Every brand needs New customers to be more profitable. Many are successful betting on various strategies to achieve it, however, sometimes they tend to stagnate in terms of their growth. From that moment the question arises: Are the resources being invested in the right way?
We invite you to follow these tips to grow with your business while generating loyal customers.
Intense and persuasive competition, new products, and consumer dissatisfaction rates are concerns for even the strongest and most successful businesses. In short, they are problems that could cause the loss of the much-desired clientele.
The easiest and most predictable way to increase your sales is closer than you think. It is no secret to anyone that acquiring a new client is 4 times more expensive than retaining an existing one and we achieve this through loyalty.
By implementing this tactic, you can identify, control and sell more to customers who are looking for long-term and lasting relationships while increasing your profit margin. How about applying it especially on dates of many sales such as Hot Sale?
7 tips to build customer loyalty
These are the tips to retain customers.
1. Create a bond with your audience
The relationship with a customer begins with the purchase of a product or service. After this, there is still a long way to go towards higher profitability. How to achieve it?
If people have already been your clients and have had a good experience, they will be more receptive to your contact by different means of communicationmainly because of the trust they have placed in your brand, product or service.
First of all, you can approach by generating presence in . The vast majority of consumers browse them, and those who have already bought from you will easily recognize your online store. This is an opportunity for them to remember you and engage with your brand through content.
Also, you can place forms to keep getting to know your community with fields such as first name, last name or email to be completed before participating in a sweepstakes, contest or promotion.
Once you have this data, you can use to establish even more direct contact. Here there are no limits, you can bring acknowledgments, opinion and satisfaction surveys or prepare one with the news of your business.
The main advantage is the one to one relationship that you can achieve with each client and the possibility of segmenting your audience, that is, grouping it by common characteristics to send the proposal that best suits each group of clients.
In this way, your messages will be more specific and relevant, unlike social networks, which are a massive and general space. For example, send a discount coupon for a particular group of customers.
2. Do not focus only on selling
Sending offers and promotions can be useful and convenient for consumers, but if your communications are only sales-oriented, you can hardly achieve a lasting and long-term relationship.
Customers often feel that they are just a simple sales tool for companies. Your social networks and email are bombarded with offers and promotions from many brands, so the one that gives a little more genuine value will always prevail.
That’s why, take advantage of the means of contact to provide them with valuable information, content, news and thanks for being faithful to your brand. This can be something as simple as sending them a private message or customer anniversary email campaign or a survey to learn more about their experience.
In this way, when they are ready to face a purchase decision, they will be more likely to choose you again. Being genuine is a highly valued attribute in a sea of businesses that saturate audiences with advertisements for deals.
3. Remember that word of mouth is the best advertising
As you can see, this whole loyalty issue points to the fact that if someone buys from you once, you have to add up the chances that they will buy from you twice.
This is achieved maintaining a good relationshipBut if there’s one thing you need to know, it’s that sometimes relationships don’t just have to be between two interested parties. You can also establish alliances with other brandsso that they recommend you to their audience.
To achieve this, you generally must also give something in return, you can even put together a combo of your product with another from an ally that is complementary, offering a more complete solution for your customers. Your ally can in turn do the same by getting sales of your product.
One of the most popular ways to sustain customers over time is offering incentives that encourage repeat purchase. A clear example is that of the airlines with their frequent flyer program, where each expense adds as a reward points redeemable for free tickets.
The secret is that these points normally expire after a year from the last consumption, so accumulating them requires making at least one annual flight to avoid losing them.
This technique positions you in the minds of your customers, making the next time when they need that product you offer, they immediately think of your business. The same case taken to an online store could be used with the use of promotional codes with an expiration date.
These are some of the ideas that you could use to create your own loyalty plan:
- Reward top customers with higher benefits to build a differential relative to less active customers.
- Create special events where the sum of points is doubled and thus stimulate sales during a certain period.
- Increase the reward on certain products to combat their seasonality or reduce their stock.
- Reinforce the introduction of a new product by proposing double points for your purchase.
- Offer rewards for those who recommend your products or attract customers.
5. Ask your customers for their opinion about your product
The Internet is a medium that allows users to freely share their opinions, but these are not always heard or viewed in a way that makes them relevant.
Your brand can demonstrate the concern to listen to your customers by inviting them to write a public review and thus increase your confidence. Platforms like or allow you to do it, but you can also build your space on a page of your online store.
In addition, reviews are an important source of information for two interested parties: first, for the company, because it knows which are the attributes most valued by consumers and the negative aspects of its products and services. In this way, you can improve them to increase the satisfaction of your customers and ensure a new sale.
Second, for future customers, since their purchase decision will depend largely on the testimonials of those who have already bought.
6. Maintain constant communication with your audience
If there is an element that is part of each of the tips mentioned, it is communication. The Internet provides many means to establish contact aimed at customer loyalty, but some of them are more direct and personalized, and therefore more effective in building solid and lasting ties around your company.
Whenever a user leaves you their contact information, you have their inbox within reach to send them messages that communicate each of your decisions to maintain their trust and encourage them to buy again.
7. Pay attention to loyalty metrics
There are basically 2: subscriptions and engagement on social networks.
A) Subscriptions
One of the most loyal gestures of consumers is when, in addition to buying in your online store, go one step further and provide you with their contact information to subscribe to your ecommerce blog or to the newsletters of your email marketing campaign.
If you put into practice strategies and offered your clients in the media of your brand, surely you are proud of having done a good job.
Now is the time to reap the fruits of so much effort! For that you will have to measure subscriptions. How?
One of the metrics that will help you assess whether your website and its contents are really interesting for your audience is the MaM Growth Rate (month to month).
First, it is key to analyze if you are growing. For that, you have to calculate the MaM Growth Rate:
MaM Growth Rate = (month 2 – month 1)/month 1 x 100
This growth must always be compared with the previous year to have a concrete starting point. (If it helps, you can illustrate it in bar graphs to visualize it better).
Another of the most interesting metrics that define the degree of interest that a content has is its viral rate:
Virality rate = the total number of times the content was shared (total shares) / post visits x 100
If you analyze the virality rate of each post on your blog, you can deduce which topics and formats work best when disseminating your brand’s content in the online world.
However, you have to keep in mind that this metric measures the noise and not the impact of a contentthat is, it does not measure the utility or the value that the content generates in your audience.
That is why it is prudent that you complete your analysis with other metrics that measure the impact of contentfor example, comments received, bounce rate, clicks on calls to action and
- Metrics for email marketing
To measure the effectiveness of sending news from your online store, you can analyze open ratenamely, the percentage of emails opened over the total sent.
If you want to do a deeper analysis you can measure the CTOR (click-to-open rate) or the percentage of emails that received a click on the total number of opened emails. That is, of the subscribers to the mail, how many are really interested in its content.
CTOR = click on email / open emails x 100
If your opening rate and your CTOR is very low, we recommend you look for or think about the connection strategy with your customers from another platform, such as social networks.
B) Engagement in social networks
Today social networks are the most powerful sources to extract metrics and study the behavior of users and potential customers.
especially, is the social network that leads the ranking and its “likes”, the shared publications and new followers are what set the pace of loyalty and allow you to investigate which customers are effectively engaged with your brand.
As a general metric, the number of your total range is very interesting. But, analyzing in depth, the metric that works best when it comes to knowing the value of your publications and your content on networks is the Interaction Rate.
Engagement Rate = Total Interactions / Post Reach x 100
This formula is very precise when drawing conclusions about themes, formats or even the tone and type of…
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