, even if it's negative.

Aspire’s CRM tracks and analyzes customer feedback so you can make data-driven decisions to improve service quality. Regular feedback collection helps you address dissatisfaction quickly, enhance service delivery, and may lead you to hire a quality assurance manager.

Feedback can also measure customer loyalty using Net Promoter Score® (NPS) metrics.

Let’s look at implementing loyalty programs or referral incentives to retain customers.

5. Implement Loyalty Programs or Referral Incentives

Loyalty programs in landscaping businesses can increase customer retention and generate repeat business. They should be part of your marketing strategy to create happy and loyal customers.

Types of loyalty programs include:

• Points-based systems allow customers to earn points for every service, which can be redeemed for discounts or free services.

• Referral rewards, which incentivize clients to refer new customers by offering discounts or bonuses, are a solid strategy for running any successful landscaping business.

• Exclusive discounts are offered to repeat customers on a limited and exclusive basis.  

Now, let’s look at the benefits of maintenance plans.

6. Offer Ongoing Maintenance Plans

Offering maintenance plans is key to ongoing relationship management for your landscape business.

These plans give customers convenience, as they can have their lawns and gardens looked after without booking individual visits.

For service providers, maintenance plans create consistent revenue streams from existing customers. Good maintenance plans include regular visits, seasonal services, and personalized care for each client.

Maintenance plans keep customers in the off-season by ensuring they remain engaged with your service.

Now, look at how the right software can help your customer experience.

Use the Right Software to Enhance Your Customer Experience

Enhancing customer experience is vital to retaining landscaping clients. The right software, like Aspire’s CRM and Marketing Pro, can help you achieve this. Aspire has CRM features that can help personalize client communications, gather customer feedback, and more.

Marketing Pro can send targeted email and direct mail campaigns to your existing customer base as part of your ongoing marketing campaigns.

Ready to grow your landscaping company customer base?

Book a free demo with Aspire today and discover how our CRM and marketing software can ensure satisfied customers and get new clients.