Three Ways To Encourage Customer Loyalty

We all know it takes a lot of effort and investment to win a new customer and so once we have them, we want to keep them!

Here are our top three tips to develop customer loyalty.

1). Every engagement should be easy to conduct

Most obvious, but often overlooked, is delivering great service. If you deal with another business either face to face, by phone or by email you want it to be a pleasant and easy process.

If you want the customer to come back time after time, you have to make sure you consistently deliver a great service by ensuring your staff are trained and the processes are in place.

Build relationships with your customer, get to know their names and tell them yours. In all your dealings under-promise and over-deliver and think about what they are likely to buy from you next e.g. If you sold them a printer, they will need replacement ink cartridges in a few months time!

Concentrate on the value they get from your business. This is not simply about price (which is where e-commerce lives) this is what differentiates you from your competitors.

2). Ask them to come back

It’s so simple but so often overlooked! Book the next appointment during the conversation. Hairdressers and dentists seem to have mastered this, but what about a restaurant? For example, if asked, “would you like me to book a table for your wedding anniversary?” the restaurant would see an increase in future bookings compared to if they hadn’t asked.

For service industries this would work differently and a scheduled review of the service they have received or currently receiving will work wonders. For example, if you work in Marketing and you have been tasked to manage their social media, book in a one to one at least every quarter to review results and discuss their future plans. During the review, ask if they need help to manage their Google My Business page or nurture emails.

This is why it is so important to get to know your customers and build your customer database. How will you find out when their wedding anniversary or birthday is, or indeed whether they want to grow their business through additional marketing if you don’t keep in touch with them in some way.

By knowing your customers, you are able to advise them what your business is doing, ask them to come back and communicate offers to encourage them to do so! In some businesses getting your customers to return may mean adding complimentary products, offer or services to the range.

3). Invite them to join your exclusive club

To build customer loyalty you need to make your business their preferred choice! You need to be proactively moving your Cstomers to Members and ultimately to Advocates.

A Customer buys from you a few times, before that they are simply shoppers.

A Member is part of special group of regular customers who get privileges, think of hotel and airline loyalty clubs!

An Advocate actively promotes your business to others and gets rewarded for doing so.

To move a shopper to a Customer you could offer a discount on their next purchase or a complimentary gift e.g. free bottle of wine with their next meal.

Your Members should be getting special treatment such as a discount card or reward points. Have you thought about running special events such as a preview evening to see your new product line, or a talk by an expert in your market that will be of interest to your customers?

Fundamentally, making your customers feel special and delivering extra value will differentiate you from the crowd. To develop customer loyalty, you need to consistently deliver a great customer experience, keep in touch, ask them to come back and always give them a reason to do so.

Ask yourself the following two questions:

1). What have you done (or doing) to encourage customer loyalty?

2). What ways of developing customer loyalty have worked for you?

If you have done nothing, very little or a lot but it’s not working, then hopefully the above will encourage you to revise what you are doing. 

If you would like to discuss gaining customer loyalty for your business, you can book in a complimentary business coaching session here.

Please put your success stories in the comments so we can share the great ideas!