Customer loyalty is essential to a company’s success. Loyal customers return to your business’ products and services. More importantly, they often become online and offline brand advocates, sharing your company’s assets and attracting new customers.
If you’re looking to nurture an ongoing relationship between you and your customers, use these five marketing tactics to foster customer loyalty through marketing.
1. Make Bold Statements
Customers are more loyal to brands that foster a feeling of authenticity, and bold statements can immediately convey authenticity.
If you have a solid understanding of your customers’ values, don’t be hesitant to make bold declarations from time to time.
For example, Ben & Jerry’s launched a climate change campaign in 2015 to promote awareness of global climate change in a creative way.
The ice cream company released a new flavor that tells the climate change story using ice cream.
‘Save Our Swirled’ is a raspberry ice cream with a surprise inside. Topped with marshmallows and raspberry swirls, the ice cream reveals melting dark and white fudge cones as you dig out a spoonful of the delectable dessert.
Ben and Jerry’s accompanied their campaign with the slogan: If it’s melted, it’s ruined.
The ice cream flavor’s packaging made a bold statement about the brand’s commitment to preventing climate change.
The lesson of the story is that an occasional bold statement can positively impact your business because it will reflect your brand’s authenticity and build customer loyalty.
2. Build Customer Relationships on Social Media
Using social media is a great way to interact with and create relationships with your customers.
Start an ongoing relationship with your customers by regularly publishing useful and interesting information. When we say ‘regularly,’ we mean posting several times a week.
Posting on social media on a regular basis makes your brand more visible and memorable to potential customers. Your business will stay top-of-mind and will more likely generate leads.
Over time, your customers and even some social lurkers will look forward to seeing posts and updates on your channel.
A mistake many businesses make is overlooking social lurkers.
Remember, a large portion- as much as 90%- of social media users are made up of silent users. These people usually never like, never comment on posts, or never share pictures. They don’t give any feedback on social media sites.
While they may not be visibly interacting, they are interested and clicking your links. You won’t see it unless you have access to analytics to track your click-throughs.
Social networking is also an excellent platform for improving customer service.
Social sites such as Facebook and Twitter are good places to field customer concerns. The best part is that social media allows you to respond to people’s questions in real-time.
Customers will automatically trust your company if they know you are invested in helping them with any concerns and issues they encounter.
3. Gather Customer Feedback
Customer reviews give helpful information about what your brand does well and where it needs to improve. The more you improve your customers’ experiences, the more loyal they will be to you.
When you get customer feedback, you have the potential to turn a dissatisfied customer into a devoted one.
Your response should demonstrate that you value their feedback and are willing to take action to correct the problem.
4. Know Your Customers
The journey to increasing customer loyalty starts by learning about your customers. The most successful businesses understand who their consumers are and what they want.
You should know more than their names and ages. Gather insights about their occupations, income, residential location, hobbies, interests, lifestyle choices, and anything else that may be valuable information to your business.
In marketing, the process of identifying who your customers are is called customer market research.
Customer research is often done using a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods such as interviews, surveys, focus groups, and ethnographic field studies. It may also include conducting desk research on internet reviews, forums, and social media to see what people are saying about a product.
Ideally, you should hire a customer research specialist to conduct a comprehensive study, which can be costly for smaller businesses. You can do a simple customer research analysis by asking yourself these questions:
- Why are they purchasing your product or service?
- Who are they buying for?
- What are your customers’ pain points?
- What are their challenges?
- How often do they buy the product or service?
- How can your products or services help solve your customers’ problems?
Jay Baer, marketing and customer experience expert, makes a compelling point:
“The more you know about your customers, the more you can provide to them information that is increasingly useful, relevant, and persuasive.”
The better you know your customer, the easier it will be to cultivate loyalty.
5. Promote Your Core Values
After you’ve learned more about your customers, create an appropriate identity for your brand.
A brand identity comprises what your brand says, your values, how you communicate your product, and what you want people to feel when interacting with your company.
Essentially, your brand identity is your company’s personality as well as a promise to your consumers.
A great brand identity will resonate with the needs of your consumers while conveying the values of your company.
Your core values should reflect what motivates and inspires how you operate your business.
“Don’t be afraid to stand for something. Now more than ever, customers are drawn to brands that align with their values” advises Callie Wilkinson, senior brand manager at Hubspot. “Inject your mission and vision into everything you do and pursue meaningful partnerships with people and organizations that share those values.”
Some brands express their core values by aligning with prominent causes.
Patagonia is an excellent example of a brand that represents its core values. They position their brand as part of the solution to environmental conservation.
Case in point: Patagonia co-founded the Conservation Alliance in 1989. That was decades before environmental activism, and climate science went mainstream. The alliance now has 180 member companies and has contributed more than $10 million to grassroots conservation organizations.
Patagonia attracts customers who share its beliefs by devoting themselves to this cause.
If you align your business with a cause that your customers value, you are in a strong position to develop customer loyalty.
Final Thoughts
Improving customer loyalty starts with getting to know your customers. Once you understand what your customers want and value, you can develop your brand’s identity on your core values along with those of your customers.
Customers appreciate authentic brands that take bold positions on issues that are important to them.
Finally, you can become a part of your consumers’ daily digital life by responding to customer feedback on social media.
By adopting these marketing strategies, you’ll be on your way to increasing customer loyalty.
But if you need help to make the most of your marketing, Jarvis can help!
Jarvis are the leaders in eCommerce recruitment, and regularly fill such positions regularly.
