Customer Loyalty Matters

Customer loyalty matters as selling more to current customers is easier and cheaper than finding and selling to new ones. Loyal customers tend to buy more, more regularly and they frequently recommend your product(s) to others.


Here are three tips to help deepen relationships with customers, establish greater levels of trust and build stronger customer loyalty.

Understand the true purpose of marketing.

Effective marketing is in large part about building trust and developing relationships. The purpose of marketing is to create and maintain a strong feeling with customers so they are mentally predisposed to continually choose and recommend your product(s). Successful marketing also requires being relevant and unique.

Identify and build your brand.

This isn't just about your logo, marketing look or tagline although you should have those tools in your marketing kit. Branding that builds genuine customer loyalty goes beyond what the eye can see. It's branding at the emotional, sensory and gut-feeling level. Your brand is what your company is known for, how you engage with customers and what people can depend on you to consistently deliver. It's a compilaton of your most importan strenghs. Identify you brand and leverage it to see customer loyalty and referrals increase. Don't be shy about showcasing your uniqueness and strengths.

Tap into what customers want.

To appeal to a customer's needs or desires, you must first understand their motivations, values and priorities. Each customer has unique needs and wants. Being tuned in to what customers want and being sensitive to their evolving needs will help you become more resourceful and innovative over time. That is an excellent way to set yourself apart from other businesses and help you build memorable, lasting customer relationships.

More tips with my next blog.

Source: MarketingProf's

Listen To Your Customers

Understanding customers' unique challenges and recognizing the solutions they need is an essential element of any business-to-business strategy. After all, if you aren't honing in on what customers want, you're likely losing them to competitors. Fortunately, there are more tools available than ever before to support customer feedback practices.

Listening. Conversations are being conducted about your products, your brand and competitors on various digital channels throughout the web. Develop a comprehensive listening strategy to hear what's being said and why. Use this data to help drive decisions going forward.

Asking. Traditional phone polls by customer services representives, sales people, etc. have evolved to include additional marketing channels, including email and social media. Whether through a Twitter poll, blog comments or a website poll, there are more vehicles than ever to enlist customer feedback regarding what your organization is doing well and where it could improve.

Analyzing. Much can be determined by customer actions -- not simply customers' words. Website and email analytics give a clear view into whether or not you are providing the information or solutions that customers need.

Want more web conversions?

Reduce your visitors' anxiety.

Quite simply, concerns about the quality of your products (or service) and credibility of your company can lead to visitors' anxiety as they visit your web site. Does anxiety emerge as vistors ask, "Who are these guys?" or "Why should I consider them experts?"

If your conversion goal is to get visitors to reach out for more information by email, a web inquiry form or even by phone, how can you double or triple conversion by alleviating visitor anxiety?

There are several things you can do to relieve anxiety caused by questionable perception of the quality of your products or service:

* Testimonials

* Third party ratings and awards

* Higher quaility photos if appropriate

* Satisfaction guarantees

* Helpful answers to frequently asked questions

But I'm still not too sure about your company.

As visitors want to know who they're buying from, consider the following:

* Clearly displayed phone number and business address

* An "About Us" page

* Third party press coverage

* Photos of physical offices and executives

* Associations, affiliations, organizations

* A landing page that offers thought leadership papers

Remember, anxiety is just on of the factors for improving conversion. Just remember the end objective -- to systematically increase your conversion rate to get a greater return on your hard earned search traffic. Rather than just counting numbers of visitors to your web site, adopt conversion principles and methods to relieve some of your visitors' anxiety.