In today’s highly competitive business world, building customer loyalty is crucial for the success of any organization. Repeat customers are an essential source of revenue and a key factor in the growth of any business. However, achieving customer loyalty is not easy, and it requires a strategic approach that includes regular communication with your customers. This is where our new blog post comes in – Over the next chapter, we’ll be sharing small, actionable steps that will help you build customer loyalty and keep your clients coming back for more.
Table of Contents
Introduction
The first step in our journey towards customer loyalty is talking to your customers. When was the last time you had a conversation with them? It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day tasks of running a business and forget to keep in touch with your clients. However, staying in contact with them is crucial to building long-lasting relationships. By keeping in touch and showing genuine interest in their needs, you’ll stay on their radar and be the first business they think of when they need.
There are four key reasons why customer retention is so important:
- It costs a lot more to gain new customers than keep old ones. Retaining your existing customers is more cost-effective and gives you a much better return on your marketing investment.
- You’ll increase your bottom line. There’s a good chance you’re offering more than just one product your target market can use. If you keep a person engaged and offer other products that help them with their needs, you’ll see more sales.
- Happy customers tell their friends about you. A referral from a satisfied customer is even more powerful than your own marketing because someone who has actually bought from you is singing your praises. This king of word-of-mouth marketing is a great boost for your brand.
- With repeat buyers and strong relationships, you’ll learn a great deal about your target market. You’ll get to know who your ideal buyer is and gain a thorough understanding of their needs. You can use this insight to improve your overall marketing strategy.
Over the next chapter you’re going to complete one small activity each day that will help you determine how you can build customer loyalty and keep them coming back to buy from you again and again. We start with talking to your customers. Have you done that recently?
The more you talk to your customers, the more you’ll stay on their radar. If you keep in contact, they’ll naturally think of you when they need something. Being in constant communication shows that you care.
How to engage with your customer
This is called “engagement” and it’s critical to establishing strong relationships with your customers. There are many ways you can engage with your buyers post-purchase and keep the conversation going.
Connect on Social Media
Social media is the perfect venue for customer engagement. There are several different ways you can engage on sites like Facebook and Twitter. Post content your audience will enjoy. Comment on the content of others. Create groups where your audience can interact. Talk to your customers through private messaging.
Find out which social media platforms your target market uses and create a presence there. Try to interact with them in as many ways as possible on a regular basis.
Ask Questions
Wherever you can connect with your audience, whether on social media, through your blog, or in real life, ask questions. Ask them whether they were satisfied with your products and if not, how you can improve. What did they use your products for? What other offers would they enjoy from you?
Ask questions that aren’t directly related to your business as well. Try to learn about their tastes and opinions. Any data you can collect from your audience can be useful.
Conduct Surveys
Marketing surveys used to be time consuming and expensive to run, but now there are free tools that make it incredibly easy. Find a survey software like SurveyMonkey to use to poll your audience. Many social media platforms also have a survey feature where you can set up and launch a survey in minutes. Use these surveys to engage your audience and find out more about them.
Stay in Touch by Email
Use email marketing to stay in touch with your customers after purchase. Send helpful information that teaches them how to get the most out of your products or provides tips to help them solve problems. You can also use your emails to make offers, but focus mainly on helping and educating your followers.
Give Your Audience Things to Do
Wherever you connect with your audience, give them something tangible they can do to engage with you. Give them surveys, quizzes, games, activities, contests, and other content they can interact with. This will help to deepen your relationship with them.
Actions: Brainstorm 3-5 ways you can be in regular direct contact with your customers.
Helping your customers by answering their questions
Recap: I shared with you different ways you can talk to your customers and engage with them to start building a strong relationship. You then brainstormed 3-5 ways you can be in regular direct contact with your customers.
Now we are going to look at helping your customers by answering their questions.
First of all, give your customers multiple ways to reach you and make it as clear as possible that you’re there for them.
At the time of purchase or in your confirmation email, tell them that you’re available to answer their questions any time. You could create an automated follow-up email that asks something like, “How are you enjoying your purchase? If you have any questions, contact us here…”
Questions you can expect from your customers include:
- Inquiries regarding how to use your product or service. Since you want people to get the most out of what they buy, you need to help them out. For example, your installation manual may seem self-explanatory to you but it might not be to them.
- Misunderstandings about products they’ve purchased. The item might not work the way the person thought it would. Your quick answer to their query can solve the issue and send them away happy.
- Queries about other products you offer. A purchaser who’s happy with what they’ve bought from you might be investigating what else you have to offer.
- Questions about what to do next. They may seek advice from you. For example, if you offer a course on blogging for success, they might set up the blog and start blogging, and then start looking for another marketing channel they can use in addition to it. This is a great opportunity to help someone and get repeat business.
- Other types of help related to your niche. Your buyers naturally see you as a go-to source of information about your topic area. They may have other related questions.
Make sure that every member of your organization is well-versed in your products and services so that they can answer customers as well. Provide any resources they need in order to do this. You may want to anticipate questions people ask or keep a list of commonly asked questions ready.
Give each question a personal response and try your best to answer it fully. Don’t expect anything in return. Answers should be given in good faith with no expectation other than to form a good relationship.
Response time is essential. Make sure you’re checking comments regularly so that you can respond as soon as possible.
Actions: Use the provided worksheet or your own notebook to complete today’s action steps:
- Outline an easy system for customers to contact you with their questions. Note any changes you’ll need to make to implement this system.
- Prepare any staff you have so that they can answer questions appropriately. Identify any training or videos you have to create to prepare them effectively, and any links you need to give them access to so they can help customers quickly and easily.
Excellent customer support
Over the last chapters you’ve discovered how talking to customers and being ready to answer their questions helps you engage and create a personal connection – which is where keeping customers for life begins.
Excellent customer support is essential to creating lifelong customers!
Don’t just wait for questions and problems to arise. Be proactive in identifying the type of help your people need and solving these issues before they’re asked. This is a great way to exceed expectations and create loyalty.
Start a list of commonly asked questions. What do people often ask you about your area of expertise? What questions bring out the best in your knowledge of the subject?
Use these questions to create an FAQ page on your website. Refer purchasers to this when they buy and let them know that they’ll find most of the answers they’re looking for there. Make sure you also offer a support number so that they can ask outstanding questions.
Your FAQ page should be continuously updated with the most recent customer questions, so it remains relevant. Organize the issues into categories so that they’re easy to find.
Another idea is to create quick and easy educational materials your customers can use to get the most out of their purchases. Make this content only available to your buyers. If you make it exclusive content, this will make them feel special and help to further build a relationship.
One great type of content for this is a video tutorial. Show the user what they can do with the product step-by-step. The key is to make the instructions quick and easy to follow, so make each video short and focused on a specific function or issue.
When making educational materials, don’t assume the user knows how to use the product. Start with the basics and then move on to teach them more advanced things they can do with their purchase.
Along with material that specifically teaches people how to use your products, you might also offer tips related to your niche that you can share in your online community or social media groups. Focus on common problems or issues your audience faces and help to resolve them.
Make this content readily available. One way to do this is to include a link to relevant content in your thank-you-for-buying email.
Actions: Use the provided worksheet or your own notebook to complete today’s action steps:
- What questions or problems do your audience typically face in relation to your products or services?
- Identify and start creating a list of FAQ’s and educational materials to help them solve these problems. Mark your calendar for when you’ll create everything.
Feedback
Are you happy with the feedback you’ve received from customers in the past? Have you ever even asked customers how they feel about your products or services?
Feedback is important not only because it tells you how well you’re meeting your customers’ needs, but also because it gives you a chance to show you’re listening.
It’s easy to collect feedback. The challenge is to make the necessary changes your audience would like to see. Sometimes, through customer comments, you can improve products and services so that they meet your customers’ needs even better.
Customers will often suggest changes either in your products or in your business operations. If it’s a simple change and one that you’re willing to make, implement it as soon as possible.
It could also be something more complex that time to implement. If this is the case, let the customer know when and how their feedback will be implemented. Thank them for their comment so they know you listened and took action. This is great for customer loyalty because it shows that you really care about them.
There could be the case where you can’t or aren’t willing to make the change. In this case, it’s very important to explain to the person why this isn’t possible.
They may be disappointed, but you can turn it around by offering some other type of help. Maybe you can refer them to another company that’s offering what they need. This means you potentially losing the customer, but the effect for your brand will be a net positive. They’ll go away feeling good about the interaction and there’s a good chance they’ll come back to buy from you again.
The key is to send the person away happy.
Gathering feedback gives you a golden opportunity to interact and engage with your customers. If you run a survey and get a comment from a customer, reach out to them by email or private message and ask for more details. This is an opportunity to open a dialog and learn more about the buyer. This kind of personal interaction also helps to build your relationship with them.
Actions: Use the provided worksheet or your own notebook to complete today’s action steps:
- Create a plan for acting on feedback gathered from customers.
- Define the types of changes you’re willing or unwilling to make.
How to retain your customer
The concept of focusing on keeping customers for life requires a very different way of thinking from traditional sales and marketing – which focused on each sale.
It’s important to cultivate the mindset that the purchase isn’t your end goal.
Rather, it’s the beginning of your relationship with the customer. You should put together a plan for cultivating this important relationship after the purchase is made.
Don’t assume that people will automatically come back and buy from you. Of course, some will naturally. But if you have a strategy in place and incentives you can offer that give people concrete reasons to keep buying from you, you’ll see much greater retention.
- Create a community around your brand where your purchasers can talk to each other and to you. The aim is to help people get their problems solved. This should be an exclusive group only open to those who have bought from you. Make it a valuable place to be.
- Create a customer loyalty program and clearly state its rules and guidelines. Rewarding repeat buyers lets them know how important they are to you.
- Keep gathering feedback and through your channels of communication, recommend other goods and services that would be of use to your audience.
- Offer exclusive deals and discounts as a way to say “thank you” to those who have bought from you before.
- Put strategies in place to bring back those who wander away from you. For those who switch to another brand, try to find out why. Offer something special for coming back.
- Wow your buyers with customer service that goes above and beyond expectations. Freebies and coupons are a great way to do this. This produces a powerful psychological effect and people will love you for it.
Always think about what you can do next to keep people engaged and continue buying from you.
Actions: Use the provided worksheet or your own notebook to complete today’s action steps:
- What customer retention strategies can you employ to keep your buyers with you?
Conclusion
In conclusion, building customer loyalty is a key factor in growing a successful business. By taking small steps each day, such as talking to your customers and staying in constant communication, you can keep your brand top of mind and create a strong bond with your customers. Remember, it’s not just about making a sale, it’s about creating a lasting relationship with your customers that will keep them coming back for more. So take the time to connect with your customers, understand their needs and build a loyal customer base that will help you achieve long-term success.