Driving Customer Loyalty with Customer Engagement
Creating customer loyalty is a complicated affair. It’s one thing to attract a customer but keeping them loyal to your brand for the long haul is another story entirely.
Marketers often aimlessly desire customer loyalty without planning to give customers anything in return.
Customer loyalty and in turn profit, is something that a business achieves by doing something for the customer.
What is customer loyalty?
Customer loyalty is defined as the customer’s willingness to buy from or work with a brand repeatedly. It typically comes as a result of a positive customer experience, customer satisfaction, and the value customers get from the transaction.
As it’s such an important characteristic of a brand’s success, all companies should aspire to have customer loyalty. According to HubSpot, loyal customers convert more, spend more on the brands they like more often and engage in word-of-mouth marketing.
With so many customers repeatedly coming back to purchase from the same brands, it indicates trust and satisfaction.
Since acquiring new customers costs more than retaining current customers, marketers and customer experience professionals should focus on activating loyal customers.
With loyal customers, brands have their very own brand evangelists that tell their family and friends about the positive experiences they’ve had.
1. Listening to Your Customers
Your customers want to tell you exactly how to keep them coming back. Utilising the feedback your customers provide is key to improving your offering and building the foundations of customer loyalty.
Measuring customer satisfaction and acting on the responses through research can give greater insight into the needs and interests of customers.
It’s important that you’re capturing the right metrics to measure customer feedback. Using the wrong measures in your analysis will lead to sub-optimal results.
2. Improved Customer Service
Customer Service is the provision of service to customers before, during and after a purchase. It strives to increase customer loyalty and allows the creation of longstanding relationships with customers.
Customer service is the kind of customer engagement that can set you apart from your competitors and be instrumental in retaining customers. If the customer service is consistently excellent it will bring repeat business through your doors.
Regardless of size, any business operating within an extremely competitive space could benefit from improved customer service.
Providing top-notch customer service is one of the ways smaller businesses can compete with larger businesses to stand out.
3. Personalised Campaigns
If you’re ready to start getting serious about building long-term customer loyalty, look to campaign personalisation. With a Single Customer View, marketers can deliver personalised marketing interactions that increase brand engagement and sales.
The more customer data a business can gather, the more refined and targeted marketing messages become. When it comes to personalised promotions and offers, customers purchase more and in turn become more brand loyal.
4. Customer Loyalty Programmes
These are rewards programmes offered by a company to customers who frequently make purchases.
Customer Loyalty Programmes (CLP) are something we’ve discussed in more detail in previous blog posts. Programmes like these often provide a deep understanding of your customer base, as well as insight into what motivates them to create a better buyer-seller relationship.
Loyalty programmes can be broken into three main types. These include a points system (recorded points on a loyalty card), a tiered programme (gaining rewards as the customer moves up the loyalty ladder) and non-monetary rewards (a percentage of the profit going towards a charity).
Regardless of which type of loyalty programme is chosen, how you deliver these programmes is what makes your customers feel valued.
Ultimately, customer loyalty is not only about repeat purchases. Loyalty exists when a customer chooses to do business with a company even when alternatives that are cheaper and more convenient exist.
Utilising appropriate customer engagement strategies is what helps drive this type of customer loyalty, solidifying customers as brand evangelists.
Are you interested in finding out more regarding customer engagement? If so, contact us today on +353 1 8041298 or click on the link below to be brought to our contact form!
