Loyal customers are profitable for your business as they are 31% more likely to buy a new product or service, benefitting your business.
Moreover, retaining a loyal customer is five times cheaper than acquiring new customers for your business. Therefore, effective customer marketing is essential for retaining loyal customers for long-term business success.
But retaining your customers is challenging as it goes beyond improving your customer service. You must encourage the customers to make purchases by utilizing clever marketing strategies. Let us learn about customer marketing and how it is important for a business to succeed.
What is Customer Marketing? Why Use It as a Business Strategy?
Customer marketing is a marketing strategy specially tailored to retain current customers rather than acquire more potential customers.
Customer marketing is conducted to market new products to your established customer base. It helps retain your existing customer base and foster loyalty. Therefore, customer marketing is the art of building a loyal customer base which helps expand your business when the existing customers work as potential marketers.
This targeted marketing has various positive outcomes for your success if you use a clever marketing strategy. Some of these outcomes include the following.
Encourages customer retention
Maintains customer loyalty
Creates business/brand evangelists
Creates a business community around your products/services
10 Strategies for Increasing Customer Loyalty
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Having clever customer marketing strategies is imperative in a competitive marketplace. You must retain customers to boost sales.
Successful customer marketing can also help attract new customers to your business and help broaden your community as it builds trust and loyalty. Here are 10 of the best marketing strategies for improved experience and customer loyalty.
1. Know Your Customers
To cultivate customer loyalty, you must get to know your customer base. It includes checking their buying habits, wants, and needs.
You must treat your paying customers as a person you want to get to know. For this purpose, your business needs to send personalized emails to understand customer queries and resolve them by holding a conversation.
While chatbots are a quick and effortless solution to customer queries, sometimes, you must get to know your customer to deliver quality results that could get you a referral.
Moreover, you must share information about your brand and business vision to build customer trust and loyalty. This strategy helps your customers to perceive the humanity of your brand.
2. Build Brand Advocates
All your customers are valuable assets for your business. The customers who love your brand and love to frequently shop from you can be your business advocates.
You can ask your loyal customers to attend your webinars or create a social media rave about your brand.
A clever business marketing strategy will help you recognize your brand advocates. Once you know a frequent customer, you can turn to case studies and referrals to gain potential customers.
Finding your brand advocates is challenging. First, to recognize your loyal customers, you must ask for reviews.
Prospect customers can read the reviews, which will help build trust. As a result, you'll gain potential customers without the need to interrupt your customer's workday due to pitch calls.
3. Find Out What Our Customers Want
Another clever customer marketing strategy is finding what your customers want. But, first, you must identify your customer needs to know what helps boost sales. There are several ways to identify your customer needs.
Keyword research is one of the best methods to identify your customers' needs. Most customers use search engines to analyze a product or service.
You can conduct keyword research to know what your customers are looking for. Keyword research in your business niche will benefit you as you know what your customers want.
Another excellent customer marketing method is learning what people say about your brand or service. You can build customer loyalty only through conducting extensive research about what your customers need.
You can look for reviews on social media and devise a clever marketing strategy to meet your customers' needs. Such focused strategies to understand your customers will help you know your audience.
Once you understand your audience, you can better advertise your products and services to gain prospective customers. You must also learn what the customers have to say about your competitors. This will help you improve your business model and prove beneficial when you advertise your products.
4. Provide Exemplary Customer Service
A customer-driven marketing strategy requires garnering customer loyalty by facilitating your audience. More customers will likely shop from you again when you provide exemplary customer service by improving your customer service infrastructure.
This helps build customer loyalty. But you must be responsive when it comes to addressing the needs of your customers. For example, you can use live chat, phone calls, emails, or messages to resolve customer queries.
Try to have a sound customer service infrastructure to ensure that potential problems are immediately addressed and resolved, resulting in a happy customer base. And, of course, it's much easier to retain satisfied customers.
5. Offer Giveaways, Trials, and Discounts
Another excellent marketing strategy is to offer giveaways and discounts to your customers. It is an effective way to attract new customers as well. When you offer free trials or giveaways to your customer base, they start to trust your brand.
Once you offer a free trial, a potential customer knows that your brand isn't a scam. Moreover, if you're aware that your brand provides a good product or service, free trials are more likely to attract new customers and retain existing customers.
Offering monthly discounts to existing customers also helps them keep engaged with your business. This clever customer marketing tactic ensures that your customers return to you frequently.
Besides this, you can take some steps to ensure that your existing customers act to help flourish your business.
For example, if you're offering discounts or free products to your existing customers, you can ask them to refer your business to two or more people who should also make a purchase. It results in increased sales. Thus, by offering incentives such as discounts and free trials, you're retaining existing customers and enhancing your customer base.
6. Set up a Referral Program
Like a loyalty program, you can set up a referral program for your existing customers to keep them engaged with your business.
In a referral program, customers benefit from referring your business to another person. It doesn't only help with the brand advertisement but also increases your customer base.
When you offer benefits such as discounts, your existing customers come back to you for more products. This mutual relationship benefits the customers and the business.
7. Engage Customers on Social Media
Social media provides the gateway to building healthy relationships with your customers. You can use your business to build customer loyalty if your company has a solid social media presence.
Many consumers perceive businesses as irrelevant if they lack social media presence. Therefore, your business must have a strong social media presence to retain existing customers.
You can share information via social media and encourage your customers to follow your brand to get information about sales and discounts. It helps build a strong online business community that promotes customer interaction.
Your posts must resonate with your target audience as they will help retain customers and attract more prospective customers.
8. Leverage Email Marketing
Email marketing can help tell your customers about upcoming products, services, and available discounts. You can also use email marketing to inform your customers about flat sales on services or products.
Moreover, email marketing is an effective way to educate your customers about your brand.
Using your social media blogs to get your customers to subscribe results in an inflow of subscribers. You must use the best marketing strategies to convert these subscribers into potential customers.
Email marketing campaigns can help you generate more leads and retain a customer base as it helps strengthen your customer relationships. For example, you can use automated email processes to send emails to customers who sign up.
Triggered autoresponders are also excellent for sending follow-ups to customers that abandon their carts. Other emails can help you stay in touch with your customer base, building customer loyalty.
9. Encourage Customer Feedback
You must encourage customer feedback to show concern for your customers and their needs. In addition, you must ask for feedback if you wish to improve your business and retain customers.
Try to send out surveys, be open to reviews, and request email feedback. Customers are willing to invest in businesses that value their insight. However, you cannot achieve customer satisfaction solely by one-sided business communication.
You must implement customer feedback and market it as proof of your business dedication. This strategy helps cultivate customer loyalty.
10. Incentivize loyalty
Impressive customer retention tactics are the heart and soul of a customer-driven marketing effort. If you want your existing customers to be loyal to your brand, you must find ways to keep them on board for as long as possible.
But how do you foster customer loyalty?
Providing exceptional customer service and constantly engaging with your customers can give a little push to your customers. But besides this, you can incentivize loyalty through free merchandise, coupons, rewards, and more.
Such loyalty programs give your customers an extra reason to stick with your brand. Loyal customers love to know that your brand appreciates them. Therefore, you could always use some new strategies to retain your current customer base.
Customer loyalty programs are an effortless way to supplement effective customer marketing strategies. Regardless of the business nature, incorporating a loyalty program can help retain existing customers for improved experience and loyalty.
Impact of Bad Customer Experiences
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Excellent customer experience can foster trust and loyalty. In contrast, a poor customer experience can have a negative impact on your business.
If your customer-driven marketing strategies do not revolve around improving customer experience, you might just lose your target audience.
More than $60 billion is lost to bad customer service per year.
According to a study, about 91% of customers leave a business without making a complaint. Therefore, you must constantly interact with your customers to ensure your brand fulfills their needs.
Some of the common causes for a bad customer experience are the following.
Challenging purchasing process
Negative experience with your customer support
Compromised security
Ignored customer feedback
Delayed response
How to Implement an Impressive Customer Marketing Strategy Today?
An impressive customer marketing strategy focuses on the needs of your current customers. It does not require attracting new customers via business marketing.
Instead, it focuses on your current customers. Business regimes such as loyalty programs, referrals, and discounts for your existing customers help to increase loyalty, advocacy, and retention.
It automatically results in an inflow of prospective customers when your existing customer base acts as a brand advocate. Therefore, you must focus on retaining your current customers for successful customer marketing.
Benefits of Customer Marketing
Customer marketing has various benefits. These include the following.
Increased customer loyalty
Increased sales
Long-term customer retention
Become customer-centric
Personalized products that are in demand
The business receives actionable customer insight
Engaging customers in real-time
Brand advocates
Enhanced business advertisement through customer advocacy
Final Thoughts
Customer marketing strategies can help your brand look into each pain point of your customer experience. When you pay close attention to the customer's experience, you can make more changes to your products and services.
When your products and services are more personalized to your audience, it increases sales. As a result, your business generates more revenue and forms a stronger customer base by establishing good customer relationships.
Cover Photo by Peter Conlan on Unsplash
