For any business, customer retention and loyalty are true indicators of long-term success. A loyal customer base reflects the establishment of a strong brand identity and is directly responsible for the growth of your business.
After all, your commitment and values—and everything that you stand for—must penetrate the hearts and minds of your customers for your business to flourish. And that’s where customer loyalty comes in. It is critically important that you earn your customer’s trust to the extent that their loyalty breathes life into your brand.
If you want to look at it from a bleaker perspective, in the absence of customer loyalty, your brand remains an abstract concept; an arbitrary confluence of ideas that do not have a foundation in reality to stand on. It is when your customers internalise those ideas and consciously make a decision to stand by your brand that you can be certain of having ascended to the next level.
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Alright, We Get It, Customer Loyalty Is Important… But What Exactly Is It?
The visionary entrepreneur Walt Disney once remarked, “Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.” This rather offhand mantra just about sums up customer loyalty.
In short, it is the measure of your customer’s willingness to continually engage with your brand, and purchase the products and services you offer. In doing so, the lifetime value of your entire customer base scales, and it manifests in the form of consistent revenue over a long period of time. When your present customers are fulfilled and are ready to fight in your corner, it is only a matter of time before new ones come on board.
How Does a Business Measure Customer Loyalty?
Wouldn’t it be nice and easy if we could narrow the concept down to whether customers stay or go? Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. There are complexities involved. To take your brand to its next logical stage, it is important that you pay attention to the intricacies of the customer engagement process. You need to identify the intent behind repeat purchases; what guides their purchases? How often do they make purchases, as compared to how regularly they engage with your brand? What are some of the recurring problems for which your brand can continually provide a solution?
5 Simple Steps to Retain Your Customers
Customer loyalty is a consequence of doing the right things, not a task in and of itself. It is the natural result of strong brand communication and engagement. So, what is it that your business can do to reap that reward?
- Make Your Brand Values Abundantly Clear in Your Communication
- Provide Continual and Exceptional Service to Your Customers
- Bring Loyalists Onboard to Help Spread Awareness About Your Brand
- Create a Loyalty Program to Acknowledge their Role in Your Journey
- Get Your Customer’s Feedback
Make Your Brand Values Abundantly Clear in Your Communication
The first step is to have your marketing team collaborate and develop a strategy that outlines the various strengths of your brand solution, your goals, and most importantly, how your values are perfectly in accordance with your customer’s core beliefs.
Focus on attributes that are unique to your brand, which sets you apart from competitors in the market. In this day and age, where customers are increasingly well-informed about the ways of the world through the internet, taking a stand on issues and ensuring it reflects in your brand message is critically important. Several studies have shown that most customers buy based on underlying beliefs. Your values are your guiding light; being authentic and firm in your beliefs is, today, non-negotiable.
Provide Continual and Exceptional Service to Your Customers
New customers go completely by their experience, and the existing ones stay on the basis of repeated positive experiences. The customer experience you provide essentially summarises all aspects of engagement, from the moment they register your brand in their minds, to the point where they request assistance from your customer service team.
No matter how effective your service is at getting to the root of an issue, most customers will not even get to that stage if your response isn’t prompt. Given half a chance, they will switch to another brand that can offer them a solution without delay. Today, brands are expanding their communication channels, and it is really critical that you do the same; an omnichannel approach will exponentially improve the efficiency of your customer support process.
Bring Loyalists Onboard to Help Spread Awareness About Your Brand
It is with good reason that curious customers often become ardent supporters of a particular brand. They identify with the values that the brand stands for, and their every experience with the brand affirms their faith. These customers are the loyalists, and these are the ones you should acknowledge and reach out to.
Find them, bring them on board, and understand their qualities. This will help you find potential customers who are of a similar profile. Some of your loyalists could become brand ambassadors who spread awareness wherever they go about all that you have to offer. These are the customers you want to have on your side – the ones whose loyalty cannot be bought, only earned.
Create a Loyalty Program to Acknowledge their Role in Your Journey
Human beings are hardwired to enact their complex but largely determined reward systems. Rewarding repeat purchases with discounts and offers is a time-tested way to earn the loyalty of your customers. A loyalty program is a logical extension of this principle. Most of them are based on point systems; points earned by customers correspond to higher discounts and exclusive offers. A loyalty program makes a customer feel appreciated for repeatedly choosing your brand.
However, it is important to note that a loyalty program is an early-stage strategy that works well in the short term. They are definitely a step in the right direction, but there is a lot more to building a meaningful relationship with individual customers in the long run. To express his loyalty, a customer must be convinced that your values are embedded in the brand – and by extension, in the customer experience.
You have to work organically to achieve this; connect in a deeper way with your customers by building something of a community to express shared values, beliefs, hopes, and experiences.
Get Your Customer’s Feedback
More often than not, customers appreciate when you ask for feedback. It doesn’t hurt your brand to ask them to share their views at every given chance; on the contrary, it shows a commitment to continually engage and improve.
You can even conduct surveys, and create buckets on social media to get customer’s opinions and encourage customer reviews. While negative reviews are not exactly a ray of sunshine in your journey, they are important nonetheless to put all the pieces together and become a well-rounded brand. Even a single piece of feedback from a customer can prove to be crucial in helping you get down to the root of a particular problem and help you put corrective measures in place.
Having Your Finger on the Pulse
The world today, more so than ever before, is constantly changing at a rapid pace. Customer experience isn’t a static concept parked in the corner of your workplace; on the contrary, it is dynamic and must continually evolve to meet the needs of the day. You must regularly check in on your values and see if they align with your identity in the market at that particular point in time.
The most fascinating aspect of brand communication is that it has the power to transform your identity overnight. Much like an individual, a brand has the capacity for reflection and self-awareness, for it is constantly engaging with the outside world and being shaped by changes.
A business is a malleable entity that can mold itself in a way that reaches out to the world and offers a solution to a multitude of problems associated with modern life. Ultimately, building customer loyalty is all about building and nurturing a meaningful relationship. It takes time and effort to establish trust, and it is an investment that is not time-bound. Every time you solve a problem for your customer, you are moving one step closer towards your sense of purpose as a business.
