How do you keep your customers coming back for more? How do you keep them from straying towards your competitors? How can you understand what drives your customer’s behavior?
Loyal customers will spend more of their money with your company, be more profitable for you than new customers, and best of all they’ll tell others how fantastic you are, driving new customers your way.
Increasing customer loyalty is the Holy Grail for any company, ensuring a consistent stream of revenue and creating a reliable brand image.
So how can you ensure your casual customers will become lifetime clients? Here are some effective ways on how to build and retain customer loyalty.
Learn what makes your customers tick
What drives customers to your business or products? What influences their purchasing decisions? It’s more than just having satisfied customers, and it isn’t all about price either. By showing an interest and understanding of what is important to your customers, you will be going the extra mile that other companies might not be willing to go.
Listen to feedback
Customer feedback should drive your business build your customer service from the bottom up and give your customers the kind of service that they expect to receive. Ensure that any complaints are fully investigated and all feedback is given consideration. It is your customers who are using your service, so they are best placed to decide if it is working as effectively as it should be.
Personalize communication
Profile your customer on a way which is meaningful to your business and communicates with your customers in a highly targeted, segmented way that is meaningful to them. Utilize all available ways of analyzing your customer’s buying habits and target all communication to them at a personal level. Rather than just relying on a scattergun technique of throwing everything at them, a communications strategy that is unique to each customer will show that you are paying attention.
Be clear with brand values
Be clear and concise about what you do, how do you do it, and what you stand for. Clarity will help customers who empathize with your brand values and identify you as a company to do business with. Brand values are extremely important and companies spend millions of pound in developing a strong brand that communicates these values. Be sure to use every possible means of communicating this message to your customers and bring your brand to their attention at every opportunity. Promotional gifts can help with this.
Deliver quality
Once you’ve communicated what you do and secured a customer, you must deliver on your promise. If you do, you build trust and from trust come loyalty. As you continue to deal with the customer this will evolve over time until you guarantee yourself a customer who will see you as their only source for a particular product or service.
There’s no quick fix to ensuring customer loyalty. Instead, it is a slow burning process of demonstrating that you provide quality products with excellent customer service.
