Businesses try out all kinds of strategies to increase loyalty. There are membership benefits, loyalty points and cashback offers that are among the most common marketing strategies to bring customers back to your business. These strategies are sort of viral in that they tend to flow word-of-mouth. However, they are also high cost, especially if you operate a business with wafer-thin margins. Marketing techniques like cashback and loyalty points do not show measurable increase in loyalty unless the rewards are sufficiently high and if you operate on low margins, such strategies are a sure way to bankruptcy.
The alternative is to pick strategies that help you understand your customer better, engage more with them and turn a business transaction into a relationship. When the perceived value from a product is more than its MSRP, customers are more likely to return. By investing in tools that build a relationship rather than provide customers a financial incentive, you are more likely to retain your customers for life. Here are three tools to invest in for a more loyal customer base.
Customer Relationship Management: Sales and support professionals are likely to talk to hundreds of customers each month. No matter how good a relationship you build, it may always seem impossible to recall all the discussions you have had with a customer or the latest status of the sales cycle with them. A customer relationship management (CRM) tool helps you organize your conversations so that you can instantly pull out all the conversations you had and other details pertaining to a customer. Modern CRM tools also come with social selling tools so that any communication with a customer over phone, email or even Twitter is neatly organized and presented within your dashboard.
Anytime Access: As marketers go on an overdrive trying to reach customers in every possible way, be it social media or email or billboards, consumers are going through an age of information overload. This is a double-edged sword. Consumers today are more likely to come across your product and possibly convert better. But then, one minor misstep could distract them from your product to your competitors’. This means that businesses should focus on bringing down the time between a customer’s intention to purchase to the actual purchase. One efficient way to ensure this is by providing tools that help them reach out to you when they want. For instance, there are a number of live chat tools that let customers chat with you with questions they have during the evaluation stage. Or, there are click-to-call tools that enable these customers to talk to a rep from within your website. These tools ensure that the customer does not leave the website at any point during the evaluation stage thereby increasing the conversion rate.
Strategic Newsletters: Email newsletters are among the most abused forms of marketing. Businesses often send one newsletter to their customers on an average week and this leads to a lot of clutter and spam in the consumers’ inbox. The jury is out on whether or not this constant bombardment of communication is effective, but one way you could bring down the clutter and still be effective is by strategically spaced out newsletters. Let’s assume your business provides tax services to clients. These are typically required by most businesses once in a year. An effective way to ensure loyalty is by touching base with your customer once a year, right before they start seeking a tax consultant. This way, you can reconnect with customers right before they make a purchase without having to constantly spam them through the year with irrelevant marketing messages.
What other tools do you use to increase conversions and loyalty? Share them in the comments.
