Customer loyalty is highly important to any successful business. In order for your business to be financially healthy, you want to reduce customer churn (without resorting to any drastic measures such as hypnosis).
Start with loyal employees
Loyal employees lead to loyal customers. If your team is passionate about their work and committed to your company, they will deliver high quality service and care to your customers. Before taking care of your customers, you must ensure that you are first taking care of your employes. Compensate your employees fairly. Motivate them. Make sure your management is open and receptive to listening to both employee and customer concerns. Give your employees incentives to perform better and they will give your customers a reason to keep returning to your business.
Personalize customer interactions
Your customers hate feeling like they are just another number to you. Everybody wants to feel important. That is why personalized customer interactions are key. Ensure that any communication that goes out to your clients has their preferred name on it. Customize any mailing and email marketing campaigns, because everybody loves the sight of their own name. Also make sure that any face-to-face or over the phone interactions are cheerful, friendly and pleasant.
Be consistent
To have consistent patronage from your customers, you must provide consistent quality services or products to them. Your customers chose to give you their business because of the quality you provided. In order to keep that business, continue to provide the same quality that your customers love. Do not under any circumstances start to cut corners or decrease quality of products to save money. It may save money in the short term, but it will cost you much more in lost business.
That is not to say that you cannot change or update your business, but any changes must be made as improvements or modernizations. Go forwards, you cannot afford to go back. And before making any drastic changes, take customer feedback into consideration.
Be responsive
An ignored customer will not stay a customer with you for long. In the day and age of instant interaction, customers want responses to their questions and issues immediately. If it takes you more that 24 hours to respond to a customer concern, you have a huge problem. Every hour a customer’s problem is not dealt with, is an hour that the customer can use to research your competitors. This is one of the many reasons you should consider having live chat on your website.
Reward customer loyalty
Just like employees want to be rewarded for their hard work, customers want to be rewarded for their loyalty to your brand. By showing your returning customers that you care about their business and that you care about them, you built a relationship and incentivize them to keep coming back to your business. Offer special perks and discounts to your customers for their return business. Celebrate anniversaries with your customer and they will begin to look forward to more years spent buying from you. In fact, offering special promotions to build customer loyalty can even cause your current customers to bring even more business to your company.
Stand out from the competition
Whatever your field or industry is, your business has competitors. In fact, it’s very likely that new competitors are popping up every day, hoping to sway you clients. How do you keep your competition from poaching your customers? In order to keep loyal customers away from your rivals, you must offer them something your competitors cannot. You must stand out from the crowd in order to keep their business. If you cannot offer the lowest prices, make sure you offer the best customer service, or very specialized unique features. Learn what makes your company special and make sure your customers know that they cannot get it anywhere else.
Offer peace of mind
It is important that you have your customer’s trust. With all of the privacy scares and private data breaches going on, consumers are desperate for a company that they can trust with their private information. Give your customers peace of mind that their data is safe with you by gathering their confidential information in secure forms.
Follow up with your loyal customers
If you want you customers to purchase your products again, often times you need to remind them about you. Track in your CRM system who purchased your products so you can follow up with them. Ask your customers how they like your products, whether they feel like there is anything you can do to improve. By continuing contact with your customers, you are keeping your company fresh in their minds. You are reminding them why they love your products and/or services. And the more your customer thinks about your company, the more likely they are to purchase again.
Hypnotize your clients
If all else fails, you can always guarantee return business by controlling your customer’s minds via hypnosis. Place your customers into a trance where they will be very susceptible to suggestion, and customer loyalty is guaranteed. But if you follow the previous suggestions from this post, there will be no need to resort to hypnosis to retain loyal customers!
