Ensuring Customer Loyalty: Top Tips And Tricks

Brands these days thrive on the quality of their customer base and go to great lengths for retaining the most valuable ones. And rightly so. 

Did you know that a loyal customer is 5 times more likely to repurchase from the brand, and 4 times more likely to provide referrals?

With increased customer loyalty brands can enjoy the benefits of continued association in terms of revenue and profitability. Not just that, brands need to spend a lot more on acquiring new customers, which can be cumbersome if they have a strong existing customer base. Reducing customer churn also reduces the organization’s need to spend excessively on customer satisfaction and engagement. 

With such a plethora of benefits to offer, customer retention and loyalty is definitely at the top of every B2B marketer’s priority list. If you are one of them, here are seven tricks that help you ensure customer loyalty in your brand: 

Hyper-Personalize Your Customer Service

Whether in a B2C or B2B model, Customer Service is one of the most decisive factors impacting customer loyalty. If you have unique customers that are likely to make a lot of high-value transactions, customer service can be the aspect where you differentiate your brand from the others. 

Also, as the rule goes: the ones that contribute the most to your bottom line are also the ones that are most likely to refer great leads. Plus, retaining existing clients is less expensive and time-consuming than acquiring a new customer. 

It helps to treat such accounts as targeted campaigns and focus the efforts on clients that are likely to contribute a greater value to your business. Personalize your customer service based on the existing projects that they have with you to maximize results. Did you know that nearly 72% of consumers say that they are only likely to engage with personalized messaging?

Strengthen Your Onboarding Process

Even though B2B brands know the value of onboarding processes all too well, more often than not, they lack in ensuring the necessary quality in the process. The onboarding process is the customers’ first touchpoint with your brand, so you should strive to make it memorable and distinct.

An estimated 90% of customers feel that the company could have done better in terms of its onboarding process. 

The customer onboarding process does not need to follow a dead-end approach, as you can customize it to what works best for you. Some companies include tutorial videos that guide the user with the initial steps. Others provide detailed product tours and walkthroughs which can help the customer understand the product/service and its features better.

Some of the things you need to keep in mind while creating a winning onboarding process are to maintain open communication, achieving small milestones for the client right away, and seeking feedback that can help you make the experience even better for them. 

Remember, a memorable onboarding experience will definitely make your customer want to stick around for longer. 

Keep Educating Your Customers

Most companies lose out on customers because they stop paying proper attention to them once the sale has been processed and the customer successfully onboarded. Educating your customers is an aspect that you should never take for granted as a brand. 

Knowledge sharing should always be at the forefront of your value offering, whether you are selling a product or service. Customers truly appreciate any learning that you are able to impart to them in your area of expertise. 

Consider LinkedIn, whose target audience consists of professionals, and executives. To keep the customers engaged, and to provide them a unique offering that no other social network does, LinkedIn offers courses and knowledge-sharing articles that help customers to learn new skills and strengthen their CV. Simultaneously, LinkedIn also retains the professionals who have registered on the website through these courses. Win-Win. 

You can create videos, blog series, or even impart quality education through newsletters to your customers. At the end of the day, you should try to come up with material that your customers look forward to engaging with and learning from. By doing this, you can ensure that the customers are motivated to visit your website regularly and are benefitting from it. 

Implement Gamification

The one thing that is even better than a personalized user experience is a gamified customer experience. Gamification has been known to work wonders for companies with a strong hold on their niche, whose goal is to convert their customers into evangelists for their brand. 

Offering rewards for customers’ continued association and loyalty to the brand, is one of the proven ways to implement this. These rewards can be anything ranging from discounts and offers to flight tickets or sponsored stays for conferences. Surprising your customers with rewards has been associated with positive customer behavior.

Gamification has the potential to create an environment that is dynamic and exciting for customers to engage in. It not only bolsters increased engagement but also motivates customers to be loyal to the brand. Brands can use gamification in processes where they want to increase customer participation and engagement.

When adding gamification-related features to your website, do not forget to consider SEO. Integrating high-definition features and elements in a website powered by Magento or Squarespace can slow down your loading speed. You can use an online guide to understand the SEO considerations that you need to keep in mind while adding such features.

Ensure Stellar Account Management

The account manager is in most cases the one contact point between the client and the brand. And let’s face it: account management needs to be stellar and over-the-top at times, for the customer to stay loyal to the brand. 

If you are in a saturated market, account management can help you ensure customer happiness and satisfaction right from the get-go. Ensure to assess and improve your customer success program consistently so that your clients always experience the best customer service. From the very first day, account managers should strive to solve customer problems and ensure that they are having the best experience using the product or service. 

The account manager is also the right person to communicate the values and beliefs on which the company runs. Setting expectations right from the start, communicating information in a positive and proactive manner will help customers form a positive impression of the brand and want to stay loyal to it. 

Organize Events and Webinars

Earlier, we discussed the importance of education for retaining customers and keeping them engaged. Another way that you can achieve this, is by organizing events and webinars and making costumes an integral part of it. 

Let your customers know that they are valued by inviting them to share their experience at an event or webinar that you have organized. By doing so, you will not be achieving customer loyalty, you would also be rewarding the customer with increased exposure, which they will definitely appreciate. 

You can organize events for varied purposes including training, product launches or updates, or a commemoration event showcasing your best use cases or customer stories. Regardless of the reason, including some of your prestigious customers in your guest list could be a boon in disguise in multiple ways. It is also a great opportunity to interact with your customers firsthand and get feedback on what you can do to make the experience of dealing with your company even better.

Providing Additional Value through Partnerships

Growing organizations that are looking for opportunities to scale should always consider productive partnerships. These partnerships can offer more benefits than one as additional value companies can provide additional value to customers.

As is the case with every business decision, successful strategic partnerships stem from a lot of diligent and targeted research. Be on the lookout for companies that sell products or services that are complementary to yours. By positioning yourself as a one-stop solution provider, you can ensure that the customer does not consider switching to other companies that offer similar products or services. 

If you are selling products, you can also find a seller who supplies similar or complementary products and sells bundles at discounted prices. In addition to this, partnering with companies that can strengthen your distribution network can also help you offer curated loyalty programs that prove effective in increasing customer loyalty. After all, 59% of customers who have registered for loyalty programs tend to choose that brand over other competitors. 

Key Takeaways

Some of the biggest companies around the globe spend extensively on initiatives that would help them ensure customer loyalty and satisfaction. There is little doubt that customer retention is more valuable and cost-effective than new customer acquisition, but even then marketers are unable to control the churn rate in their organizations due to varied factors. However, some of the valuable tricks and tips that have been listed in this post can definitely get you a headstart on improving customer loyalty. By taking a smart approach to managing customers, you can consistently expect better revenue and profitability.