It costs about five times more to acquire new customers than to retain current ones. Business owners, therefore, need to find innovative ways to keep their customers coming back. This can be done effectively by creating trust and loyalty in those customers through reliability.
However, it’s not all about customer retention. Happy customers are more likely to recommend your business to their friends and family who in turn, will be more inclined to try you out based on the “word of mouth” advertising. Not only does this earn your business new customers but these new customers will already have an inherent inclination to trust your brand. Should you deliver to their expectations, you can stoke that trust and use it to turn those customers into lifelong users and brand ambassadors.
You can clearly see why building customer trust and loyalty is important for your business. Here are some tips on how you can do that for your business starting today.
Through these tips, you can start to slowly but gradually build loyalty and trust among your existing as well as new customers:
1. Create a Database of Your Customers
The very first thing you need to do is find a way to list your customers. You can do that by creating a database of all your existing customers. This database can be used to determine your actual market demographic. The system you create here should be populated with actual paying customers. For that, you will need to use tools such as biometrics identifying people which can help you detect fraudulent clients and separate those names from your real customers. Once you have your database, you can use that data to determine how best you can market your goods and services to keep those customers satisfied.
2. Create a Loyalty Program
A loyalty program is one of the best ways to keep customers coming back. It speaks to the innate need for people to do things when there is “something in it for them”. Offering a reward for repeat purchases give your customers a powerful incentive to keep coming back to you as well as to tell their family and friends about all those wonderful offers that you give them. 72% of American customers today say that they are more likely to choose a business that offers loyalty programs over one that doesn’t.
3. Ask for Customer Feedback
Everyone wants to feel heard and your customers are not an exception. By asking for feedback from your customers, you not only give them a chance to be heard but you also give your business a chance to improve its products and services.
- You can easily do all this by sending out surveys asking the most pertinent of questions:
- How your customers are finding your goods and services?
- Whether or not your products and services have lived up to their expectations?
- Do they get the kind of support and response that they expect from your brand?
- How satisfied are they with the overall performance of your brand?
While all these questions are important, the most crucial one is to ask for their suggestions as to which sectors of your brand can be improved. This is where you will find customers giving you their honest opinions about how best you can serve them. By taking all this information in and acting on them, your customers will begin to feel heard and slowly start to identify as part of your brand which creates more trust and loyalty.
4. Publish Customer Testimonials and Review
In this digital age, social proof is a very powerful marketing tool that, if used correctly, can help you gain more clients and foster better trust and loyalty from your existing ones. Customers are more inclined to believe other customers over companies. That is because people know that, no matter how unbiased you try to be in your own evaluation of your brand, there is always a very good chance that you will inherently lean on the positive aspects while downplaying the negative.
However, honest and random customer reviews tell them exactly what it’s like dealing with you as a brand. That is why you need to publish more testimonials and reviews (even the bad ones) so that people can see what other people are saying about your brand. It creates a transparency that fosters trust.
5. Offer the Best Customer Service
Nothing turns customers off a brand as much as bad customer service. As soon as people feel that you don’t do enough to address their concerns or questions then they will start feeling unheard. When that happens, they immediately start looking for alternative brands that will treat them better. Your customer service should be quick and effective. You can use several avenues for this:
- Have a number where they can call in and speak to a real person.
- Have social media platforms where they can post they questions and you can post your timely responses.
- Create a chatroom on your website.
Having a way through which your customers can easily get a hold of you when they have concerns is the best way to offer them reliable customer service.
Many of these tips and tricks are easy enough to implement and can help you gain the trust and loyalty of your customers without costing you too much in terms of capital.
customer loyalty -DepositPhotos
