Customer loyalty is the success of a business in maintaining a long term relationship with the customer. When a customer is loyal, they are likely to return to the brand to make purchases. It can also be described as ‘brand loyalty’. With 82% of adults loyal to brands and 84% loyal to retailers, building up brand loyalty is integral for revenue creation.
Below are six ways in which you can win loyalty from your customers:
Get to know your customer
By getting to know your customer, sending out ‘Happy birthday’ and other personalised emails, your customers feel as if they are worth more than a single purchase. Furthermore, a study showed that personalised emails deliver 6 times higher transaction volumes, an incredible opportunity for savvy eCommerce stores. Remember, it is easier to maintain an existing customer than it is to find a new one.
Reward loyalty with a loyalty program
Discount coupons, sent through email or text can ensure that existing loyalty from your customers is rewarded. As well as this, by making your loyalty points are not transferrable to other sites, your customers are more incentivised to make purchases on your eCommerce site.
Make it easier for your customers to remain loyal
This refers to your eCommerce store making it easier for returning customers to make purchases. One method in which to do this could be to store your customer’s payment details within your website (or in token vaults), ensuring that your customer no longer needs to input their credit card details every time they make a payment.
PayDock can help you here, offering a PCI compliant token vault to help you save payment details.
Encourage customer feedback
Sending out email reviews to your existing customers can provide invaluable feedback for your eCommerce stores, alerting you of problems that you may not previously have known about. Apart from being a great learning opportunity and a chance to further improve your site, it also allows your customers to feel more valued, further increasing their loyalty towards your brand.
Be transparent
If something doesn’t go as anticipated, instead of hiding and covering up, you should aim to communicate this to your customers. An open relationship is likely to lift trust, which in turn, promotes loyalty within your existing customers.
Communicate to your customers
Providing a live chat tool on your eCommerce website, or even ensuring that a physical person is easily contactable can make a huge difference in improving customer loyalty. Great customer service make a large difference, with research finding that people who had bad experiences with customer service were 50% more likely to talk about it on their social channels than those who had good experiences. Ensure that your eCommerce store has a good reputation.
