By Dave Thompson
Customer loyalty is arguably the most important factor in business today. Not only will customer loyalty bring repeat business, but it will also translate to more opportunities via word of mouth as well as brand mulligans for those little hiccups that occur every now and again. Here are three tips that we’ve found to come in handy when it comes to increasing this important marketing metric of customer loyalty.
Three ways you can increase customer loyalty.
Establish a personal relationship with each individual customer
A significant aspect of customer loyalty comes down to your likability. People will almost always remain committed to a brand if they feel they’ve developed a genuine and mutually beneficial relationship. Take advantage of any opportunity to get to know a client on a personal level. To be more exact, designate a specific team of representatives to each individual client. In doing so, you will put yourself in a situation to develop good rapport with every customer and, more importantly, give you critical information to use during follow up opportunities. Most people will not expect a customer service representative to ask about their son’s graduation or a recent job promotion. Organize your operations to keep a mindful eye out for information that can help build such a relationship.
Take into account content relevance
Google no longer rewards those SEO bandits who claw and scratch their way to the top of the search results by including popular keywords in meta tags and hyperlinks to optimize their sites.
Instead, the search engine is now judging content in context with what’s being conveyed on the entire web page and rewarding sites accordingly. With that in mind, make sure to modify your content based on who the traffic is.
For example, our company does business in more than 22 countries worldwide and we provide personalized websites with information drafted that is culturally oriented to each nation. We do this in order to provide relevant content to each location in the dialect that natives would use.
However, you can take it a step further and adjust your other marketing campaigns – including offline ones – in similar fashion. To go into detail once again, our company supplies numerous CPA firms with personalized marketing products. The majority of business we do with these clients occurs throughout January as they prepare for the workload increase that comes in mid April. What we do, which really resonates with our clients, is print the equivalent of a 1040 form wrapped around a pen.
Follow the Rules
Ultimately, customer loyalty and satisfaction is the deciding factor to help build and maintain loyalty among your clientele. In this sense, it is essential to adhere by the “Golden Rule” and Google’s “ Platinum Rule.”
The first rule, which states to treat others how you would like to be treated, could be reflected in something as simple as a 100 percent satisfaction guarantee. This example might be somewhat of a given, but it cannot be understated how significant it is that customers know of something like this.
The latter rule, which can be applied in communication, states to interact with people the way they prefer you to. If someone contacts you through email, follow up using the same method; if another reaches out via social media, reply using social media. Furthermore, if you fall out of touch with someone, take the hint. Do not berate them with messages in the hopes of rekindling a dying flame; chances are they fell out of contact for a reason. Together the two rules can go hand in hand to develop customer loyalty by developing a healthy business-customer relationship and this will reflect in your retention rates.
About the Author
Dave Thompson is CEO of National Pen Company, a provider of personalized marketing solutions to more than one million small and medium sized businesses globally. He can be reached at dave.thompson@pens.com
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