Why Build Customer Loyalty Through Relationship Marketing
How are you engaging with your customers?
Sure, you may have some marketing campaigns and promotions running to acquire customers or to retain your existing client base.
Your discounts, promotions are temporary, you can attract your customers for time being, but if you are willing to build customer loyalty in true sense then you much focus on customer relationship building.
You must have spent money for acquiring your past customers, but you cannot afford to retain them at the cost of huge expenditure. If your ROI is not as expected, then how are you going to spend more on them?
The answer is you need not spend money on retaining them, but rather focus on ‘Relationship Marketing’. Because if your customers love you, you can also expect that these loyal customers will grow your business by recommending your business to their friends and families.
Let’s see how to connect with your customers with ‘Relationship marketing’ tactics.
Establish Brand Loyalty by Personalisation
Personalisation stimulates a positive emotion amongst customers, and you should take the advantage with just a little effort from your side.
Sure, you must be having an attractive loyalty program. But how generic are those programs? How are you communicating with your customers about your loyalty program, your products or services?
That’s why engagement plays a very vital role in establishing relationship with your customers.
Choose a platform that gives you the features for personalisation and helps you to increase your engagement with your customers.
Feature #1 One of the most important features you would like to have is Marketing automation. With the help of Marketing Automation, you can easily personalise your messages, rewards individually, in groups or even segment based on their shopping behaviour.
Give Your Customers a Sense of Achievement
Your customers will participate in your customer loyalty program but what if they are not been given the right information at the right time? Sure, you are going to lose their zeal to participate or even stick to your membership.
Feature #2 Push Up messages to notify about their points or rewards in real-time. This can be possible if you have a platform with a loyalty app for the customers or even if it has SMS option.
Feature #3 Go for the Tiered Loyalty Programme. Unlike other programs where customers earn and burn, tiered programs rank members into certain groups based on certain metrics. Each tier is defined by a set of variety of benefits or rewards which increases the value as the customer climbs the ladder. There is a sense of achievement each time it reaches its tier rank.
With Tiered Loyalty program, you can engage with your customers for now and for years to come. Just make sure that you create your tiered exceptional that sets you apart from your competitors.
Feature #4 Gamification is another great feature. Inducing fun elements into your rewards program helps to increase engagement. Not all loyalty programs help build emotional bonds but gamification might save your day as where there is fun, there are emotions!
Learn to effectively communicate with your customers
In order to communicate with your customers, you will need to listen to what they’re saying first. But, to communicate about your brand products, make them aware of your reward program, how are you going to reach out to them? Is the right message reaching to them? Are they reading your messages?
This is very important because there is no point of the loyalty program if your main brand loyalty message is lost in between you and your customers. That’s why you need to rely on a good loyalty management platform to automate your messages.
Feature #5 If your platform has Powerful Electronic Direct Mailing (EDM) feature then it’s an additional benefit for effective communication. You can include your message through your brand image, video, links that can help you to increase your loyalty and sales.
Feature #6 Catalogue Listing feature can also help you to display what you are intending to showcase to your customers. You can list your products, services, your promotions, links to emails, direct call feature. Once a customer opens the app or login to member portal, they can easily get communicated about your brand through your displays. Poket provides the catalogue listing feature both via app and member portal.
Relationship Marketing to build customer loyalty is definitely not a short-time goal. You cannot expect to see the output just the other day, but if done well it gives you the most loyal customers for a lifetime. To build on a meaningful and long-term relationship with your customers, you need to add a personal touch to your customer loyalty program. That being said, if you have not yet strategise on relationship marketing, this is the day. Start it today! It costs you almost nothing!
What type of ‘Relationship Marketing’ tactic are you using to build customer loyalty for your brand? Write to us.
