10 Ways To Build Brand Loyalty
It’s a lot easier to keep a customer than it is to get a new one. When your business can build brand loyalty and brand advocacy with your customers, it’s a meaningful way to increase the lifetime value of every customer that you attract.
FREE Checklist: Branding For Small Businesses
Great branding requires that you understand your audience, know their values, and can add value to their lives simply by existing. Your brand is communicated through every single action your business takes.
Here are 10 ways to build brand loyalty so you can create lifetime customers who’ll tell others about your business.
1. Under-Promise and Over-Deliver
You’ve likely heard this before, but the first thing you want to do is under-promise and over-deliver. This doesn’t mean that you should do more than is normal, but it does mean that you shouldn’t puff smoke and claim to be delivering the moon when you’re not. Big businesses might be able to get away with that for a little while, but small business owners need to focus more on customer service.
2. Make Customer Service Top Priority
You need to make customer service your top priority. Offer many ways for your customer to get the care that they need.
Create a ticketing system and answer your emails quickly. If you’re a small business and have a lot of customers, you might also want to consider hiring a virtual customer services assistant.
FREE Checklist: Branding For Small Businesses
3. Ask Your Customers
The easiest way to please your customers is to ask them what they want. Send regular surveys after they’ve had a chance to use your products and services to find out what they think. Make the surveys short. Sometimes it’s easier to ask one question and allow them an open-ended answer then it is to send 100 questions.
4. Be Consistent
When dealing with customers, it’s imperative that you’re consistent. It helps if you know what your principles, morals, and values are before you even start your business. Incorporate those values into your business mission, and decision making will become practically automatic.
5. Focus on Customer Experience
When you focus on your customers’ experience, it will be easier to please them. You want them to feel good whether they are talking to an email, on the phone, or in a Facebook group. The experience should feel very familiar so that they trust you.
6. Offer Existing Customers Discounts on New Products
Have you ever been frustrated by seeing a commercial bragging about the low prices new customers can get for car insurance or a smartphone subscription? Don’t do that to your customers. Send all discounts on new products to your customers first before you release them to the general public. This makes them feel like VIPs.
7. Partner with Organizations Your Customers Trust
One way to build loyalty is to partner with other organizations that your customers already trust. If you’re not sure, do some research to study your customers. You need to know where they get their information and where they like to hang out.
8. Build a Community for Your Customers
An effective way of building loyalty and advocacy is to create a community for your customers. When one of your customers buys from you, make it a habit to invite them to your private customer-only groups immediately. You can create groups on Facebook or other platforms.
9. Praise Your Customers Publicly
Praising your customers in public is also an excellent way to make them feel loyal. You have to be careful about this depending on what kind of business you have, but if someone does an outstanding job in a course that you’re teaching, why not call them out publicly about it and let them know how much you appreciate them.
10. Share Product Secrets with Your Customers
To make your customers feel even more important, take them behind the scenes a little bit. Share some secrets about how you came up with your product ideas or how you are developing new ideas. They will probably love participating. Let them pick the next cover for your next eBook. A profitable way to use this is with an affiliate program. One of your customers might be your next super-affiliate.
Free Checklist: How To Build Brand Loyalty
Branding is something that can take years to develop, but it doesn’t have to if you have a plan in place. Know how you want your business to be represented and seen from the beginning. Develop the right content and information that spreads that message far and wide.
Download my free checklist, Branding For Small Businesses for more actional tips on how to increase brand loyalty and advocacy so you can provide a positively memorable experience related to what you have to offer and improve customer retention.
