Building Brand Loyalty to Increase Customer & Client Retention

Businesses thrive when factors like the cost of credit, per-capita income and cost of production are in their favour. But sometimes there are sudden (or not so sudden) changes in the market that can catch them off-guard.

A good business can be gauged by how resilient it remains or how quickly it adapts when everything is going wrong, for instance during a pandemic like the one we are in now.

This is where the loyalty of your customers will be tested seeing as a lot of the one-time buyers or even other occasional customers may cut back on their expenditure significantly.

Scenarios such as the entrance of a new and larger player into a market can also make it difficult for other businesses to retain customers, especially if the newer business is aggressive with methods like discounts and promotions.

Let’s go through some ingenious ways to build brand loyalty and retain customers:

Understand What A Brand Is

Put aside the back end activities like your financing and accounting and think about every point of your business that a customer interacts with. From store attendants to graphics in social media posts and forms on your website, list every element that can be openly and directly associated with your business.

Think about what kind of person your business would be and separate the parts of your brand that you can control, like store themes and product packaging, from those that are harder to control, such as “word-of-mouth reviews”.

Refurbish things like your logos and slogans to send messages that are relevant to the times/current affairs. For example, Nike made a shift from “Just Do It” to phrases like “Play for the world”, “You can’t stop us” and “Play Inside”.

Study Your Customer

Don’t make simple assumptions like “they want it cheaper”, only to find that your customers were more worried about getting their products fast and safely. Embrace technology by using reporting and analytics tools to do more research about your customers and find out what makes them tick.

Go beyond the basics like their age, gender, location etc. and find out details like how frequently the recurring shoppers buy, whether they always first look at other new products or go straight to a specific one, and so on. Pay attention to queries over the phone too.

This insight will help you to refine the content in your marketing strategy such as the copy used for messages in your automated email campaigns, plus your paid advertising .This information can also help you when building brand loyalty by improving customer experience. For example, you can redesign your site to make it more responsive on various types of devices, improve the search function, make your call to action buttons easier to reach and shorten checkout processes.

Through techniques like A/B testing, you can learn how different customers respond to certain features and deploy them the correct way. Automation will also enable you to improve customer support with the use of chatbots. Don’t forget to remove any unnecessary pop-ups or prompts.

If customers can find what they are looking for with ease and get effective help when stuck, they have a higher chance to coming back due to the convenience.

Establish Trust and Strengthen Relationships

Strengthen your security measures by offering things like multi-factor authentication, getting a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate and clearly displaying badges related to safety and compliance standards in areas like your checkout or account opening.

You can also offer discounts or loyalty program points in exchange for a review from customers. These may get them to sign up for updates, enabling you to reach out to them continuously with the help of marketing automation and CRM tools.

Another way to establish trust with your customers is by offering them the chance to opt in or out of things like extra cookies and other intrusive features while ensuring that you send verification messages and receipts via email or SMS promptly.

Embark on a Mission

Set a non-business-related goal and mention it to your customers as a promise. Find a way to help them participate in achieving that goal while they buy from you.

For example, if you run a nutritional supplements store, you can let your customers know that a portion of the money they spend on each product will go to funding charities delivering basic healthcare services to disenfranchised populations.

There’s even an assortment of apps that can manage the whole process. Use data relating to customers’ search entries and use of certain keywords on other platforms to guide you on what social issues they may be paying attention to.

In conclusion, always consider every service or communication point and cover the entire customer journey, making use of any technology that simplifies actions on both your end and the customer’s end.

 

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