Use These Strategies to Boost Customer Loyalty the Easy Way

Customer loyalty is the holy grail for every successful business, as it is a well-known formula that existing customers spend more and more often than new customers. When done correctly, achieving as little as a five percent increase of customer retention rate can grow company revenue by between 25% and 95%.

In short, while new customers are obviously important to any business, it is more cost effective and lucrative to retain your existing customers than it is to keep acquiring new ones. This avoids the leaking bucket syndrome where for every new customer you add, you lose an existing customer.

The dynamics of all kinds of businesses continue to change as digitalization becomes increasingly embedded in companies. In all types of businesses from estate agents to photography studios, providing a seamless and exceptional customer experience is crucial to surviving and thriving. From marketing to sales operations, every function of modern businesses is facing both new opportunities and competitive challenges that digitalization presents.

Read on to learn more about some easily executable strategies to boost customer loyalty, increase average order value and to overall your approach.

Learn Your Customers’ Habits

The first step in figuring out how to boost customer loyalty is to figure out what is keeping your best customers loyal.

To do this, carry out a quick analysis of your top accounts and ask yourself (or them) why they continue to use your product or service, and how and why they have expanded their usage over time. Most importantly of all, figure out what pain point your product solves and what this means to the bottom line, or what revenue value your product brings to your best customers.

Once you know the answers to some of these key questions, you will be much better placed to measure and apply this knowledge across your customer base.

Plan Around Your Customers

In practical terms, the first step to utilizing this newfound knowledge is to identify a detailed account development plan for each of your “next tier” customers – in other words those that fall just outside of your top accounts.

Work out how you can apply your findings from your top customers to boost the loyalty of your next tier of customers and add these ecommerce customer retention methods to your handbook. Loyalty is achieved by making your business indispensable and “sticky” to your customers, so the more services you offer and the more integral they are to your customers’ business, all the better.

Given that key customers will come into contact on a peer-to-peer level with many different people across your business, it is also crucial that account plans are not merely documents that are produced as a one-off exercise and then filed away and perhaps revisited as part of a year-end post-mortem.

Engage stakeholders from across your business in building and maintaining them and ensure that they are stored in a shared folder to be accessed and updated regularly.

Make Your Business Baked-In

Effective account plans are not just about trying to sell more. More sales and repeat business will follow as an effect of a well-executed customer loyalty plan, but the plan is a means to an end.

Because of this, it is also important to ensure your relationship with key customers does not hinge on one person or one team, so you can get the most out of your loyal customers. While most of your work may always be with those key contacts, ensure you have relationships or at least visibility across different seniorities and departments within your customer.

Tactics to do this can include customer newsletters geared to different stakeholders such as the c-suite, etc. Remind the senior executives on a regular basis who you are and what value you are adding to their firm. To take the Financial Director as an example, a regular touchpoint from your organization will ensure that they have other visibility of your work and value than simply seeing your logo on an invoice every billing period.

To get started with this, ask your main contacts for some introductions to key stakeholders in other teams or departments in their business, and ask for some advice about the best way to get some visibility with them. Do they have a regular team meeting you could provide a quick update in? At the very least, profile some key stakeholders and make their acquaintance on LinkedIn by introducing the work you do with their colleagues in other parts of the business.

Do not just rely on one person from your organization to do all the relationship-building, either. Get your managing director to build a peer-to-peer relationship with their counterpart in your customer, your accounts payable clerk to build a relationship with your customer’s finance team, and so on to improve customer relationships across the board. By doing so, as a company you will nurture relationships on all levels of seniority and on strategic and tactical levels.

The Final Scoop

Keep your customers close. Learn from your relationships with your best customers and use this knowledge to grow deeper relationships with all your customers. Most of all, never be complacent, and remember the leaky bucket theory – while winning new logos is exciting, you need to ensure that holes in the bucket are not negating the effect.

Apply all of this, and your ecommerce business will thrive. Need even more tips? Read our related guide: Ecommerce Facts & Strategies That Win Customers Over for Life.