Building Customer Loyalty – June 2016 Newsletter
Building customer loyalty is hard, but it is one of the most important things for your business. To increase customer loyalty, it can cost nearly seven times more to acquire new customers than to keep existing customers.
There’s a lot of information on how you can build customer loyalty and retain more customers, so instead of reinventing the wheel, here a few strategies you can incorporate into you business:
Let Customers Know What You Are Doing For Them
This can be done via a quick informal phone call or a friendly email newsletter – either way, you want to subtlety let your customers know about all the work you have been doing for them. For example, you may have spent part of your weekend fixing up a few problems for a customer – you can hint about this when you follow up the next week. It’s important to realize you are not being cocky here; you are simple letting them know you value their business and are willing to go the extra mile for them.
Pass On Information
If you read an article, see a new book, or hear about an organization that a customer might be interested in, drop a note, share the information on social networks or make a quick call to let them know.
Strive To Empower And Educate Your Customers
Become your customers go to adviser on all things relating to your industry. For instance, if you’re in IT, be their IT Guy. Help them with choosing the best mobile plan; let them know about upcoming compliance regulations. Go the extra mile.
Make Customer Retention A Priority
This may seem pretty obvious, but I’m serious. Make a commitment to put customer retention at the top of the list. If you spent as much time building customer loyalty and retaining customers, as you did acquiring new customers, you’d have the world’s best advocates and a 100% retention rate.
Understand The True Purpose Of Marketing
Effective marketing is about building trust and developing relationships. Too many times people think marketing is just to push a bunch of advertisements and they will come. Well, it’s not that easy. The purpose of marketing is to ‘create and maintain a strong feeling with customers so they are mentally predisposed to continually choose and recommend you’. Building customer loyalty is about building trust and developing relationships – it’s all interlinked.
Focus On Integrity, Which Leads To Trust And Loyalty
Integrity involves fundamental behaviors such as keeping your word, being honest, providing a consistent level of service, and being reliable. Businesses that demonstrate a high degree of integrity are seen as trustworthy.
Building trust requires businesses to continually put customer’s interests ahead of their own. Customers will see this, and you will earn their trust and go a great distance to building customer loyalty.
Create Enlightening Experiences
A successful business is about more than just selling stuff. It’s about selling experiences. Focus on making the customers feel good, and do this by not charging for every add-on. Customers want to walk away with an experience, an experience that will keep them coming back for more, and telling their friends about it. This will go a long way to building customer loyalty.
When You Do Wrong, Make It Right
Resolving customer complaints is the best way to build customer loyalty. By handling complaints in a professional manner, you earn the opportunity to fix the problem and regain customer trust. In doing so, you engage your customer on an emotional level. Providing you resolve the problem, your customer now has a very unique experience with you, and you have shown first hand your willingness to recognize the problem and go out your way to ensure it is fixed and won’t happen again. Customers love this.
