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Making your existing customers stay with you is even more complicated than acquiring new customers. That’s because existing customer relationships are much more important for a business when compared to garnering new customers. According to research, acquiring new customers will cost you 5% to 25% more than retaining the existing customers.
This means that, if you are able to make your existing customers stay with your brand, you are going to save huge on the marketing costs. However, it is not going to be an easy haul. Your brand needs to provide exceptional customer experience to make them stay.
89% of customers leave their existing brand because of a bad customer experience. No matter how refined and perfect your product or service is, if you are lacking at delivering a great customer experience, then it all goes vain. So, it is important to focus on your customer relationship post purchase.
Before we dig into the topic more, let us look at what brand loyalty means and why is it important for your business?
What is brand loyalty?
There is competition for everything in the market. No matter whichever business you are in, you will have to face the competition and it is non-negotiable. Despite so many options available in the market, most of the customers get attracted to one particular brand and go for that brand multiple times.
During this process, they cultivate a positive relationship with the brand as well. Making your customers loyal to your brand is a multi-step process and it requires some serious efforts from you.
Why is it important to build brand loyalty?
Businesses can reap so many benefits by building brand loyalty. Here are some of them:
- Brand loyalty is long term: Customers who are loyal to one particular brand always tend to stay with the brand. This long term relationship is very beneficial to organizations and gives them a competitive advantage as they don’t have to invest heavily in acquiring new customers.
- Better growth: Brand loyalty is a circle of growth. Your business will thrive when you retain more customers as its ROI is better. With the brand growth, more customers will be retained.
- Word of mouth: Loyal customers don’t just come back to your brand, they also recommend it to the people in their circle. Self reinforcement will ensure to bring in more brand loyalty, solidifying your company’s advantage.
Ways to build brand loyalty through customer experience
Building brand loyalty is not going to be a cakewalk. However, if you refine your customer experience, you will more likely create brand loyalty among the existing customers. Here are some of the things that you can do to build brand loyalty.
1. Offer exclusive deals
Exclusivity can be a game changer for your brand. Customers love the thought of getting something unique that no one else has access to. You need to reward your customer for purchasing from your brand, and this reward shouldn’t be something that everyone gets.
Be it a discount on their existing bill or a coupon for their future purchase, sample of your new product which isn’t in the market yet, free shipping, etc. When you offer things like this, it prompts customers to come back to your brand again and again expecting more exclusive deals.
This is a small gesture, but can help you build brand loyalty on a very huge scale.
2. Referral commissions
Retaining your old customers is very important, but at the same time you need to acquire new customers to make your business grow. There is a marketing strategy that can make both of this possible, and that is referral commissions. You can offer a reward for every referral that you get from the customers.
No, you don’t have to burn a hole in your pocket to do this. Small rewards like some percentage share on the billed amount would be enough to make your customers happy, you can also give them a free product. Either way, a small reward from your brand is enough to make them come back to your company again and again.
3. Personalized responses
Most of the time, we see banks sending birthday wishes to their customers. This is a small gesture, but it is capable of creating a positive relationship with the customer. Use tools like CRM to track the important events related to your customer.
Send them wishes, give them a coupon, and make their special day even better with your wishes. Apart from these, you should always ensure that every communication that happens between you and the customer should be personalized and never give them generic, chatbot replies.
4. Faster replies
No brand in the whole world delivers exceptional products or service with no complaints. It is common for your customers to come to you with one or the other issue that they are facing. Be it on social media, email, call, message or any other communication channel.
Your response has to be fast. When you quickly acknowledge the issue, it sends a positive vibe to your customer and makes them believe in your brand even more. Listen to the customer’s issue carefully and then strive to work on the solution.
There are times when your customers share negative feedback about your product or service, acknowledge that and respond. Make sure that the customer updates their review if they are happy with your solution.
5. Gamification
Who wouldn’t love games when it is coupled with rewards? Reward programs are really fun and would be a great way to engage your customers with your brand. You can conduct surveys, quizzes, trivia, offer them with a badge or something.
Right from signing up to your newsletter or app to purchasing, you can keep rewarding your customers at every step of the sales process. This will keep them engaged, and they will take more actions to get more rewards.
6. Ask for feedback
Post purchase, ask your customer for the feedback and try to improve on it during their next purchase. These small things are very important for customers, and it shows how much you care for them and their opinions.
So, make sure to send a questionnaire to collect feedback via email or message. You can also use IVR to simplify the process even more.
7. Keep improving customer experience
Have a proper, streamlined customer service process in place. As said above, customer attention span is very less now, and you just cannot take any chances with it. So, make sure that you address your customers almost immediately.
Have a proper path for selling, interacting with customers and ensure that none of your customers are left behind. You can use a CRM to have that omnichannel experience.
3 companies with great brand loyalty
Building brand loyalty is an art and there are so many companies who have mastered it. If you observe, almost all the success brands out there offer built brand loyalty and are thriving with amazing growth.
1. Apple
Did you know that in 2021, Apple reached an all -time top brand loyalty score of 92%! Apple has always been one of the top companies to have great brand loyalty. Being one of the premium electronics companies in the world, Apple was able to retain most of its customers. One of the main reasons for this is the brand positions itself as a premium one in the market and almost all of its products are in another league compared to its competitors.
Apart from that, the company always ensured great customer service. It has always been on the top for customer satisfaction indexes. Proper products coupled with great marketing strategy and customer service has made Apple one of the best brands in the market and created brand loyalty.
2. Starbucks
Starbucks has reported that in 2020, their loyalty program has crossed 19.3 million members across the globe and are expecting 10% YoY in the upcoming years. This loyalty program is helping in garnering 50% of sales across the world for Starbucks.
Starbucks combines multiple parameters in their loyalty program. They use in-app user data, specific store insights, purchase history to curate discount offers as per the user.
3. Nike
Nike relies on image building by partnering with famous athletes as brand ambassadors. Apart from that, the brand is also using omnichannel experience to deliver great customer service. This way, they are building a huge community of the customers and are providing reward programs.
The brand is offering multiple free apps with workouts, running clubs, etc. and are incentivizing people who are signing up and taking action on those apps.
Conclusion
Delivering exceptional customer service alone can help in retaining your existing customers. So always focus on building brand loyalty by improving the customer experience.
However, you have to be extremely careful on how you are planning to do it. There are multiple strategies mentioned above to build customer loyalty, you can opt for one or more of these strategies that align with your requirements.
