It can be difficult to stay on top of your creative marketing services, especially when your company is growing. What does it take to create customer loyalty that keeps people coming back even when management changes, when products are discontinued, or when your company falls on hard times?
Here are some tips from the experts.
1. Know your customer base. Customer bases are not homogenous. Even though your customers may have some things in common, they undoubtedly have different ages, races, zip codes, and buying behavior. Gathering data about your customers and analyzing it thoroughly will tell you a lot about your customer base. You don’t even necessarily have to go through the process of creating a detailed survey to get information about your customers’ preferences. For example, if you’re a retailer with an eCommerce website, you can create a section of your site that lets people tell you what kinds of products they’d like to see on your site and give other suggestions in exchange for a reward. This reward will encourage your customers to spend money and help you learn about what they want from your company and personalize their user experience even further. The more you can demonstrate to your customers that you know what they need and like, the more likely you are to hang onto their loyalty.
2. Make it personal. Shift from mass mailings and generic communications to personalized communications as much as possible. This should go beyond “Dear <>” and include content driven by demographics, demonstrated preferences, or past purchase history. The goal here is not to just let your customers know that you know their names but to increase the relevance of your communications to their lives. Now, it’s entirely possible to go overboard in this department. According to an InMoment study (granted, it’s a few years old, but its core sentiments still hold true), 75% of consumers deem many forms of personalization as “somewhat creepy.” This survey also reported that 20% of those customers stated they would unsubscribe from your company’s communications if they felt creeped out by your personalization. If your personalization is aggressive, unauthorized, insensitive, or inaccurate, it will drive your customers away.
3. Create multiple touchpoints across your company. Encourage your customers to have multiple points of contact within your company. This can mean interacting with more than one employee so that they don’t jump ship just because their favorite person leaves, but this concept can also apply to the channels across which your customer interacts with your company. For example, if you send them a text message alerting them about a sale, don’t also send an email to that effect. If your customer chats with customer service, follow up with an email detailing what they discussed. Each communication channel should work in concert with, not independent of, all others.
4. Increase the frequency. Stay in communication with your customers regularly, not just during a special promotion or event. This is why drip marketing campaigns can be so helpful when building customer loyalty. They show your customers that you view them as people, not just numbers or sources of revenue. And it’s not just about the frequency of your customer communications. You have to ping them at the right time, on the right channel, on the right device, and with the right message. Otherwise, you risk losing them.
5. Reinforce and reward loyalty. When customers are loyal, let them know you appreciate it. Then reward them for loyalty. You can send them special “loyal customer” discounts that are personalized to their habits and preferences, giving them early access to a program or promotion, or even providing merchandise.
Retaining customers takes effort. What’s your plan? PMI can help you get started with direct mail marketing, printing and binding services, and other creative marketing services. Our team of talented design-driven professionals has been providing high-quality creative marketing services to businesses in the Bay Area for over two decades. Reach out to us, and let’s start putting your great data to work!