Closing a deal with a new customer is a great feeling. A customer continuing to do business with you is a better feeling. And a customer choosing you for every transaction before anyone else is the best feeling—and the best way to keep making money.
Retention is when a customer isn’t just a one-off relationship. They keep coming back to you for products and services. Customer loyalty, however, is when they trust you more than they trust any other business in your industry. Your competitors don’t matter when you’re fulfilling their needs.
Even if someone buys from you once, lots of other companies are still making noise to get their attention, and some might succeed in distracting them from you.
So it makes sense that customer loyalty and retention marketing are part of any competent marketing strategy. Proactive marketing reminds customers that you’re at their service when other companies are trying to tell them the same thing.
And the best way to keep people engaged with your business and think of you as the best at what you do is to create those proactive marketing strategies.
Give Special/Surprise Offers to Returning Customers
A customer keeps coming back? That’s a reason to celebrate. Let them in on the celebration and offer a token of your appreciation.
Customer appreciation is nothing new, of course, but so many companies continue to use it because it’s been proven to work over and over.
Offers that display customer appreciation doesn’t have to be especially complicated—or even original. Here are a few reliable tried-and-true methods:
- Discounts
- Two-for-one deals
- Free giveaways
If you’re able to track the exact purchasing habits of your customers (and you should be), you can offer them deals on products and services that relate to their past buying habits. This is more effective than just a blanket discount on anything and everything.
Communicate With Your Customers Well and Often
Customers hate feeling ignored. And if you’re not interacting with them, someone else probably is.
And with so many avenues that enable you to talk directly with customers (and potential customers), you don’t have an excuse to ignore them until they’re ready to do business with you.
Talking with customers is one of the easiest and most effective tactics for proactive marketing. You get to address their comments, concerns, and questions, often in real time.
Use their feedback to refine your approach to doing business. The more you talk to your customers, the better you can understand how well you’re accomplishing your objectives.
Talk to Your Customers in Your Social Media Direct Messages
If your phone isn’t ringing, that doesn’t mean no one wants to talk to you. It might mean they’re just trying to talk to you in a different way.
You might already be publishing content on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, but how often are you checking and responding to your direct messages?
Take your direct messages online seriously. Anything from a casual comment to a complaint is worth taking note of. Making a point to respond to those messages can mean the difference between losing a potential customer and turning them into an evangelist of your business.
Companies use social media for customer service all the time. Social media platform company Hootsuite uses it regularly for their clients.
Employ Social Media Contests to Engage With Your Audience
One of the most popular ways for driving engagement on social media and letting people in on the fun is a social contest or giveaway. Give your audience a reason to share a post on Facebook or submit something to a form, in exchange for a cool prize:
- Free product
- Free services for a month
- Merchandise
Fun contests can quickly boost engagement (and make up for social’s pesky constantly changing algorithms). If your audience hasn’t heard from you in awhile, or if you feel like your social content has gotten stuck in a repetitive rut—and your audience has lost interest—a contest can not only liven things up but also motivate people to connect with your brand in a way they haven’t before.
More importantly, it reminds people of what a great company you are and how much they like you.
Stay Relevant by Connecting With Customers Through Email Marketing
Email lets you reach out to all of your customers, certain segments or just one. While the perennial question in marketing is whether email is dead (it’s not), email continues to be a great medium for sending promotions and updates to customers who have opted in.
Email marketing is the vehicle that lets you send those discounts and promotional offers to customers who might be interested in them. It also enables you to enhance your relationship after a purchase and provide timely updates:
Send Purchase Follow-up emails
A purchase follow-up email isn’t an email confirming the transaction. Those are important, sure, but they’re also impersonal and mundane.
Follow-up emails should amplify the customer’s feeling of excitement for their new item. Make them feel good about doing business with you and dispel any potential feeling of buyer’s remorse.
Follow-up emails can also include subtle pushes for customers to take extra steps, such as returning to your website to continue shopping or to follow you on social media.
Changes to Business Models
Are you reinventing the way you sell your services? Your customers need to know ASAP. Use this as an opportunity to also help them smoothly transition to your new way of doing business.
Use this as an opportunity to explain to your customers how these changes benefit them and make their relationship with you more conducive to their satisfaction. Change is scary for everyone. Strengthen their trust in you by eliminating their fears.
Solicit Feedback From Your Customers
You should care about what your customers think of you. A lot. Every single person who has bought from you can easily share what they think online … and without warning.
Still, you can do this in a controlled environment that’s more conducive to improving your business model and refining your strategies.
Asking for reviews is a simple way of showing your customers that you care about their opinions. When the drop a review into the void of Yelp or Google, they’re not holding their breath for a customer representative to reach out to them. But if you ask them to do it, they can feel better knowing that their feedback is being considered.
You can do this a number of ways:
- Put a call-to-action at the end of every purchase confirmation email that asks people to leave a review on your Google My Business page.
- Leave a request to leave a star rating on a scale of 1 to 5.
- Send an email asking them to fill out a detailed survey about their experiences with your company.
Asking for direct feedback like this makes your customers feel like they have a say in the direction of your business. Even if their feedback is negative, it’s a chance to rope them into the conversation and make them feel like they’re collaborating with you on ways to improve.
Requesting feedback is a signal to your customers that you care about their opinions and experiences.
Asking for and receiving those reviews is only half the battle, though. Your customers don’t want to feel like they’re just howling into the void.
Respond to every review you get, whether it’s good or bad. Responding to reviews is crucial to fostering the customer relationships.
Thank the people who leave positive reviews. Thank the people who leave negative reviews, and tell them you’re committed to bettering your business model and creating a more satisfactory experience in the future.
Customer retention and loyalty isn’t a one-and-done rule. If you want returning customers who genuinely love what you give them, you have to show them how much you love doing business with them.
Contact us today if you need help with using email and social media as part of your customer retention and loyalty strategy.
