In life, customer loyalty is one of the virtues you needed utmost, and when it comes to business it is the one for survival, really! Did you know that 20% of existing customers can upsurge 80% of your future profits? If not then ready to get dive in.
These demographics undoubtedly show why loyal customers are so important for boosting your brand profits. You’ll never lose your dollars if you hold onto your existing customers. As they are the ones who would do more to advertise your brand than the media.
Therefore, if you want to get a piece of that valuable pie measure customer loyalty. This meant that analyze how satisfied your customers are with their experience. And what is the probability that they would share that experience with their friends and family?
Additionally, sharing some values with your customers and thinking out of the box yet focusing on your strengths are some of the tips to grow your brand. However, brands are still finding customer loyalty extremely difficult and face several challenges.
We will try to address all these concerns faced by the brands one by one in this guide.
So let’s get started.
What Are the Challenges to Building Customer Loyalty?
Nowadays, customers’ enticements are on hitting up the top-notch as they are surrounded by multiple brands or digital platforms. Because of such myriad buying options brands are facing challenges to build their customers’ loyalty.
In today’s hyper-competitive market space, building a connection with customers is worth the effort. The loyal customer stays with your brand because they know that you have the best products and services to deliver. Therefore, they feel pleased shopping with you!
Furthermore, crystalizing brand loyalty through social media doesn’t mean just reaching out to your customers. Instead, it means responding swiftly when people reach out to you. To beat this challenge a brand must have to hire someone for replies because when you are fast customers start to remember you as the brand that’s there for them.
Focus on Your Strength and Quality of Service
Moreover, keep a bull’s eye on your strength. Why? Because your brand loyalty doesn’t strengthen when you try things for all the people. This doesn’t help you to stand out! For that, you have to be niche-specific and target a single segment of society. For instance, think about Lyft, same as uber, but don’t try to beat it. Instead, it offers carbon offset for climate-aware riders.
Likewise, don’t compromise on your service or product’s quality. As if you do then even your existing customers don’t shy away from sharing their disenchantment with others. Plus, they will continue this all over the internet which can make it difficult for your brand to control the influx of negative narratives.
Similarly, another challenge for brands is to establish an emotional one-to-one connection. For this, your brand has to act like a human being who has a wonderful heart with heavenly emotions in it, really! Because customers now are getting attracted to emotional loyalty more than anything else. Hence, your brand’s emotional connection can act as a catalyst to build up brand loyalty.
Lastly, you can overcome all of the above challenges by managing and strategizing each and every move. Whether it is on social media platforms, your services, values, niche, advertisements, and obviously the product.
What are the Master Ways to Build Permanent Customer Loyalty?
It is not hidden that living souls need belongings. It’s why they are loyal to their loved ones, the same is the case with brands! They have to tap into this search for belonging and when they do it, they cherished their success.
As when a brand gives loyalty, it will return back to it through its customer base. So, let’s learn further how to foster loyalty among customers.
1. Increase the Probability of Selling to Existing Customers
Want to increase 60-70% of your brand’s selling probability? If yes, then make sure to engage your existing customers as they are the ones who know your brand’s products and services. And when you introduce novel products, they are more likely to try them out as compared to new customers.
Hence, don’t neglect them as the new customer base cost you more and their selling probability is just 5-20%, pretty low right? Try to focus on your existing yet loyal customers as they are the ones who have already fallen in love with you.
2. Increase Positive Customer Feedback
Do you know what is more important for your brand’s improvisation? Reviews and feedback, are one of the most prevailing tools for establishing brand loyalty. For that, your customer must feel a connection with your brand’s products or services and is ready to show his/her honest experience in terms of feedback.
After this, your brand can effectively use these endorsements and grow its business accordingly. Additionally, customer loyalty-building programs are a must-have! Especially for those who want to enjoy long-term success and solid brand positioning in their target market.
3. Build a Community of Brand Ambassadors
As fancy as it sounds what does it hints at to build a community of brand ambassadors? Well, it means making a pool of loyal customers so that they can proactively endorse your brand among their loved ones. In other words, they’ll become loyal brand ambassadors.
So, the question arises that how you’ll do it. The answer definitely lies in the perks or relatability your brands offer to its customer. One of them is Loyalty programs where your brand not just addresses the discounts but also the added value their products induced in each customer’s life.
For instance, Amazon Prime offers its members value-added proposals like cost-free shipping, quicker delivery, a more personalized shopping experience, complimentary music streaming, as well as movies/TV series via Prime Video for just 99$ for one year. Through this, they create a tribe of loyal customers.
To add value to your loyalty program you can also associate it with a charitable cause whose ambassadors are from the community of your loyal customers. And these brand evangelists not just come back to you again and again but also assist you in further endorsements.
You can use social media management tools to effectively engage with your ambassadors and audience on different social media platforms. Moreover, you can also check the response and feedback from different social channels in a single dashboard, making it easy to make the next decisions.
4. Drive Business Profits
It is a proven fact that retaining an existing customer is more economical than acquiring a new one. Although it is significant to charm a new customer it is noteworthy that boosting customer retention will eventually drive more profits.
Just take the example of Starbucks a brand that runs a customer rewards program to escalate customer retention. Hence, they are giving some personalized offers to their customers like you can get free drinks and food. Therefore, if you actually want to wow your topmost regulars, just throw a jamboree!
So, for two brands with identical sales revenue, the company that vends more products to repeat customers will have obviously advanced earnings. Besides a happy clientage customer loyalty is beyond that. Basically, it’s the chief key by which your brand is able to maximize its profitability.
5. Offer Customers an Omnichannel Marketing Experience
Delivering a consistent brand experience to your customer from multiple marketing mediums is a great way to bring loyal customers on board. So, if you want to know what exactly is omnichannel marketing then please do read this further!
Your customers might use manifold channels for interaction such as your brand’s mobile app, your physical on-ground store, your website, or social media sites. The emphasis of omnichannel marketing is to certify that our customers relish a steady brand experience regardless of the medium they choose.
This consistent experience of your brand across several touchpoints means that you need to focus on your customers so that they get the same message across multiple devices and channels. All the users should get experience in an equivalent way and have access to the same promotions and offers, you’re giving to your in-store customer.
That is why your omnichannel marketing strategy should deliver omnichannel loyalty programs that reach out to all your customers anywhere and anytime regardless of their medium of engagement.
To make sure the program is effective you can rely on sales management tools that centralize all your sales data generated from multiple platforms. This will give you a clear idea of how and where you need to improve your digital marketing strategy for the products or services you are offering.
6. Decrease the Cost of Acquiring New Customers
By now, you undoubtedly learned that the key to successful branding and revenue progress isn’t just bringing in new customers. But it’s all about retaining the existing customers you have. Bain & Company studies found out that snowballing customer retention rates by just 5% can upsurge profits by 25-95%.
In addition to this, running after a new customer can be 5-25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. Therefore, it’s absolutely strategic to invest so much time and resources in retaining existing customers over new ones.
You can do this by using SMS marketing tools to send personalized offers and discounts to your loyal customers. Also, you can tap other cross-channel platforms to push notifications on discounts and benefits you are offering.
7. Incentivize your Referral Program
Want to galvanize customer loyalty? Then introduce them to referral programs that have some core areas such as targeted promotions, personalized incentives for customers, and robust brand networking.
Before we went further, it is vital to know what loyalty and a referral program do. So basically, a loyalty program inspires clients to make repeated purchases from you, whereas a referral program moots your customers to get their loved ones to shop from your brand.
For instance, Bombas bring up the ‘refer a friend program which illustrates that when your friends & family buy something from Bombas they’ll get 25% off, now that’s a smart hack! Likewise, Riff Raff & Co. offers a cost-free toy worth 68$ for every 5 referrals.
Therefore, peppering your customers with some perks is the best way to boost your brand profitability as well as customer loyalty. Also, you can use youtube monetization strategies to not only promote your program but also earn some quick cash.
8. Personalized Your Marketing Programs
In this fiddle-footed competitive market space, customers are getting attentive to various brands. For this matter, the most effective way of speaking directly to your customers is via personalized marketing. This can magnetize a segment of customers and helps to build trust.
After a while, your customers will be able to make a distinction between your brand and the others. Long story short you just need some amount of customer data to deliver personalized marketing messages. Like their shopping preferences, history of their buying decisions, their timings to shop, or their responding time.
Moreover, if you have a loyal tarn of repeated customers, then they don’t want to be fed with some generic marketing messages. Instead, they expect personalized posts/emails that speak to them one-to-one and eventually cater to their needs.
For instance, take the example of Netflix which is our household buddy. Apart from their remarkable content strategies the company uses some algorithms to deliver customers personalized recommendations on the basis of what they view or browse.
By using this strategy, your brand can make offers, discounts, and promotions that boost buying decisions. And the cherry on top, if you use an email marketing tool, then personalizing your emails can help lift your lead generation. In fact, they can deliver 6 times higher transactional tolls than generic emails.
9. Use Customer Feedback to Strengthen your Brand
Gone are the days of one-way marketing communication channels – where brands spoke and customers responded. Today, it is the customer who speaks and brands need to listen carefully. One of the best ways of displaying that you value the opinions of your customers and that they are important to you is by asking for their opinion and actively incorporating those ideas into your products and services.
When you ask a customer for their opinion or to share their brand experience, it makes them feel like you care – knowing their opinion matters will encourage them to openly share their ideas and experiences and make them feel a part of the brand which in turn can encourage brand loyalty.
Why do your customers choose you over a competitor? What needs and values do they have that you fulfill better than others? Some answers to these questions are already out there, both in the feedback your customer service team receives and in the comments people leave on social media. Don’t stop there though—it’s just as important to ask for feedback directly.
Targeting new generation millennials
Building brand loyalty with millennials? Reaching out is particularly important. Research shows that millennials’ brand loyalty is reserved for those companies that actively reach out to engage and ask for customer opinions.
What’s more, the benefits of feedback requests go beyond the millennial cohort. When you ask for customers’ opinions, you show that your buyers matter, and that’s important. Almost 70% of churn happens because customers feel like a company doesn’t care.
Miao Miao features customer testimonials on their homepage. If they see you incorporating their ideas, opinions, or suggestions to improve your brand, not only will you have earned their respect and loyalty, but it can make them your strongest brand advocates.
Even a customer who gives you negative feedback can be converted – provided you can address their disappointment or grievance quickly. So always have an action plan on how you can deal with negative feedback and bring the customer back to engaging with your brand.
There are several ways in which you can collect customer feedback including via email, customer satisfaction survey tools, social media, your website, or online review sites. You can also use personalized email surveys to connect with customers – just make sure you have strong email deliverability.
Build Customer Loyalty – Final Summary
Brands that want to build a loyal customer base for their business need to actively invest their time and efforts in strategies that encourage brand loyalty.
It doesn’t matter how big or small your business is – by incorporating steps to drive customer loyalty you can effectively build a pool of repeat customers who could also become your biggest brand ambassadors.
In life and business, relationship matters, and relationships take work. Investing in brand loyalty means showing your customers that you care, asking them what they need, and responding to their requests.
Create conversation. Make it clear that your customers are an important part of your community. Earn their loyalty and you won’t just keep great customers. You’ll create brand ambassadors that spread the word and expand your community. It’s one of the most satisfying ways of driving growth that you’ll ever see.
More from Smashitbuck: Do check out my other articles on the conference call platforms, inspirational quotes, and leadership qualities to improve your work life.
.
