It’s almost always harder and more expensive to find new customers than to retain your current customers. By creating brand loyalty with your existing customers, you can hold onto the customers that you have while still building your company. Creating a sense of brand loyalty will encourage your current customers to stick with you instead of switching to a competitor.
You might not realize it, but your email list is a powerful tool for building brand loyalty, especially when utilized in the right ways.
It gives you an easy way to reward your customers.
When customers are regularly rewarded, they feel a growing sense of loyalty to your business and your brand. You can do this in a variety of ways.
One of the most common ways is creating discounts only for people who are on your email list. This is a good place to start, but when overused can end up devaluing your products and services, so make sure to use it sparingly and irregularly.
Other ideas include giving customers insider information about what’s coming up next for your business, having VIP only products or services available to those on your email list, and letting your email list members have early access to new products or services.
It activates reciprocity.
Reciprocity is what happens when someone gives us something of value – we feel the inherent need to pay them back at some point in the future. The important thing to remember here is that you have to be giving them something that’s actually of value, not just an inflated or made up value.
Customers can tell when you are trying to pull one over on them, and they do not like it. But if you are actively rewarding your customers, they will feel the need to repay you – by buying more of your offerings, telling others about you, and staying loyal to your brand.
It gives customers an easy way to stay in touch with you – and for you to listen to them.
This is something that many businesses forget, and their customer retention and loyalty suffers as a result. In this day and age of cheap outsourcing, businesses that actually listen and respond to their customers, or even ask for their customers’ opinions, are incredibly rare.
Invite your customers to respond to your email campaigns and tell you what they think, or send them surveys asking about their opinion of what could be improved in your business, and then actually listen to their responses. After this, your business will automatically stand head and shoulders above the rest in your customers’ minds.
This can also backfire, because if you invite a customer to tell you what they think and then either don’t listen or send back a canned auto-reply, they can be turned off to your business. Make sure to honor the effort that the customer has put forth in telling you their thoughts, and you will gain a customer for life.
www.cflmarketing.co.uk
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