While acquiring new customers is crucial to grow your business, customer loyalty is the fuel that keeps a business sustained and is the foundation of any brand. Loyal customers are usually willing to stick around through ebbs and flows of a business, they deliver valuable nuggets of information, and can drive word-of-mouth marketing. In fact, 80% of revenue comes from existing customers and 77% of customers would recommend a brand after a single positive experience.
Advertising dollars can only take you so far, but when you have a solid base of customers that believe and trust in your brand, they’ll end up doing a lot of the work for you. The key is knowing how to keep those customers loyal to your business and coming back for more.
1. Ensure your data is clean
The ability to reach your customers is only as good as the data you collect from them. If their information changes and isn’t tracked accordingly from a data standpoint, a company’s ability to effectively (and accurately) reach out to their customers will be impacted. There’s nothing worse than being sent an email that you know was meant for someone else! Cleansed and enriched data will give you peace of mind that the customer communications you’re sending out are going to the right people, at the right time.
2. Meet customers where they are at
Personalizing your messaging to fit your customers’ unique demographics, life stage, etc. is crucial in maintaining a loyal customer base. Customers are more receptive to brand messaging when it feels like a brand is speaking to them specifically, and not an entire audience. Someone with a family may think, act, and buy differently than someone in a single household. Taking the time to segment and understand who your customers really are — and speaking to them accordingly — will reinforce that you care about them. They’re not just another number on a list; they’re vital to you and the success of your business.
3. Understand buying patterns & incentivize customers
Like demographics or life stages, a repeat customer will look a lot different than a lapsed customer. They both need love and attention, but in different ways. Crafting message strategies around these different audiences is a great way to test and learn what types of messaging resonates with buyers depending on where they are in the buying lifecycle. Incentivizing someone who is lapsed (via promotional offers, special perks, etc.) may be the final push to bring them back to your business or brand. Someone who is already interacting with your business on a consistent basis may be more interested in news or product updates.
4. Stay consistent and relevant
It’s inevitable that the brands we interact with weave themselves into our daily lives. Many become a part of who we are, the choices we make, and can even affect how we live. The brands that tend to resonate most with customers are consistently communicating about things that their customers care about. These companies have also done the research to know that based on unique identifiers, customers will be more interested in certain types of content than others. Customers have a wide range of characteristics, so it’s important to have a toolkit of content that you can use to ensure your messaging doesn’t feel blanketed.
5. Ask for (and act on!) customer feedback
Regardless of if a customer ends up liking or disliking a product or service, they want to be seen and heard. Having a strategy for feedback provides the perfect window of opportunity for growth. Customer feedback is a gold mine and can be crucial when making decisions that directly impact customers. Giving them a forum where they can express their experience with your brand not only provides valuable insight directly from the source, it also establishes a level of trust as brands implement the feedback received. Customers notice when companies are working to change for the better and it keeps them coming back for more.
Questions? We can help!
Ensuring you have clean customer data, you are meeting customers where they are, and staying consistent with personalized marketing all comes down to having the right tool. For many retailers and companies, their customer data lives across multiple systems and aren’t aggregated for a holistic 360-degree view, which leads to missed opportunities and more time wasted. Don’t let that be you and your business.
At Ascent360, our data driven marketing platform ingests all your data, cleanses and enriches it for accuracy, and enables you to segment that data into unique customer groups and create highly personalized messages, at scale.
Learn more about how data driven marketing helps businesses like yours
gain and retain customer loyalty by putting your data to work.
