3 Ways to Increase Customer Loyalty

Customer acquisition is five times more expensive than customer retention. And by building customer loyalty, customer retention increases simultaneously.

Gaining customer loyalty should be the goal of every business today, considering that loyal customers not only spend more but also become your strongest and leading brand advocates, as they provide a free word of mouth promotion.

So, how do you increase customer loyalty? Aside from having a solid and rewarding customer loyalty program, here are three ways to increase loyalty among your customers.

1.     Build personal relationships.

An important aspect of customer loyalty is your relationship with them. Customers will almost always remain committed to a brand if they believe they have a mutually beneficial relationship with them, and this relationship should be built even BEFORE customers become customers.

View customers as people, not transactions or potential sales. Having this mindset will do your business good if you view customer relationships as such, not just as some form of business profit.

Establish a personal relationship with each customer such as by creating opportunities to get to know them on a personal level. Customer service experience factors in heavily in this aspect, as your customer service representatives are the front liners of your company and are the ones who interact with customers the most. Invest in it.

A recent survey shows 71 percent of customers who ended business relationships did so because of poor customer service experience.

2. Follow the Platinum Rule.

Have you heard about the Platinum Rule?

The Platinum Rule says we should do unto others the way they want us to do unto them. In other words, you have to treat people the way they want to be treated, not the way you want to be treated. That requires a little more effort.

When it comes to customer relationships, the platinum rule simply means making them happy and following their lead. When it comes to communicating with them, interact with them in the way they prefer.

This is why customer service channels have expanded to include social media channels, as customers now prefer to communicate via social media. When it comes to offering products or services, listening to what the customers are looking for doesn’t only guarantee customer satisfaction—it also makes for significant sales increases.

Remember, loyalty increases when you can anticipate what customers are going to need before they know it.

3.     Reward the right customers.

While it is a good strategy to offer rewards to customers, it is a wise strategy to pay extra attention to your repeat customers. Make them feel, the ones that return and repurchase, that you see them and appreciate their loyalty by giving out extra perks in the form of a bigger discount, express checkout privileges, free shipping royalties, etc.

Build loyalty around loyalty – that’s the term.

Increasing customer loyalty may seem like difficult work such as through rewarding customers with perks and devising a loyalty program that works.

Remember, though, that these short-term investments breed long-term results. And at the end of the day, increasing customer loyalty boils down to letting customers feel they are appreciated, heard, and understood as customers. Be loyal to them so that they can be loyal to you.

Author’s bio:

Apple Pineda has served a number of clients as a content marketing specialist for 3 years. She's a wanderlust in the making, often seeking adventures to live life to the fullest. She's a writer for Avail.at, a company that specializes in digitizing rewards programs for your employees or customers.