The importance of customer loyalty in business is indescribable. You can go as far as to say that without a potential base of customers your business is almost non-existential. Every successful business knows the worth of valuable customers. They can lead the business to a marvelous height. Without having customer loyalty your business cannot reach the peak of success. Gaining customer loyalty is one of the most important aspects of a business. It is very important that you set up a loyal customer base with proper engagement.
Customer loyalty in business
Your company’s most valuable asset is its potential customers and their perspective about your company. Three terms are most essential in the business that is customer loyalty, customer retention, a repeat of sales and also good customer support. Because customer feedback can greatly improve sales. These three terms are all intertwined. Customer retention leads to brand loyalty, and which in turn leads the organization to consumer loyalty. The consumer is more likely to buy more from a brand or company they trust. How to gain customer loyalty? By developing a strong relationship with its clients. Let us discuss the important elements:
Customer retention
What does it exactly mean to retain your customers? These statistics are generally defined as the percentage of long-term clients of a company. The long-term clients are more important than short-term customers because the reason being very obvious that is they tend to spend more money, costs way less for advertising the products, and they tend to make references of the company which fetches the business more valued customers.
Find out how you can convert one time buyers to a lifetime customer.
As they are familiar with the products, they feel to spend their money on the products and they enjoy doing so. Short-term clients might purchase the product for one time and then not return. This is the reason it costs less money to advertise through long-term customers.
To acquire the long-term clients there are few easy strategies you can employ:
1. Always provide support to your customers under any circumstances. They need to know that you are always available to answer questions or solve problems they may be having.
2. Survey your customers. Measure customer satisfaction, ratings, and handle shortcomings. Make sure to require a reasoning section for cancellations or downgrades. You need to know why the customers are unhappy to the point of cancellation.
3. It is beneficial to provide discounts for your long-term customers when and where it is possible. Show them that their support has been instrumental in your business and it is your gift to them as customers.
Once a customer is retained, the next step is customer loyalty.
Customer loyalty
Loyal customers are arguably the most important factor in achieving business success. From customer loyalty comes repeat business and more opportunities for more sales. The major strategy in increasing customer loyalty is keeping it personal and always following up. Factors essential for building customer loyalty:
1. Establishing trust with a client comes from forming a relationship with them. Start by developing a personal connection. After you finish talking, send a personalized email or a thank you note. It even helps remember significant things your clients have told you and follow up with them about it later. This shows that you not only care about clients as a sale but also as a person.
2. You must always follow up with your client. Make the connection right away. Do not wait until later. The moment you hang up the phone send a follow-up email re-establishing what you have talked about and what your next steps are. This is especially important if the client has reached out about an issue over the question.
3. Make sure you provide solutions or answers to the questions that they seek. Forgetting to do so can lead to a happy client and decreased sales. Remember loyal customers are your best salespeople. Spend the time in developing a connection and following up to questions and you will have a customer life. If they are satisfied, they may provide opportunities you did not have access to beforehand.
The last step after measuring customer loyalty is generating repeat sales.
Repeat sales: As mentioned earlier, it is much easier to sell products to loyal customers that is someone who values and trusts your company or brand. However, generating repeat sales does not just happen. It takes deliberate action to create an opportunity for repetition and loyalty. After all repeat sales are one of the major factors in boosting profit and generating new leads. To make more and more repeated sales there are a few techniques you should use:
Always deliver on your promises
Do what you saying you are going to do and make your priority the happiness of your customers. If you have their best interest at heart, they are more likely to trust you and your products.
Always make sure to use gestures
Gestures like thank you while dealing with your customers. It sounds simple enough but make your customers feel valued and important. Find a way to show appreciation for their business like customer loyalty techniques, building trust, and following up with your customers is incredibly important for repeat sales. Constantly reinforce your relationship with your customers by ensuring the quality of products, answering questions, meeting deadlines, and so on.
Meeting Customer expectations
Closing the deal is a high priority but not as high as exceeding customer expectations. Follow up with your customers so that they know that you are constantly thinking of them. Offer values and insights whenever possible
Certain tips on building customer loyalty
Customer loyalty is the key to success. It is so important to have your customers come back to you, send you referrals, and write good reviews. If these things happen, your business is going to blow up. Let us discuss some tips:
Let customers know what you are exactly doing for them
Perception is reality and if you do not tell them what you are doing, they may not realize what you are doing in the background scenes. So make sure you call them, send them frequent emails, text messages, or social media messages. Try to understand how they like to communicate and then communicate with them that way. It is very important to keep them updated, over-communicate if possible, and be proactive about your communication. This will effectively build your customer loyalty.
Remember special occasions
Get to understand them. Get information about their birthdays, anniversaries, achievements they have received, awards they have received. Get information about all these special occasions and save this in your calendar. Send them emails or call them on these particular days to congratulate or for wishing them. The reason is simple people do not care about how much you know until they know how much you care. So make sure you understand those milestones in their life and stay in touch.
Gifts are excellent follow-up tools
Make sure you are using gifts to please your customers. Don’t you want to spend a little amount for making thousands of bucks? So send people gift cards from their favorite restaurants. Just show them that you care and that you are thinking about them. So sending a gift is very important. If you are a salesperson and somebody is not ready to sign up for you, you can send him or her a card with his or her favorite restaurant. This will certainly make them stay, as customer loyalty is more of an emotional affair than logical. Gifts are hugely valuable and they are underrated, so take advantage of it. Send your best customers and leads a small gift to earn more business in the future.
Write personal notes
Write personal notes and send them more frequently. Personal handwritten notes are not that popular in these technological ages were there so many social media platform where a message is just a click away. Therefore, if you send your customer handwritten notes it is going to set you apart from your competitors because nobody else is doing it.
Keep it personal
Take it outside of the business relationship box and get it into more of the personal box. You want to get out of the service provider box into the friend box. You have to keep in mind that a customer stays for a month, but a friend stays for life. Therefore, you need to build more of a friendly base with your customers and this can help you in gaining customer loyalty.
Pass along more information
If you see something that your customer might be interested in, even if it has nothing to do with your business relationship, still pass it along. If you read an article you think they would enjoy or a movie you have watched you think they would like, pass it along. If you see an organization that they might want to be a part of, pass it along. This is called “Thinking of your moments”. The more “thinking of you moments” are there, the more your brand loyalty grows with each passing day.
Benefits of customer loyalty
Gaining customer loyalty is as important as your business entities. Thousands of benefits that lies under the covers of customer loyalty. When the marketers discuss upon the pointers of loyalty, they often suggest certain measurable metrics including sales increase, conversion rate, and enrolment increase. If all these factors are high in number, then it is easily suggestible that your business has successfully conquered the brand loyalty of potential customers. However, these factors do not narrate the whole customer loyalty Pictionary.
The conversion rate can determine the number of visitors that you have converted into sales, but they cannot show you the whole picture of whether your customers are captivated with your products and services. The conversion rate cannot determine whether your customers have developed trust in your brand or whether they are willing to purchase again. To truly see and understand the customer loyalty you need to look way beyond these conventional metrics.
Some of the significant benefits of customer loyalty are:
Brand Advocacy
This occurs when your customers become brand advocates. They become so diligently in tune with your brand that they go out of their way in promoting your brand without expecting any compensation on their part from the company. They start doing their branding through Social media or direct referrals.
Price disdain
This is a situation when the customers become very insensitive about the price rates of your brand. Here the customers are likely to purchase your product even if the price increases considerably. The customers trust your brand with their whole and they buy your stuff no matter what the price rates you apply.
Undeviating referrals
These referrals are new customers that are advised to use your products by customers that are already satisfied with your brand. This has a positive impact on your business and this has a direct link with the increase in sales. There are no additional charges for advertising to such customers, and they buy your products even if you do not invest in engaging them in your products. Simply put, this is an easy sale without any extra advertising or promotion.
Customer support
Potential customers will listen to you anyway. You can communicate through email and they will directly respond to your offers you provide them. In this way, you can convince them of re-sales and even establish customer relationships.
Predictability
If you a loyal base of customers, you can easily predict your sales for the year. This will help you determine the pointers that you need to increase your considerably.
Conclusion
Customers are the most important part of a business entity. If you have potential customers that believe and trust in your services, then your business is going to touch the height of success no matter what consequences come along the way. Customers are like family for your business. If you can please them successfully, you can always worry less about the other factors.
