The Power of Customer Loyalty and Retention Marketing

Sales and marketing has shifted over the years, deviating from an aggressive "hard-sell" kind of approach into a more personal style of customer acquisition. A lot of this has to do with the nature of the Internet, and the over abundance of ads. While ads and hard-sell tactics still have their place, focusing on customer loyalty and customer retention is a much stronger long term strategy. Let's take a look at how focusing on these elements can lead to bigger profits, and successful business growth.

Social Media Marketing is All About Customer Loyalty 

The rise of social media put a huge damper on aggressive sales tactics, but opened the door for powerful branding and consumer loyalty opportunities. By interacting with potential and existing customers on a more personal level, a business gains trust, respect and loyalty. This can even lead to them spreading the word without being told or paid to do so, basically amounting to free referral marketing.

Retention Marketing - Making Money on The Back End 

Getting repeat customers is the golden goose of business. They have a much lower cost of acquisition, and since they've already bought from you once before, they have a much greater chance of buying from you again, giving you a major boost to your conversion rates. The key to getting repeat customers is to ensure that your sales funnel places a strong focus on customer retention. This can be bolstered by offering customer rewards such as exclusive discounts, and other bonuses for repeat business. It goes without saying that if you're not focusing on back end sales, you're leaving a lot of money on the table.

New Marketing Strategies for a New Era 

While some may lament the fact that the Internet has had such a huge impact on traditional marketing strategies, others are taking advantage of the opportunities it has presented. While it is true that marketing strategies that focus on loyalty and retention take a bit more effort upfront, the long term rewards are more than worth it. Social media makes it particularly easy to incorporate elements such as customer rewards and referral marketing into your sales funnel, setting you up for successful business growth over the long term.

If anything, consumers are much savvier these days, and have even developed "ad blindness" to a degree. Focusing on connecting with them on a personal level through social media, email, texts, and other forms of more direct communication can help take your business to the next level.

Overall Benefits of Choosing A Customer Loyalty and Retention Program 

By providing an opportunity to share their profile with you, you get pertinent information that helps with your marketing campaigns. You’ll have the ability to customize your campaign according to the needs of your customers, giving you a much greater chance of generating more sales.

Increase in Revenue  

Increased revenue results in higher profitability not just from a one-time purchase, but from repeat sales.  When satisfied customers buy from you the first time, chances are, they will come again.  This opens up a window of opportunity to convert them to repeat customers.

Free Referral Advertising

A happy customer will not only come back to support your business, they will bring others with them.  Those they bring along can be their friends, associates, family members and even co-workers.  The more they spend, the more a business grows.  If those they bring are satisfied, guess what?  They too will bring in others, creating a viral effect for the ROI in such programs.

A More Cost-Effective Advertising Strategy

Although building customer loyalty and retention requires an investment, the Return On Investment (ROI) can be far greater taking into consideration the cost of other marketing and advertising strategies needed to attract new customers for your products or services.  Such cost can be in the range of 20 to 30% increase in your advertising budget.

Opportunity to Build Emotional Attachment

Surprise customers by sending them birthday or anniversary wishes, reward them for being loyal by offering “special discounts”, points or other types of rewards.  This process is automated so you don’t have to worry about errors and confusion.  Promptly address customer’s concerns and solve the issues quickly.  Consistently work on building a strong business relationship and develop an emotional business attachment, by regularly engaging them through emails, social media and other communication avenues. Doing so will stabilize their emotional connection making it hard for other competitors to “steal” them away.

In the past, only giant retailers and companies could afford to participate in this very effective marketing strategy.  But times have changed and technology and social media have made it possible for small business owners.  Those who want to participate in a customer loyalty and retention program to accomplish their business goals can now do so at the push of a button and with minimal cost.  What use to be a time-consuming and expensive process, can now be done hands free, allowing business owners to focus on growing their business.