Creating loyalty amongst your customers. How do you improve your retention?

What is customer loyalty?

As a business you should be more focused than ever on creating better customer experiences, being engaged with your customer and therefore building raving loyal fans that form the basis of your brand's community. Brands that put customers first and treat them with empathy improve their chances of winning and keeping their business. 

Customer loyalty strategies can be built into all phases of the brand touch points being:

• Pre-purchase, 

• Purchase, 

• Post purchase

Every touchpoint, from the first meeting through to renewal (and beyond) impacts the relationship your client has with your brand. Clear, cohesive, and empathetic communication ensures empathy never turns into empty promises.

Use your customer experience to enhance loyalty

To start driving customer loyalty, consider the key phases of the customer journey in terms of what they have to accomplish and how you can make that process easy and delightful, rather than how you can continue to attract, sell, and retain customers

Ways to improve your customer relationship:

• Improve communication with your customers. Consider sending weekly newsletters or having regular touch points with your customer, resonate and allow them to feel like you know them to enhance their experience you can do this for both product and service based businesses. 

• Remember the finer details - address your customers by name, remember the little things they’ve told you about themselves, their family, their goals and needs etc.

• Ask for feedback and adapt based on the responses. Do you have customer feedback or exit survey opportunities in your business?

• Always address complaints and negative feedback. You know that saying in customer service that the ‘customer is always right?’ Correct. Make sure you have good customer service in addressing both positive and negative matters.

• Keep in Touch with Your Customers

  • Send weekly emails that are fun, informative and purpose driven 

  • Check in for service based businesses - whether it be on a particular check in day, mid week check in having known they may need your support 

  • Create a community group and conduct group calls/chats with the clients

  • Conduct masterclasses to showcase expertise, generate leads and connect with your customers 

  • Post on social media - show your doors are open and lights are on, social media is a way to connect with your audience and tell your story 

  • Physical products or anything exchanged/sent should consider packaging, notes inside the small touches that impact the overall experience

Consider a customer loyalty program

• Point based and tiered loyalty programs - point based is quite common and usually best suited for e-commerce brands. X amount of points = $x value off. Whereas a tiered loyalty program is something you can introduce for a longer commitment and higher price point business where you encourage repeat customers by increasing the value of the rewards as they move up the loyalty ladder.

• Paid loyalty program (VIP) - members agree to pay a recurring membership fee upfront for great benefits they can use immediately and all the time this payment can be made through a one time fee.

• Value based loyalty program - when you understand the customer you’ll be able to give value in ways that are not monetary related so they are purposeful and charitable. This can build a unique connection with customers, fostering trust and loyalty. This program doesn’t actually reward customers. But it holds a special place for them, as the rewards are used to benefit society. You can create a hybrid loyalty program using this model.

• Game based loyalty program - Gamifying behaviour with ‘earnings’ as well as creating competition with odds encourages repeat customers and engagement with the customer, their spend and the end result of the incentive. Make sure to not make the odds too slim because customers may think you’re misleading them to win business.

CASE STUDY EXAMPLE OF A POINT BASED LOYALTY PROGRAM
Woolworths’ Everyday Rewards program has 6.5 million active users, shoppers earn points every time they spend which accrue to money off or redemption through partners.

If you’re a service based business you could also consider increasing the discount based on length of commitment encouraging loyalty.

Metrics to know whether your loyalty program is working

• Customer retention rate 

• Referrals 

• Social media mentions 

• Net Promoter score (customer loyalty and satisfaction measurement taken from asking customers how likely they are to recommend your product or service to others)

• Negative churn (the rate at which customers stop doing business with a company over a given period of time)

Loyal customers mean repeat business, better results and also raving fans. Just like getting to know someone when newly dating you should get to know your customers as best you can, enhance their experience, satisfy their needs and ensure their time with you doesn’t just start and stop at the first date.