Attracting new customers might be tough, but in reality, it’s only half the battle – you have to keep them. Cultivating brand loyalty is something that even multibillion-dollar corporations haven’t perfected; it’s definitely more of an art than a science. Regardless, there’s still plenty we know about what a business can do to promote customer loyalty.
How do you do it? Well, you could get an MBA online to figure it out in great depth and detail…but if you don’t have time for all that, you could just keep reading, and we’ll help you dip your toes into the basics.
Know What They Want
If you want to sell people something even once, let alone ongoing, you need to know what they want. Novelty counts for something, and sometimes products can grab some initial revenue, or even become trendy or fashionable just by virtue of scratching that itch for something new and different. But that’s not how you keep them coming back. To create truly loyal customers, you need to understand them and know what they want. If you don’t give people what they really want, someone else will.
It’s important to start off making something you care about – after all if you want it, odds are someone else will, too! But it’s also important to pay attention to the data. Collecting data on customer behaviour is crucial. If you are selling tons of one particular product, or one version of that product, listen to the numbers – make more! Trying to sell others a product according to one’s own taste is the pitfall of countless business owners. At the end of the day, the numbers don’t lie.
It’s not just about your product either – you have to know what kind of image your customers want your brand to present. That’s why it’s really important to install trackers from advertising platforms like Google and Meta to determine conversion rates from different types of advertising. It’s also important to change up the visual presentation of your ads, website, and other visual customer touch points for your brand, and monitor their response.
This is why it’s so crucial to collect data and track trends in buyer habits – at the end of the day, if you don’t listen to your customers, they will punish you by simply not buying your product.
Play Fair
People can smell a rip from a mile away. Most scams and companies selling bad quality products never make it off the ground. There are always exceptions of course – we live in the age of dropshipping, where people buy products in bulk from Alibaba or eBay, put up a simple website, and start marketing on social media or crowdfunding platforms. With enough people running scams and selling low-quality products, the law of averages allows one of them to succeed now and again. But even that doesn’t usually work out. People hate bad quality products, and if they get burned once, they won’t be coming back for more.
People also hate bad customer service. Even for big companies, poor customer service can be a major pitfall. It’s important to support your products and remain humble when something goes wrong. If you ship a defective product, failing to fix the problem could wind up hurting your brand far more than you might save on one return.
In this day and age, it’s not just about doing the right thing, either: you never know when your customer might be an influencer. People with large social media followings can quickly get the word out about a bad customer experience, and it can be damaging or even fatal, even for an established business – see the recent scandal with ASUS’s customer service for a prime example of how not to handle customer complaints and defective products!
Watch Your Back
Understanding your competition is more important than most business owners realise. Unless you run a retail business in a small town, or just happen upon some other kind of convenient monopoly, you will have competition. And that means other people will probably be learning from your successes and failures, and, if they’re smart, applying them to their own business – you should be doing the same. Research your competition constantly: if they’re doing something that you’re not, pay attention to when they made that change, and how it might be affecting your business; if the data suggests that you might be losing customers to their new strategy, it’s time to adapt. Likewise, if you detect an influx of business when you haven’t changed anything major, it’s probably a good time to check in on your competition and see what they might be doing wrong.
Get The Word Out
No matter how good your product is, people might just forget about you if you can’t stay top of mind when they’re thinking about their next purchase. Advertising is crucial for ensuring the prominence of your brand in your niche, and ensuring that, when people think of your product, they think of you. It’s easy to spend wastefully on advertising, especially when conducting big marketing campaigns, or spending large amounts consistently over time.
It’s crucial to make a big splash when you put out a new product or make other big changes that might attract customer attention, but unless you’re a brand-new company trying to make a splash in a competitive industry, it’s often more effective to spend smaller amounts of money over targeted periods rather than blowing your war chest all at once. With that said, spending consistently over too long a period can reduce ROI: people might get tired of your ads, or become frustrated with your weekly mailers. It’s important to cultivate a balance, and of course, pay attention to the data to determine the impact of your spend.
At the end of the day, creating brand loyalty comes down to giving your customers what they want and treating them with respect. If you can do that, and you’re able to make yourself known, you’ve got a recipe for success!