Customer Loyalty: How to Achieve Greater Engagement

Customer loyalty is the foundation of a successful business. Therefore, if you manage to master it, you will strengthen your business yes or yes.

Table of Contents

What is customer loyalty?

Loyalty is a feeling of respect, fidelity, and commitment towards someone or something. It can also be defined as a fairly strong trust bond.

Loyalty does not only occur in individuals, but the best examples of loyalty are achieved in animals such as dogs, cats, and horses.

Specifically, in the case of customer loyalty, we can define it as how committed, identified, satisfied and delighted a customer is with whatever you sell.

The importance of this aspect is reflected in how the loss of customers has a great effect on business growth.

Today’s typical customer is quite fleeting and is not precisely characterized by being loyal, which is why brands that achieve this loyalty acquire a high degree of competitiveness.

Importance of customer loyalty

Before you know the best tips to get your customers to be loyal to your brand, we will mention the benefits you will get from their loyalty.

Getting a new customer is always more expensive than keeping an old one. So loyalty means higher profitability.
Your customers will always be willing to pay more if the quality of the product or whatever they love about it is maintained.
As a result, loyal customers buy more frequently and in greater quantity or volume of products.
Loyal customers will offer you the highest conversion rates on new products or model launches.
On the other hand, customer loyalty will allow you to spend less on advertising since those customers will need less persuasive efforts to buy.
For all these reasons that we have exposed, a company can be highly competitive if its customers are truly loyal.
A company with a loyal customer base will have tremendous opportunities to expand as existing customers will promote such brand expansions. An example of this is Google, which thanks to its great prestige and loyalty with its customers has managed to expand its search business to the niche of emails, cloud storage, web analytics, paid advertising, and many more than They have helped him become the giant that he is today.
The greatest benefit of customer loyalty is that it will help you generate the most powerful type of advertising out there: word of mouth or word of mouth. Your customers will recommend your brand to their friends and family. They will speak highly of you on social media, creating a viral effect, which will attract a good flow of customers to your brand.

Stages of customer loyalty

Before you start to implement strategies to retain your customers, you should be aware of some stages that buyers go through before becoming loyal:

The first stage is the awareness of the existence of your brand, product, or business. This awareness can be quite fleeting like staring at an ad for three seconds or briefly looking at your product on the supermarket shelf. Efforts to attract attention are typical of merchandising, packaging, and marketing strategies.
As a second stage, we get with the research, which is typical behavior of the current consumer. Consumers first make sure to Google pricing and options before hitting the buy button or going to a store to purchase it.
The third stage is the purchase of the product where the customer begins to be influenced by a large number of factors that influence their loyalty, such as the entire shopping experience.
In the fourth stage, we achieve the use of the product, where loyalty finally occurs by experiencing excellent quality.
We can include a fifth stage and this is the repetition of the use of the product.
Finally, we can add other stages after loyalty such as recommendation, defense, and promotion of the brand of which customers have been delighted.

What it takes to achieve customer loyalty

To start building customer loyalty, you only need one requirement:

Know it.

By knowing the customer you will know what product is needed to satisfy him, what characteristics that product should have, how it should be wrapped, how to present itself to the market and what to communicate about your brand so that the customer feels identified and turns it into an element of your identity.

What exactly do you need to gain customer loyalty? In the following lines we explain it to you:

First of all, you need to know the needs, problems, and shortcomings that lead your customers to purchase a product. But, beyond the physical needs, you must know those emotional deficiencies that drive a customer to purchase. An example of this is Nike, which has recognized the need to overcome today’s society produced by high complexes with their physique. There are a lot of people who are self-conscious about their physical appearance and Nike with its brand strategy has turned its shoes into a symbol of self-improvement, which makes its customers feel like athletes and thus exploits that need.
Second, we get solutions to the wishes and desires that a client wants to have for a certain context. A desire can be the expectation that a customer has regarding a solution that he wants in terms of the problem or need that he wants to solve by buying a product. Whereas a longing is something that you would love to receive from a product but is not expected. It is there where you must work your brand to enchant your customers.

To know these two points it is necessary to carry out a market study which reveals all the information you need to know it.

This information is invaluable and helps to know the key points of your client so that they buy and become loyal to your brand.

And for you to build an ideal customer profile, you should read our guide: How to create a buyer persona.

A great truth about building customer loyalty

The great truth that we will reveal below is also about the philosophy that is essential when starting to build customer loyalty:

First of all, a must-have here is really putting the customer first when it comes to your business interests.

It is true that without profitability and without that opportunity to generate good profits, there is nothing to do in a business, but neither is there if you do not have the customer and their problems in a high priority.

You need a genuine desire to help people who put their trust in your brand. People will perceive that genuineness and value it.

Having the customer as the first priority also means offering them the best quality that we can.

On the other hand, we must establish a series of solid values that characterize our actions around clients. Which, in addition, take into account the emotional needs of said clients which we already mentioned.

Finally, we have customer service which must be optimal as well as the entire purchase journey and buyer phases.

We can summarize this point in that to achieve customer loyalty it is necessary that we first be loyal to them.

How to build your loyalty program

Now, let’s talk about how to build customer loyalty through the following loyalty program:

First of all, you must find out what is the best way to measure the loyalty of your customers: this can be done by measuring by the quantity of purchases, frequency of purchases or other factors that you obtain such as the data obtained through a survey with which customers value your product and their purchases.
Secondly, as we have mentioned, after each first purchase it is necessary to measure the quality of the experience is you can do it through a post-purchase survey with which you have the possibility, in addition, to know the opinion of your customers about their shopping trip.
Third, look for a way to reward the purchased loyalty of your users, either through a points program, offers, promotions, and other suggestive that you can use. The important thing at this point is that you really have the ability to make your customers feel special and that they know that you are grateful for their purchase. You can also do this by creating a thank you page for your purchase.
In the fourth place, you must start optimizing the user’s shopping experience, first by making the purchase easy and access to the product is fast, customers will value that of you along with your quality, few businesses achieve a level of effectiveness in these areas. So getting it for sure is going to differentiate you from various competitors in your industry.
Finally, remember to run advertising campaigns from time to time to remind your customers that you exist. These campaigns can be done through social networks or even through email marketing.

Turn your brand into a symbol

Perhaps the highest level of customer loyalty is when they feel that the brand is a symbol with which they identify.

Just as Apple has made its bitten apple a status symbol, you must make your brand become a symbol for some desire or emotional need of your customers.

You can achieve this by reinforcing the identity of your brand. In addition to the fact that your brand and how you manage it has a lot to do with how your customers view you. So, therefore, you must reinforce your brand.

The way you build a strong brand is by reinforcing your values and communicating them.

It is necessary that the packaging of the product reflects those values that your client needs. Just as Coca-Cola reflects through its bottle and advertising what is a symbol of sharing between friends and family when it is only a sugary drink with gases.

The engagement of your brand

Engagement is only how committed and involved a customer feels with your brand. High engagement will offer the impression of high activity on your brand, which is attractive when it comes to attracting more customers.

And here is the importance of generating online communities that bring together your brand’s clients and give them the opportunity to interact, comment, and talk from you to you.

It is also necessary for the brand leader or the highest leaders to interact with their customers whether, through Twitter, sometimes social media, or even live broadcasts.

The current business leader archetype is a social media influencer who is close to his customers and likes to interact with them.

A blog that contains useful information and also communicates each of the actions of the brand is important to get the impression that this is a fairly serious project and that there is a high level of commitment there.

On the other hand, it is quite useful to provide useful information to customers about the sector to which your brand belongs. For example, if you are a dental clinic, offer advice and tips on YouTube or in a blog about how to take care of oral health. This gives a very good impression that the project is truly committed to its customers and is a loyalty-worthy brand.

Other tips for building customer loyalty

Here we will include a series of tips to achieve customer loyalty which are also important, but did not fit in the previous sections:

First of all, try to offer the customer all the products that they need in terms of the usefulness of what you sell them. So if you sell the ax, offer him the tool to sharpen it as well. They like to get everything they need in one place.
Allow the option to comment and rate your products that way you will get positive comments that will attract other people.
Really listen to your clients, listen to their needs, recommendations and take them into account to improve your project.
It opens the doors to electronic commerce since there is a large segment of consumers who every day prefer to buy more online.
From time to time offer pleasant offers to your most loyal customers such as promotions and discounts which make them feel recognized and special to your brand.