How can you ensure the loyalty of your customers? Here are 3 levers to activate
Retaining your customers needs their involvement.
For a long time, the commercial relationship involved the simple transaction. Marketing designed finished products, sold at a certain price to customers, and this on an ad-hoc basis. Today, this vision of "transactional" marketing centred on the product is evolving to move toward "relational" marketing centred on the customer: "customer-centric". Specifically, how can you ensure the loyalty of your customers and make sure that they are more than simple consumers, but become true partners who exchange about their experiences?
A brand must establish ongoing and customised contacts with its customers. It’s not a question of sending them information only when a new product is to be promoted. Thinking should take place over the long term by regularly asking them their opinion, providing them with useful information, and even by involving them in the development of new products. The better you understand your customer’s need, the better you can respond to it. A virtuous circle after all which makes them adhere to the brand.
How can you ensure the loyalty of your customers by triggering the right levers?
Knowing your customers is the essential step to any beginning of dialogue with them: what their tastes are, the products and services that have already been provided to them by the company, their reactions, their comments, their suggestions. They must not feel like strangers, but like real people with whom you create a relationship. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an indispensable tool for having an accurate history of the company’s relationship with its customers.
Supporting your customers is also proving to be a determining factor in the link that you weave with them. Each step of the commercial relationship should be assessed, the first point of entry with the company until the after-sales department: website, employees, sales staff, responsiveness of the after-sales department. The image of the business depends on it!
Finally, satisfying your customers is paramount. Measuring their satisfaction allows you to have a quick and global vision of what they think of the company, its products and services.
Below, there is a very simple method that can serve as a basis to more easily gather the points for improvement of a product/service. It is the Net Promoter Score (NPS): Ask 3 questions that take less than 5 minutes for customers to reply to.
Listening to your customers’ opinions, giving them feedback by showing, for example, how their remarks have been integrated, is always beneficial. They will be more inclined to remain loyal to the brand in question. There you already have a few ideas to imagine how to ensure the loyalty of your customers.
And when we know that 83% of satisfied customers are ready to recommend your business to those around them, understanding that your customers’ satisfaction can, in addition, generate new sales opportunities through the recruitment of new customers and this, at lower cost.
For commitment from your customers over the long term, play the emotional card.
Ensuring loyalty fits into a context of a very broad approach to customer relationship management. When we ask ourselves how we can ensure the loyalty of our customers, beyond the product, and the levers which can be activated, a more personal and direct approach constitutes an effective and efficient opportunity to create a unique link with your most important customers.
This is even more true for BtoB-geared companies who must enter into contact with their customers’ decision-makers. Contact which is sometimes difficult to initiate by the obstacles to be overcome before reaching the leader of the business.
Public relations events often allow you to bring down these barriers. The out-of-the-ordinary environment, their different hours, the emblematic places in which they take place, public relations activities are an effective tool for creating a unique link with your customers. Among the different places for public relations in France, Stade de France is a benchmark both by the exceptional and diverse character of the events that it hosts (football and rugby matches, major French and international concerts), by the quality of the service offered to guests (boxes or reserved private lounges), but also by the know-how of its teams in supporting its clients (20 years of experience). Beyond the "product” aspect, welcoming your customers, prospects or partners in the VIP areas at Stade de France, it is to share with them a special moment around a sporting or musical event, in an informal environment, which considerably facilitates exchanges.
In summary, if you ask yourself how to ensure the loyalty of your customers, the solution may be to test new methods that you had not yet explored. The establishment of CRM, knowing your customers better, listening to them, and meeting them personally during public relations events to create a personalised link that is difficult, or even impossible to initiate otherwise, here are a few key steps.
Would you like to learn more about ensuring customer loyalty? Imagine uses adapted to your objectives?
We invite you to download our white paper which deals with this vast subject.