As a small business owner, you’ll know how important customer loyalty is. It can help grow your business during its early years, build up your bottom line, and even keep you afloat during tough times.
Customer loyalty is the ongoing emotional connection between a company and its customer. This relationship goes beyond simply buying products; it leads to customers engaging deeply with your brand and recommending it to others.
But how do you inspire loyalty while maximizing your customers’ lifetime value? Here, we’ll provide you with the tips you need to succeed in this area.
1. Personalize the marketing messages you send to customers
With so much noise online these days, you must work overtime to stand out. And, you can ensure that your brand catches your customers’ eyes and consistently convince them to come back to your company by personalizing your marketing messages.
Email marketing and SMS marketing offer great ways to help earn your customers’ loyalty since you can tailor your messages so they’re relevant to your audience’s interests. There are several different techniques you can use for this, such as:
• Sending discounts through email and SMS marketing for products your customers are interested in based on previous purchases.This approach can help you get the most out of your email marketing and text message campaigns while engaging with your customers more personally
• Reminding customers they forgot to checkout to encourage them to return to their shopping cart and complete their purchase. A tool such as Emotive’s abandoned cart recovery service can help you to execute this effectively.
• Announcing a new product or service update based on what your customers have purchased in the past.
Using data-driven decision-making will help you create the right personalized marketing messages for your unique target audience by providing your marketing team with details like the customer’s name, birthday, and purchase history. This will then allow you to send timely promotions, recommend products people are likely to be interested in, and build stronger connections with your audience.
2. Create quality content your customers will keep coming back for
If you want people to make repeat purchases, you must give them a reason to return to your website time and time again. One of the most effective ways you can do this is by publishing informative and high-quality content that your target audience will want to consume.
To do this, you need to generate content ideas that will boost your business and keep customers coming back for more. You can do this by:
• Conducting keyword research to identify what kinds of information your target audience is looking for. You can use a tool like Ahrefs to find common terms people are typing into search engines to get an idea of what they want to learn more about. Try to choose terms that have high search volumes but low levels of competition so you stand out from your competitors.
• Listening to common customer questions to generate content that will help them. You can send a survey to your customers to see what questions they have about your industry or the products and services that you sell, so you can then create content that addresses them.
• Covering breaking industry news that is relevant to them. This is a great way to show off your expertise and build your reputation as a thought leader.
Once your customers recognize your brand for its high-quality content, they will continue visiting your website to read more. This will also help support your SEO efforts by giving you more opportunities to target relevant keywords and help your pages rank higher in relevant search engine results.
Let’s look at some businesses that do an excellent job of creating informative content to win their audiences’ loyalty.
Business24-7 is a company dedicated to providing unbiased reviews of trading platforms and online brokers. To keep their audience returning to their site, they continuously publish “Best Of” articles that explore the top platforms and brokers out there.
Each of these articles provides a brief overview of the different options and services available, then compares them to help people make the most suitable decisions for their needs. This is a great way to ensure customers return again and again for more honest reviews that will help them find the best trading platforms.
You can use a similar strategy by consistently publishing content targeted toward helping your customers find the best products or services for their unique needs. This will ensure customers keep returning to your website to get the latest news and insights as they research solutions that will make their lives easier or help them reach their goals.
Another company that uses its content to earn its customers’ loyalty is Decentralized Social Media (DeSo), a tool that helps companies track different data points across various social media networks.
Since they are the first business to build a blockchain dedicated to scaling decentralized social media, they know they need to offer educational content to help their audience better understand their offerings and learn about the company. So, they publish lots of in-depth guides about the industry to help customers understand how they can use this technology to grow their own businesses.
For example, their article about a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) provides lots of information by defining what a DAO is, explaining what the different types of DAOs are, and exploring why DAOs are essential for business owners. A DAO is a novel form of organization designed to be automated and decentralized. It operates as an open-source venture capital fund, with no typical management structure or board of directors; instead,experts write code that runs the project! This type of information is crucial for customers who are new to the field, and these blog posts show the brand is an expert in the field and can help customers achieve their goals. Since the article provides in-depth information about this very relevant topic, many customers will trust DeSo when they need to purchase the solutions the company offers in the future.
You can use this approach by regularly publishing content that explains complex terms, provides examples of how your products can be used, and shows how what you sell can help people reach their goals. This will ensure they find value in your content and will inspire loyalty.
3. Introduce a loyalty program to reward repeat customers
A customer loyalty program is a marketing tool that provides incentives and rewards to customers who purchase from your business on a regular basis. For instance, you could let your repeat customers accrue points with every purchase that can be cashed in for store credit or collected to earn exciting rewards.
There are many benefits of offering a customer rewards program, including inspiring repeat purchases so you can generate more revenue by improving customer retention and increasing how much current customers spend with you.
You could even develop different “tiers” to your program with rewards your customers actually want. You can decide what these should be based on what customers most frequently buy from you. Over time, you’ll likely find that people come back to you more often and spend more each time in order to move up the ranks and earn better rewards.
4. Offer regular discounts on your bestsellers
Sometimes businesses will only provide discounts on products they struggle to sell, but it can actually be more fruitful to offer money off the items you know customers already come to you for.
Offering discounts on your best-selling items will inspire people to shop with you consistently and earn customers’ loyalty. This is because it’s likely you always have a lot of people considering buying your most popular products from you. So, a surprise discount could be all it takes to push them over the edge and turn them into repeat customers.
You can use social media to promote your discounts to your followers, as these will often be people who are already interested in what you sell. Post about your best-selling items along with an exclusive code as a thank you to all your loyal customers.
This is a great way to capture customers on the fence about buying your products and encourage past buyers to take advantage of your new discount. Whenever you market this promotion, just make sure it’s clear what you are offering and how it can benefit your customers. Depending on the platform, it can also be a good idea to include an image or video to show off the product or service that you are selling.
5. Don’t forget to support your customers post-purchase
To be successful with online selling, you need to show your customers that you care, so they know that you are looking out for their best interests instead of just trying to sell them something. This means your relationship with customers shouldn’t stop as soon as they spend money with you — supporting your customers after they make a purchase can lead to more sales in the future.
Giving customers an avenue to turn to with any issues that arise after they purchase is a great way to build loyalty. You can do this by:
• Following up with customers to see if they are satisfied with their purchases. Try to follow up with each customer with an email or phone call within 10 days of the sale to see if they have questions or concerns.
• Asking for their honest feedback and acting on any suggestions they have. You can send a survey to customers asking them how you can improve the shopping experience you currently provide.
• Providing in-depth product demonstrations and guides to help them make the most of your products. This is a great way to ensure your customers get the most value out of your offerings and reduce returns or customer complaints.
Following up with your customers will help to prevent them having negative experiences and reinforce positive ones. By demonstrating that your relationship with your target audience doesn’t end at checkout, you’ll inspire customer loyalty and build your brand’s reputation.
Summary
At the end of the day, your customers are what matters most to your business. By building positive and supportive relationships with them, you’ll inspire brand loyalty with an increased ROI and generate a positive buzz around your brand.
Use these five tips to earn customer loyalty among your audience. Before long, you’ll see an increase in web traffic and sales as your customers tell everyone in earshot about their positive experience with your products or services.
Looking for more great articles to help grow your business? Check out AZ Big Media’s business blog for more great tips to take your company to the next level.
Author: Adam Steele has been writing about digital marketing and SEO for 11 years. He’s consulted for businesses small and large, including several of the largest companies in the world. If you liked this post, follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn for more like it.
