In recent years, customer loyalty has become increasingly elusive. A recent YouGov survey shows 56% of high-income consumers feel less loyal to brands now than they previously did. This means that businesses must work harder and smarter to make sure their efforts are effective at both retaining customers – and acquiring new ones.
Whether your brand has a formal programme or not, you can foster loyalty by nailing down the fundamentals of great customer experience (CX).
Here are six proven ways to step up your loyalty game:
1. Listen
It may sound glaringly obvious but the simple act of listening is the first step in optimising your customers’ experience. Using social listening platforms, and actively collecting customer feedback through surveys or contact forms, will provide you with invaluable insights to help you close gaps and remedy pain points in your CX offering.
2. Test and learn
For underperforming emails, pages, posts or banners, develop a test-and-learn plan to discover what customers respond positively to. When asked by a financial services client for help with a poorly performing rewards programme, Epsilon identified specific email campaign types that were under-performing. We then proposed a detailed test-and-learn strategy to create powerful, evidence-based data about what worked for the client’s rewards programme. When it comes to optimising your external communications, never underestimate the importance of test-and-learn. Using this straightforward strategy you can find a way to boost underperforming communications in no time.
3. Get personal
In the YouGov survey, 62% of high-income consumers said that feeling like they had a personal relationship with a brand was a factor in loyalty, while a recent Hello World study found that 77% of customers believe loyalty programmes should have personalised rewards. Become acquainted with your customers by using intuitive recommendations, relevant banners and native ads to help them feel more known, understood and appreciated.
4. Make them feel good
Share the love and thank your customers for their loyalty with feel-good messaging and promotions. Research shows millennials respond extremely well to surprise-and-delight promotions, so why not try out some special offers on those all important VIP customers. A thank-you note campaign is also a great way to strengthen affinity and increase personability.
5 Focus on full life-cycle
Nurture your relationships with customers by adding life-cycle messaging to your regular marketing campaign. Think about where your customers are in their life-cycle. What support do they need at any given moment? What are their pain points or issues? Develop key customer personas to get to the bottom of these questions and implement specific touches that will help to remedy them.
6 Celebrate good times
Help your customers feel appreciated by celebrating moments like birthdays, holidays and customer anniversaries. Aside from helping you stack up brownie points with your audience, communication like this also gives you more opportunities to engage in a meaningful way.
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