Your Guide to Gaining - and Keeping - Customer Loyalty

Posted by Ahmed Macklai on November, 7 2019 8:29 pm

Customer loyalty is something that drives some of the most successful companies in the world. It is also difficult to achieve. Since loyalty from your customers cannot be bought, forced, or faked, it serves as an excellent indicator of which business owners are committed to serving their customers - and which are committed to serving themselves.

Here, we’ll share a collection of tips for creating loyal customers and keeping them coming back. Whether you’re providing customer service, selling products, or working in a business-to-business setting, the advice here is designed to help your business be a better version of itself - so your customers and clients can be more satisfied, time after time.

Strive for Excellent Customer Service

While this piece of advice should be obvious, there’s a reason it tops the list. For some business owners, providing top-quality products is a priority. But once those products are in the hands of a consumer, all obligations the business owner and their staff have to the public are seemingly off. This isn’t the way to garner customer loyalty. No matter how great your products are, if you aren’t serving your customers in a way that makes them feel valued, they won’t bring their business back.

Make It Personal

When you want to show your consumers that you value them as customers or clients, personalize your correspondence with them. It could be as simple as a name plugged into an email or an automated text message with a birthday greeting included. These small gestures mean a lot to those that receive them, though. Studies have shown that personalized correspondence from companies is six times more likely to foster customer loyalty than impersonal correspondence - and it can be as easy for you to do as changing a single setting in your email marketing campaign setup.

Give Them Something to Talk About

People are more likely to be loyal to a company that they believe their friends, family members, or celebrities that they admire are loyal to. Creating content and advertising that inspires people to talk about your brand and products is a great way to create that kind of loyalty. Whether you partner with celebrity influencers or create a reward program for referrals, there are plenty of ways to get people talking about your company and reap the rewards of their chatter.

Offer Incentives

Everyone loves getting rewarded. When you offer incentives to your consumers, it’s as good as saying, “We appreciate your business!” Rather than a hollow greeting, though, the incentive comes in the form of a discount, freebie, sample, or another useful item. It’s like a gift and a reward in one - and something that will inspire customer loyalty in your consumers and clients.

Incentives are even better when you supplement the regularly-scheduled ones with occasional surprises. Consumers report being delighted to find surprise coupons or free gifts from their favorite brands or to receive packages from companies they have done business with in the past, offered as incentives to keep these consumers loyal to the brand. While it’s not something you have to do regularly and for every consumer, it’s something that inspires loyalty in those who receive the acts of gratitude - and keep them and those who witness these acts loyal in hopes of receiving more!

Make Use of Loyalty Programs

Beyond one-time incentives, customer loyalty programs have been shown to not only foster brand loyalty but actually convert consumers from being loyal consumers of one brand to another. If you shop with one company and their competitor offers comparable items at similar prices but a much better rewards program, which one are you going to choose? That easy decision is what steals many customers away from companies that don’t make full use of the customer loyalty program concept. Make sure your brand is one that does!

Request Feedback (The Right Way)

There is invaluable information to be gleaned from your consumers when it comes to improving your business and your approach to customer service. However, many consumers do not like taking the time to answer customer feedback surveys or provide their input to assist with these measures. As such, the data that supports these efforts can be difficult to come by and easily skewed by small subsets.

Break this trend - and find useful information within your own consumer base - by creating feedback opportunities your customers and clients actually want to participate in. Everyone likes to feel like their opinion and input is valuable. Feeling like a VIP or a representative of the overall consumer base can inspire customers or clients to be more vocal in offering feedback.

Programs that require consumers to apply to receive benefits - and require the exchange of information for those benefits - inspire this feeling of exclusivity. They have also been shown to inspire customer loyalty and satisfaction, two things that you cannot create with your average feedback survey!

Employ Automation

Keeping customers in the loop when it comes to sales, new products, company news, and other important information is always a great way to keep loyal customers on-board. But doing that manually can be very time-consuming, even if you have a large and dedicated customer service department.

Instead of spending endless hours following up with every client and consumer on your list, rely on automation to handle the task for you. Today’s technology makes it easy for you to keep in touch with consumers. They will love how frequently you check in, keeping your name fresh in their minds. You’ll love how effortless it is - and how little it takes to deploy each new update.

For more information on how technology can make creating and maintaining customer loyalty easier than ever before, contact the industry experts at ChaseData. From providing you with the tools and technology to create a top-notch customer service contact center to offering you the software to automate your customer contact efforts, we have everything you need to streamline your efforts to inspire customer loyalty - and keep those customers loyal for a long time to come.

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