Top Tips to Improve Customer Loyalty

Loyal customers are priceless when it comes to maintaining a successful business.

They not only spend more money with your company over time, but they act as free marketing for your products or services. It can be difficult, however, to maintain brand loyalty if you don't follow best practices. 

Looking for ways to improve customer loyalty in your business? Here are our top tips for gaining repeat customers.

Gather and Store Customer Data

Understanding your customers is key to gaining their loyalty. Gather as much information about them as you can to better their shopping experience. Useful data includes their name, birthday, gender, location, marital status, if they have children, how they interact with other businesses online, purchase history, browser history, etc.

Not only should you gather the information, but it's important to the future of your business to store that data. Think of it as creating a profile of each customer that interacts with your store in order to create more effective marketing strategies. Storing that information in a customer relationship management system (CRM) like Creatio is the perfect way to organize data and automate marketing strategies for applicable target markets.

Customize Messaging

This stored data allows your marketing team to customize messaging to fit certain groups of customers. For example, each June 1, you can send out personalized e-mails to customers who indicated their birthday is in June and offer a special birthday discount or freebie to those individuals. 

Customized messaging also looks like sending relevant blogs, product release notifications and more. 

Offer Outstanding Communication

Customer loyalty requires outstanding communication. When customers reach out to your company with questions or concerns, what quality of service are you providing them? Is it easy for potential or repeat customers to get in contact with a live agent to learn more about a product or service? Do you provide several channels of access to your customer service team? 

The most successful businesses offer a variety of customer service channels including social media, phone, e-mail and live online chat. The harder it is to get questions or concerns addressed, the less likely that person is to make an initial or repeat purchase with your company.

Anticipate the Customer's Needs

The data you gather about customers also helps you anticipate their future needs. If you know that a certain customer re-orders dog food every three months, you can ensure there is enough stock available when that time comes, offer a timely discount or simply send a re-ordering reminder. 

Ask for Feedback

Nothing tells a customer you care more than openly asking for feedback. Create easy ways for customers to provide honest feedback after any transaction or customer service experience. 

Feedback is crucial to honing your customer service skills and improving the way you do business. For example, If you begin seeing a trend of frustrated customers who interact with your customer service team via telephone, you may want to adjust the way that process works. 

CRMs Make Customer Loyalty Easier

Gathering and storing all that information about customers may sound like a daunting task, but it's not as difficult as you may think. CRMs offer comprehensive user interfaces, interactive dashboards, business processes, analytics and management capabilities. 

So, whether you're gathering initial data on a customer, storing feedback, sending specialized marketing, offering customer service or anticipating your customer's needs, it's all in place.