Avoid these 3 mistakes that sabotage customer loyalty
Businesses bloom on repeat customers. Thus, keeping your customers hooked is a vital business requirement.
Loyal customers must know the difference between established business and a struggling one. These are the customers who drive revenue (a maximum part of it) into businesses.
Let the numbers speak:
- Repeat customers spend 67% more than new ones.
- About 82% of the small businesses said that loyal customers were the leading players in their business growth.
- Repeat customers have a 60% – 70% chance of conversion for each visit.
Owing to this reason, customer loyalty programs have become popular among businesses today.
Big brand names are also pouring a substantial amount of resources into customer loyalty programs. Whether it is a small coffee shop or a huge departmental store, rewarding customers is consistently trending. Moreover, it seems to be a foolproof plan for further business growth.
Many other businesses, however, cannot easily acquire customer loyalty through plug-and-play solutions.
If you are unable to retain your customers and have already made several tweaks to your products and the way you sell, there are chances that you are doing something wrong.
Understand these three mistakes that might hurt getting the loyalty of your customers. Take a look:
1. The mistake: Not knowing about your loyal customers
It is neither about knowing all their names nor about encompassing profile that box in all your loyal customers. It is impossible to fit all your loyal customers in one profile.
Your loyal customers come to you for different reasons. Either they find you the most affordable or grew interacting with you.
With this in mind, you need to understand your loyal customers regardless of difficulties coming in to explore their buying patterns. This is the only way to nurture your relationship with your customers.
If you continually improve their experience each time, they will keep coming back to you. However, if you are unable to keep track of your customers, specifically the loyal ones, you will end up reaching out to them in the wrong way. It is because you are not maximizing your relationships with these loyal customers and are not capturing and using data to find more customers like them.
The solution: Create customer personas
You cannot afford not to nurture the relationship you have with your loyal customers. This way, creating customer personas can help you in approaching, engaging, and marketing to your loyal customers.
Customer personas signify your ideal customers. Moreover, with these personas, you will be able to market to a broader audience and sales funnel. This way, your loyal customers could join your pool of repeat customers.
What makes a loyal customer?
If you start tracking your customer data, you will be able to identify factors that define your loyal customers:
- your customers’ spending habits, referrals, and longevity.
- your customers shared traits and with whom they can be grouped with
You can even analyse your data to get the answer to these questions:
- How do loyal customers find you?
- How do they respond to your marketing campaigns?
- What do loyal customers buy from you?
- What is the minimum and maximum spending of a loyal customer?
- What approaches go unnoticed by your loyal customers?
What do you do with this information?
Use this information to interact, reach out, and form relationships with your best customers. You can even use this information to personalize and target your user engagement.
You must know if rewards and loyalty programs work for them and make them come back more often. Also, if the quality of your products and services makes them buy more and encourage them to bring in their friends.
To have an utterly predictable business model, you must have a sturdy customer base that continually expands itself.
2. The mistake: Giving discounts as your customer retention strategy
Providing more and more discounts may work to get more feet in the door, but do they stay for long?
Undoubtedly, customers love getting discounts, promos, freebies. But, do they still love your brand without it? You should know the answer. It is nearly impossible to find a person who does not like discounts.
Giving discounts is an excellent way to keep people interested, but does not guarantee a sale.
The solution: Provide a positive customer experience
If you are providing a positive shopping experience, your customers will stay.
Do not hinge entirely on compromising your bottom line through discounts. Instead, develop a positive customer experience for your business.
Start with seeing things from the perspective of a customer. Go above and beyond to improve your customer experience.
Implementation of small gestures helps to turn a meh into a wow by creating lasting loyalty and bringing a better overall experience for your clientele. For example:
- Speeding up an order, or including an upgraded after-sales service for their purchases.
If you successfully execute these gestures into the business, it can help in boosting customer retention and transforming your current clientele as your customer acquisition evangelists.
Remember that no matter how many times you have pleased your customers, they will remember all the negative experiences with your brand.
3. The mistake: Denying to embrace technology
Your customers love the neighbourhood cafe ran by that endearing couple. Is it because they make the best food, or they provide the most authentic experience? No, it is because they have turned up for accepting the truth of today’s businesses, especially technology-wise.
In this modern-day and age, businesses must be connected to the people virtually.
If you are refusing to update with the times, your business authenticity will soon mean nothing as you run out of customers.
The solution: Adopt technology
Leveraging technology makes things snappier, easier and more personalized that helps you retain your customers. Moreover, if you are not on social media, you are off the radar of most of your consumers.
Retaining customers is always about going above and beyond.
Create a mobile app
Today, building mobile apps is not as tricky as it was before.
With drag and drop solutions, you can convert your website to a mobile app in a few steps with AppMySite. A mobile app helps you improve your business operations and revenue and drives more user engagement.
Your business should have as many channels available when customers want to find and connect with you. Moreover, building an app will work as an extension of your business. Add content that’s relevant to your customer base.
Let us know in the comments below about the ways that keep your customers happy and your go-to strategy for customer retention.
Comments