Customer loyalty is a fantasy, but your offer’s appeal is very much true. You may increase brand advocacy among your customers in a number of ways. These remedies consist of:
delivering exceptional client service.
launching referral or loyalty programmes.
building a brand narrative and personalised experiences that go beyond distributing product newsletters.
keeping in touch with customers through several points of contact and being aware of significant occasions like birthdays and anniversaries.
running free freebies and online contests to increase client involvement.
Want to discover some tried-and-true strategies for increasing brand loyalty among your clientele? then continue reading.
The great consumer loyalty myth
Customers are rarely brand loyal, and because brand loyalty is intangible, changeable, and highly emotional in nature, it is challenging, if not impossible, to quantify. Family, country, or even a football team can inspire loyalty in people, but businesses very rarely do.
Consider it this way: Assume you have your preferred brand of shampoo. When you visit a store, the shampoo you want is sold out. What do you do next is the question. Do you leave the store without purchasing any shampoo and forgo washing your hair for the following month, or do you choose a different brand with comparable
According to Oracle, Dogs Make Loyal Clients Aren’t dives deeply into the psychology of brand advocacy and customer loyalty. What the study revealed is that brand advocacy is more closely related to the stickiness (attractiveness) of your offer, which means providing services that are:
Affordable
easily reachable
Simple to use
high calibre
able to elicit favourable associations and connotations
I understand that all this rhetoric about client loyalty may leave you feeling a little dejected, but I won’t let you leave empty-handed. Although client loyalty has no bearing on your sales rates, the stickiness of your offer does, and you can employ a variety of strategies to encourage repeat business and again.
12 tested strategies to boost brand advocacy include:
- Deliver first-rate client service
You cannot miss this step if you want to develop favourable associations and memories associated with your brand. One of the very few interpersonal touchpoints that you should use to boost customer happiness and give your company a little more of a human and personal feel is customer service, whether it be online help or face-to-face consulting. If your customer service representatives are friendly, respectful, and easy to talk to, you simply enhanced your odds of recurring business and, if you’re lucky, some consumers became brand ambassadors. For instance, you might add sorry discount coupons to your live chat support to express your regret to clients who have complained.
- Remain true to your word and serve as your clients’ best advocate.
While brand advocacy may not have much to do with consumer loyalty, it does have everything to do with the loyalty of your company to its clients. If you promise something to customers, whether it’s a special offer, bonus, discount, or the introduction of a new product, you had better keep your word. You face the risk of permanently losing clients if you break your promise since once trust is destroyed, it’s broken forever. Additionally, keep in mind to be fair; avoid altering the rules as you go, and consider the issues that your clients encounter rather than punishing them for a single infraction.
Be quick and efficient in all of your actions. - Customers expect quick customer service, quick delivery, and quick turnaround times. This is the secret of Amazon’s success. The problem is that efficiency and quality should go hand in hand, which is difficult to achieve when you have little resources and a small budget. Implementing live chat support and reward automation engines that allow for flexibility and efficiency is a terrific start to fostering brand loyalty, and you can scale as your business expands. Keep in mind that if you don’t respond to your customers quickly enough, your rivals will.Keep up the good work and don’t get complacent.
- Even if the number of brand champions increased dramatically, you shouldn’t stop doing what you’re doing because it’s clearly effective. Additionally, don’t allow it discourage you from exploring fresh strategies to foster consumer advocacy. Never cease investigating and acting upon actionable data coming from your CRM and other customer data platforms. Run iterations, try some A/B testing, introduce new incentives.Invest in CSR initiatives and let customers relate to your message
- Customers are asking for more as the market is overflowing with goods and services and dog-eat-dog rivalry. Therefore, by adopting a social position, you can raise your chances of receiving media attention and customer acceptance, which will ultimately probably result in greater advocacy rates. Just look at IKEA, which wins people’ hearts year after year because to its environmental and social initiatives.Establish a loyalty scheme
- I’d want to give you two pieces of advise in this situation. First of all, keep in mind that the loyalty programme should be managed in the customers’ best interests and not for your own. Keep the regulations straightforward and offer valuable incentives and rewards. The second thing to keep in mind is that there won’t be a ready-made loyalty programme for your company – creating a killer campaign takes time, failures, and extensive user research. The effort is worthwhile, though, as 70% of consumers are more inclined to recommend a brand that offers a strong loyalty programme. And rather than creating your entire loyalty infrastructure from scratch, you always rely on adaptable loyalty management software.Conduct a referral programme
- Since referral schemas are created to discover and reward future brand champions, this fact is obvious. Even if many of your customers participate in your loyalty programme, they don’t make the effort to tell their friends and family about your company. In the case of referral programmes, this dedication is the trait that will allow you to separate the wheat from the chaff and discover brand supporters, who you can then target in the future with extra incentives to keep your brand appealing. Again, you may use referral software that is ready to go, like Evolve, rather than having to start from scratch.