New and old customers both play an important role in the development of a business. However, loyal customers are always the most valuable customer group for every business. When the cost of acquiring a new customer is 5 times higher than the cost of retaining an existing customer.
Therefore, retaining old customers is the key to helping businesses increase sales and develop sustainably. To do this, businesses need to have an effective customer retention strategy. Below are a few ideas from PangoCDP that you can refer to for your strategy.
Why is building customer loyalty important?
According to a study published by Bain & Company and Harvard Business School, researchers found that existing customers are 50% more likely to buy new products and spend 31% more than new customers. Another study also shows that a 5% increase in customer retention rate will bring 25 – 95% profit to businesses.
Simply put, building customer loyalty will help businesses optimize costs and promote sustainable growth.
In fact, successful businesses like Amazon or Starbucks also realize the importance of building customer loyalty, which greatly contributes to the company’s value. Therefore, these brands have focused their investments on building the customer experience right from the first time because they understand that customers are more likely to return only if they have a great experience with the brand.
The essence of fostering customer loyalty remains the same across all industries. If you provide quality products or services and bring continuous value to customers, they will always trust and come back to you.
From another perspective, loyal customers are also reputable brand ambassadors who help promote the brand widely without cost. If your products or services are good, they will tend to recommend them to relatives and friends. A customer referral not only expands your existing customer base but also strengthens your brand position.
Therefore, to increase sustainable strength in the market, businesses need to have an effective customer retention strategy.
6 ways to build customer loyalty for businesses
Provide exceptional customer service
According to a psychological analysis of human behavior, people tend to choose familiar things. Based on their own safety needs, most people will tend to choose products or services they have used before. Therefore, if the product or service is “good enough”, customers often have no incentive to switch to other products even though the new products may be much better in reality.
Therefore, providing quality products and exceptional customer service is the deciding factor in helping customers become more attached to the brand. You can consider a few of the following factors to improve product quality or customer service:
- Products and services must meet customer needs.
- Always respond promptly to all customer questions about products and services.
- Always listen and solve all customer problems to improve product and service quality to meet customer requirements. Businesses should have many different communication channels (SMS, Zalo, Email,…) to be flexible in supporting customers anytime, anywhere.
Personalize customer experience
Customer loyalty will be built on the basis of trust and to gain trust from customers, experts advise that you need to approach customers from a more personal perspective. That means you can’t send the same message to all customers. This makes customers feel like you don’t care or invest in them and most customers will leave you to find another brand with better care.
So how can businesses personalize customer experience?
First of all, businesses need to have basic information about customers. Businesses can collect information through many different ways such as surveys, getting customer information at offline stores, etc. However, collecting customer information is one thing. How to process that huge amount of data to obtain valuable information is a challenge for businesses, especially retail businesses, when they have hundreds of store chains and separate systems.
PangoCDP will help you solve this problem simply with a unified customer data platform from Online to Offline in real time. Based on that, PangoCDP will provide a 360-degree customer profile overview to help businesses clearly understand each specific customer behavior to have an appropriate personalization strategy.
One of the most effective personalization scenarios that PangoCDP has built for customers is sending birthday messages. To implement this scenario, businesses need to have customer birthday information and send it on the correct date, along with major customer-specific promotions valid from 2 weeks to 1 month to encourage customers to use them immediately.
With an attractive enough promotion like a 30% discount, it will create enough motivation for customers to come to the store and make a purchase. The scenario only needs to be set up once and runs year-round with PangoCDP. Discount code generation systems will be connected and channels for sending messages such as SMS, email, Zalo will also be integrated so that all steps in the scenario are 100% automated.
More than anyone, we understand that for retail businesses with a large number of customers, human care can only serve the super VIP customer group. For the remaining customer groups, Automation tools will be a reasonable choice.
In particular, PangoCDP also helps businesses effectively measure customer interactions and transactions after receiving messages from the brand. At any time, businesses can check the effectiveness of this scenario based on the number of messages sent, the number of customers responding, the number of customers purchasing and the sales contribution of the scenario.
With just a simple personalized scenario of happy birthday, the contribution value can be up to 10% of the total sales of the entire company.
Build a customer loyalty program
Another way to help build customer loyalty is to bring unique values to them. Building a program specifically for loyal customers is a typical example.
You can carry out activities such as offering limited editions, accumulating points, exclusive incentives for loyal customers, etc. These activities will help customers become more connected with the brand throughout their interactive period.
In particular, building customer loyalty programs will help businesses update new information about customers. From there, providing new and more interesting experiences helps retain users and “warms” relationships with regular customers.
It is more effective if businesses integrate this program with PangoCDP to track customer satisfaction levels and provide detailed real-time reports to optimize business strategies.
Create a strong customer community
Building a strong customer community is a way to help businesses build deeper connections with customers. Businesses can build direct interactive communities on social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter,… to stimulate sharing and exchange from their customers.
Customer discussions surrounding the brand’s products and services will create a crowd effect that stimulates interest from new users. Because according to research, consumers today tend to listen to other people’s opinions rather than believe in advertising.
Creating this open communication channel also helps develop deeper relationships and trust between customers and brands. As shared by Nutifood representative at the event: “Build and Warm the Master Channel – Season 2: The Master Trend”: “Thanks to the application of PangoCDP to track customer behavior and build similar scenarios, Nutifood has also built a community of people who love Nutifood products and thanks to that, there have been unexpected and outstanding growth results.”
Give exclusive offers when introducing new customers
Up to now, there have been a variety of incentive programs for old customers when referring customers to register an account or buy products and services from the brand. However, these incentive programs only create initial effects and gradually become boring because they do not have a special hierarchy.
Businesses can change their approach by: The more new customers each customer introduces, the higher the ranking they receive and the higher the preferential benefits. Increasing this ranking can translate into increasing benefits such as higher discounts or free exclusive items for customers.
Thereby, your customers will have more motivation to respond to brand activities, increase engagement and develop deeper relationships.
Leverage the power of social networks with product review trend
The way consumers learn, discover and ultimately decide to buy products today is completely different from centuries ago. The Internet has changed a lot in consumer behavior, especially during the COVID-19 epidemic. Consumers tend to receive information from many sources and are influenced by different factors before making a purchasing decision.
Therefore, creating reputable review sites, leveraging the attractiveness of KOLs, KOCs, etc., to promote brand reputation and spread positive values to the community of users who have needs related to the products and services you provide will develop the customer base and turn them from the first customers into potential lifelong customers. At the same time, it also helps strengthen trust in old customers who have used your products and services.
In addition, using official media channels also helps customers feel secure when the business’s image is supported by reputable agencies in advertising.
Building customer loyalty is not difficult with PangoCDP’s support
Focusing on building customer loyalty is vital to your brand’s long-term success.
With the customer data platform – PangoCDP, you can enhance your customer retention strategy based on data orientation. Through PangoCDP, you can get detailed data on customer behavior to ensure that your loyalty building strategies are as effective as possible.
Contact us now if you want to know more about specific customer loyalty building strategies from PangoCDP – Email: hi@bytetech.
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