7 marketing actions to build customer loyalty

Customer loyalty is a necessity for the viability of any company, but it is still necessary to understand the psychology of your target customers and to know how to use the best channels, offers and actors in your loyalty process. Remember that a loyal customer is a customer who appreciates your product or service, your welcome, your sales area and your professionalism. Hence the need to know the right techniques to use to build customer loyalty.

If we apply the principle of Pareto’s law, on average 20% of your current customers will bring you 80% of your turnover. However, many companies devote all their time and effort to acquiring new customers. What we propose today is to discover how to create customer loyalty in 7 simple actions.

Action 1: Consider customers as partners

Many companies don’t go far enough in building relationships with their customers, yet this is the key to building customer loyalty. By limiting yourself to a provider-client relationship, you remain in a logic of execution. While this may be enough to make a sale, your relationship may not last over time. In fact, you are exposing yourself to a new competition because there is no bond between you and your client.

When you enter into a partnership relationship, you manage to build a strong relationship based on trust and desire to grow together. The idea is to project your ambassadors in the long term with your brand and build customer loyalty through engagement.

Opt for relationship marketing

Here are some tips you can implement to make it happen:

Establish an atmosphere of trust: fluid communication is essential in a trusting relationship. So don’t hesitate to be transparent and anticipate potential problems.
Make plans for the future together: share your vision with your client: how your collaboration could evolve in the future?
Take into account his opinions: this allows you to grow as a couple in the long term, because you ask him to improve yourself. So make sure you get regular feedback from them, improve and measure their satisfaction.
Become his advisor: share with him the best trends in the business, the market and your techniques. Tell them how you work so they know what you are doing and why. You will thus become a real advisor that he will solicit on questions beyond your competence.
Learn to thank him: learn to regularly thank your customers for the trust they place in you. This shows your consideration and love for them.

Solicit their recommendation: your loyal customers can help you make additional sales. So don’t hesitate to ask them to recommend you to their contacts, to leave you customer testimonials or to be the subject of your case studies. Kalido offers a complete solution to develop a relationship marketing strategy that encompasses community animation, sponsorship and engagement rewards.

Action 2: Improve the customer experience

Building customer loyalty requires a consistent, rich and challenging customer experience. Make the customer journey an adventure within an eco-system that reflects your image: combine a communication tool, a game interface and an online rewards marketplace. Challenge your audience with transactional objectives and value their commitment: frequency and volume of purchases, testimonials and referrals, co-responsible behavior, etc.

Engage them: It is crucial for you to identify your customer’s perception of the world. Put yourself in their shoes and ask them how they experience each step of the sales process, what questions they might have and how they feel about your work. Ask them live questions to best meet their needs,
Make their experience seamless: a successful customer experience is frictionless, simple and fluid. To do this, you need to identify the potential difficulties for your customer, the blocks they might have and remove any complex steps both online and in-store,
Surprise them: we all like surprises, especially when they are more than we expected. The surprise comes from the (positive) gap between expectations and reality. So don’t hesitate to give them small, thoughtful gifts (postcards every year, a loyalty gift for their birthday or special events).

Action 3: Deliver a high level of service

Your customers expect more than a product from you, they expect a service that lives up to their expectations. If they are disappointed, you can kiss them goodbye in the medium term. To do this, don’t rest on your successes today. Establish a customer journey animation strategy to build loyalty with your audience.

To do this:

Actively listen to your customers: Keep in touch with your customers to understand their problems and to better understand their needs. Learn to ask the right questions, conduct surveys, identify their priority needs and find solutions.
Develop an improvement routine: If you want to be successful in the long run, make it a habit to improve your skills as well as your products and services. Invest the money and energy and create an agenda for improvement over several months.
Stay on top of new trends in your market: take the lead in your market and anticipate trends. If you can identify market trends in time, you will allow your customers to be in tune with the market and they will be grateful.

Understand why your customers are leaving: Some separations are inevitable, but you need to understand the reasons for these departures. This is how you can improve your procedures, your offer, your service and your customer relationship.

Action 4 : Offer a high quality customer service

Beyond the transactional, your customers’ experience begins at the threshold of your store and continues long after. Propose a personal space allows you to keep in touch and build customer loyalty: multiply the sources of data and engage your community.

Here’s how to improve your customer service:

Be responsive: When your customer encounters an obstacle in your sales process, they are obsessed with it. If you don’t react quickly, he will blame you for the inconvenience, even if it’s not your fault. Facilitate communication with your customers so that they feel valued.
Solve both causes and effects: this means solving the problem while ensuring that it does not happen again.
Do a good job of conflict management: When a customer expresses dissatisfaction, avoid taking it personally. Tell yourself that it is justified and correct it. Be smiling, and listening and your customers will thank you for it.

Limit friction: Your customer must be able to reach you easily, so give priority to human availability with a direct line. Create a community of customers ready to help each other. Finally, explain your availability and the timing of your response.

Action 5: Establish a new customer acquisition routine

Is it better to focus on acquisition or to retain pre-existing customers? Answer: both! The perpetuation of your business depends on recommendations and word of mouth. Via a relational platform, you can develop a sponsorship program . Capitalize on your base to prospect a targeted and qualified audience.

Here’s how to get organized:

Allocate the right resources based on return on investment: This refers to human, financial and energy resources. You can organize your teams so that there is one dedicated to prospecting and another to retention.
Make sure you stay in touch with your prospects: the goal is not to harass them with your presence, but to provide them with value on a regular basis. To do this, make sure you regularly provide them with value and educate them through your blog and newsletter. Identify their main issues and write content accordingly.
Ask your clients for referrals: Loyalty and acquisition can be self-sustaining if you know how. When you meet a new customer, who could become a partner of one of your customers, do not hesitate to make a connection. Your customers will repay you by doing the same for you.

Action 6 : Putting forward the values and history of your company

If you want your customers to become attached to your company, you must learn to tell your story. Extend your online brand experience with a club that reflects you. Reward positive engagement, whether transactional or non-transactional, to steer your customers in the direction of your marketing strategy.

This includes:

The federation of a community around your values and your mission: share your vision of your business, the benefits that your product or service brings to your customers. Your mission is your quest, the solution you want to bring to the market with your product.
Turn your customers into ambassadors: Remember that your satisfied customers are your best salespeople. Therefore, give them a voice in writing or through video, organize promotions to share with their loved ones, highlight them in your events and thank them publicly.

Put them at the heart of your stories: tell how you were able to help your clients solve their problems. Make them the heroes of your story, and in doing so, you make them want to write more with you.

Action 7 : Organize loyalty actions

Loyalty programs are an effective lever for customer loyalty. Kalido also offers a complete solution that combines all the features mentioned above previously. To learn more, go here.

Here’s how you can do it:

Set up a referral program: You can choose to offer a gift to your customers for each new customer they bring to you. It could be a discount on an offer, chocolates, voucher for a meal at a restaurant, etc. Put your creativity to work.
Get great discounts: you can offer a loyal customer an interesting discount on a product. Inform them at the beginning of your collaboration of the existence of this system of thanks according to the loyalty of your customers.
Give gifts: don’t hesitate to create a surprise with unusual attentions. On the other hand, avoid making it a routine, you can for example offer a birthday gift only the first year.