While your values shouldn’t change drastically, your positioning should match the mood of the moment. which means make your customer your priority by understanding their needs, talking to your customers and asking for their feedback frequently.
ESTABLISH A CLEAR VALUE PROPOSITION: Loyalty is about catering to the needs of customers. Before you can increase customer loyalty, you should first understand what aspects of your brand are worthy of your customers’ loyalty. Sit down with your team and come up with a marketing strategy that outlines what makes your brand stand out, and how your values align with your customers’ core beliefs.
Specifically, your marketing should focus on those unique brand attributes and where you can stand out from your competitors. Your brand values should be your guiding light. Be firm in your beliefs and communicate them authentically. Conveying this value to customers is far more effective than blindly sending out discounts and deals.
ENGAGE CUSTOMERS: To command interest from customers, it’s important to keep them engaged. Inducing loyalty requires brands to motivate people to embrace them, and interact with them beyond transactions. Your customers are your best brand advocates but don’t leave this valuable marketing tactic to chance. Proactively encourage positive posts from your customers by requesting reviews. Ask customers to share their purchases by including simple buttons that share their purchases across their social platforms. Encourage engagement by turning your social platforms into 2-way communication channels. Reward customers who share your content with a tip of the hat or some other reward. Host contests on Instagram or other social platforms that encourage customers to share pictures of them using your products. Business owner must incentive give customers a reason to take an action, and recognize them for it. Why? Loyalty must be earned, and customers typically expect some reciprocity in the form of points, discounts, or free products as a goodwill gesture from the brand.
For example, a restaurant brand may consider offering an incentive to people who share a picture of their family enjoying a meal at one of its restaurants on social media. In today’s era of social media, sharing photos and experiences is something many customers do anyway. Therefore, encouraging and incentivizing such behavior is often all a customer needs to engage—and the end result is a genuine experience.
BE RELEVANT: To win loyalty, it’s essential that business provide meaningful contents. Relevant and personalized messages not only build trust with customers, but to add values to keep brands in top of their mind to make product recommendations or even reach out to you on special occasions. As your business grows, your offerings change. Experience teaches you which goods and services sell and which don’t provide sufficient returns on your investment. Turn to existing customers when it comes to deciding what offerings to eliminate and where opportunities exist. It also offer great opportunities for upsells and cross-sells
OFFER A LOYALTY PROGRAM: Show your appreciation with a loyalty program
To build customer loyalty, it helps to incentivize repeat purchases with special offers, discounts or perks. You might even consider creating your own customer loyalty program. There are many different types of loyalty programs, such as those based on points systems—the virtual equivalent of the coffee shop punch card. By giving your customers some kind of reward, you make them feel good about purchasing and motivate them to keep coming back. Loyalty programs like these help your customers feel valued and appreciated, while also providing valuable customer data you can use to improve your customer experience. These tactics can bolster your results in the short-term, but because they’ve become so commonplace, they can sometimes fall flat when it comes to building a meaningful relationship with your customers. You should also strive to serve your customers by creating a good customer experience and living by your corporate values. Together, these efforts can help turn repeat customers into loyal customers. Also, Companies may also consider working with complementary, outside partners to offer additional value to customers and extend the reach of their brand. Customers, in turn, will build more affinity for brands if they receive greater value from them.
PROVIDE EXCEPTIONAL CUSTOMER SERVICE: For new and existing customers, you want to provide the best possible experience. Your customer experience includes everything about the way your customers interact with you, from the moment they first land on your website to when they call and ask your customer service team for assistance. People have high expectations, especially for customer service. A study we conducted with Dimensional Research showed that 89% believe a quick response to an initial inquiry is important when deciding who to buy from. Couple that with the fact that nearly half of people say they would switch to a competing brand after just one bad service experience, and it’s not hard to see why an emphasis on customer service is so important to building brand loyalty. To respond quicker to customer requests, you can start by expanding your channel offerings. Taking an omnichannel approach to customer support will allow you to provide a fast, helpful experience no matter where your customers are reaching out to you.
ASK FOR FEEDBACK: If you’re looking for ways to build customer loyalty, you should be asking your customers for feedback every chance you get and Pay close attention to customer complaints, because those are warning signs about the health of the customer relationship. Customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys are commonly used following a support interaction, and they give you an indication of how happy your customers are with the help they received. You can also ask your customer service team members to share anecdotal feedback about how customers are responding or common issues they are encountering in the tickets they work on. Beyond surveys, you can also look at social media activity or analyze online reviews. No one likes to get negative reviews, but negative reviews can actually help you because they pinpoint the exact areas that need improvement. Plus, taking customer feedback seriously shows customers and prospects that you care about them and are committed to providing a good experience. This can help increase satisfaction and build loyalty.
Building customer loyalty is really about building relationships. As with any relationship, it takes time and effort to establish trust, and an ongoing investment to keep the relationship afloat. Loyalty and retention can’t just be bought—they have to be earned. To improve customer loyalty, look to your customer experience and do everything you can to make your customers’ lives easier and hopefully, more enjoyable.
