Last Updated on September 1, 2023 by David
Guest Post by Joe Peters
When it comes to growing a business, it is easy to fall into the trap of getting laser-focused on gaining new customers. More customers equals bigger growth, right?
Well, it is not as clear cut as that. In order to continue to grow, a business has to nurture its existing customer base. Otherwise, the process becomes a revolving door of gaining and losing clients without any real value.
Establishing long-lasting relationships with consumers not only helps you expand the numbers of your customer base, it actually grows profit margins for each customer.
It can cost almost five times as much to secure a new customer than to retain a current one. Improving customer mention rates by just 5% can increase profits by anywhere from 25% to 95%. With these numbers in mind, it’s clear that it pays to improve your customer loyalty.
5 Tips for Improving Customer Loyalty
So, what can you do to nurture relationships with your consumer base? Let’s take a look at some strategies.
1. Reward Your Customers for Loyalty
In addition to providing a quality product or service, you have to create incentives for customers to keep coming back to your business. This means going beyond merely exchanging their money for your products.
A rewards program is the most obvious way to increase the value of your offerings.
With today’s technology, it is easy to enroll your customers in a loyalty program that tracks their purchases or visits. You are probably enrolled in similar loyalty schemes yourself with businesses you frequent.
Another way is to create a VIP experience for your most faithful customers.
By throwing VIP events or offering better incentives for customers that reach VIP status, you can build a real community. Not only does this help forge stronger bonds with your VIP clientele, but it also provides something to aspire to among your new customers.
With that example to strive for, the more recent patrons will continue doing business with you in exchange for the perks.
2. Be Reliable
The easiest way to lose a customer is to provide a bad experience. One negative incident can taint a customer’s view of a business for the rest of their life. Those consumers will talk to their friends too, or leave a damaging online review.
Therefore, if you want to foster loyalty, reliability must be integral to your company culture, from the first contact with the customer and throughout the services you provide.
This often entails maintaining quality communication with clients even after that initial contact and purchase.
For example, do your salespeople regularly follow up with customers to ensure they were satisfied? Do you have a marketing email list to keep customers in the loop on sales or promotions you are running? Is anyone managing your social media and responding to questions or complaints?
If you have answered no to any of the above questions, it is time to reconsider how reliable your business actually is in the eyes of customers.
3. Be Honest
A customer is giving your business their hard-earned money and time. So, if your salesperson is more focused on the sale than whether the product or service is a good fit for their needs, your customer will feel swindled and violated.
Therefore, your company and all its sales representatives need to have honesty as the baseline. Being misleading to get the sale will only benefit your business in the very short term.
For example, let’s say that your representative discovers that the potential customer needs product A for their lifestyle during a sales consultation.
If all your company offers is product B, it would be dishonest for the salesperson to allude that product will provide the same solutions when they know it will not.
When reality sets in, your company will lose not just that customer, but also any potential clients the original customer speaks with. So it’s best to keep in mind that honesty is always the best policy, even if it loses you a sale.
4. Use Technology
One of the biggest ways to improve loyalty is to have responsive and comprehensive customer service. Utilizing technology will broaden your company’s capabilities in that area, and improve communication in general.
The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) has significantly changed the way businesses operate and connect all aspects of the business. For client service, AI has also resulted in a variety of business benefits. Chatbots top the list of AI tools for customer care.
Bots provide a spectrum of benefits in maintaining excellence and promoting customer loyalty, including:
- Allowing your business to be contacted at any time. Offering support 24/7 is expensive if it means employing a team around the clock. Chatbots provide an opportunity for customers to interact with the support service on their own timelines.
- Streamlining finding the information. An AI bot can answer a vast majority of customer questions. Instead of skimming long FAQ pages, customers can get an immediate answer by typing their questions into a message box. When the chatbot is unable to field the question independently, it will escalate the issue to a live employee.
- Reducing time spent on minor issues. If only complex issues reach a human representative, those employees will be less overwhelmed with the volume of questions. Instead, they will be able to spend quality time making real, loyalty-boosting connections with each caller.
To sum up, with artificial intelligence, consumers receive fast answers to simple questions from a chatbot as soon as they need them, instead of sitting in a phone queue for a long time to reach an employee.
Speed and accuracy are integral to the customer’s positive perception of the service you provide, so improving them with the latest technological solutions will benefit your company’s overall image.
5. Expand the Customer Relationship Beyond Business
Creating lifelong loyalty in customers goes beyond being considered their favorite business. Take the example of the Harley Davidson brand. They are more than just a quality motorcycle manufacturer; they represent a community of people.
Harley Davidson has built this community by branding their motorcycles as a lifestyle.
The company organizes social events where Harley owners get to interact with each other. The bonds that those customers build with each other then serve to strengthen their ties with the brand. For a Harley owner, the brand conjures emotional connections that go far beyond business.
In this case, that community has become so large that it recruits like-minded people all on its own because they are drawn to the lifestyle.
By associating your business with particular lifestyle choices, you can get your brand to mean more to your customers than just the products or services it provides.
To do this, start by identifying what your company represents. Then, help your employees to embody those values in their daily customer interactions.
In addition to that, interactions with customers need not always feel formal.
The more personable your employees are with the customer, the more the customer will felt cared for. Getting to know customers on a personal level also provides deeply valuable insight into their likes and dislikes. That insight can then be leveraged to improve offerings and customize the customer experience for greater loyalty.
Conclusion
Establishing connections with your consumer base is at the heart of doing business. Nurturing relationships with existing customers is more profitable than having to build new ones from the ground up.
Make sure to identify the values your company stands for and get the customers to associate them with you. Those values should include honesty, even at the expense of making a momentary sale, and reliability.
One way of nurturing your relationship with consumers is by offering timely and dependable customer service, especially by leveraging the latest technology. Another is implementing different loyalty programs to reward repeat business.
By implementing the strategies above, you will be able to increase customer loyalty and improve your business.
About Re:amaze
Re:amaze is a modern helpdesk and customer messaging platform designed to help eCommerce businesses boost customer happiness and revenue. Re:amaze allows all customer-oriented teams to work together in a shared inbox through email, social, SMS, voice, and live chat. Re:amaze also comes packaged with automated messaging and chatbots so eCommerce brands can succeed at the front lines of conversational commerce.
About Joe Peters
Joe Peters is a Baltimore-based freelance writer and an ultimate techie. When he is not working his magic as a marketing consultant, this incurable tech junkie devours the news on the latest gadgets and binge-watches his favorite TV shows. Follow him on @bmorepeters