Ways An Online Business Can Build Customer Loyalty

What is your online business currently doing to keep customers engaged and coming back after the first sale? Are you encouraging repeat purchases or utilizing ways to build customer loyalty?

Just offering a great product or service is not enough to build a loyal customer base these days. If you want customers to make multiple purchases you are going need to focus on tactics that get them engaged and interacting with your online business. There are many tactics out there to achieve this goal, but the following are three ways your business can increase loyalty and build profits.

Offer Excellent Customer Support
Poor customer service is the fastest way to lose customers. 89% of consumers who experience poor service will switch to another brand, and nearly 7 in 10 consumers (68%) said they would not go back once they switched.

Customers come with high expectations of seeing their needs met, and providing excellent customer support is a great way to build customer loyalty. If customers do not receive help or if their questions are ignored, it is very likely they are going to stop buying from you and take their business elsewhere. Make it easy for customers to communicate with your business. Simply having your contact information available in a clear and accessible way is one of the easiest ways to gain customer trust and loyalty.

Personalization
You can learn a lot about purchasing patterns just from the data of your existing customers. Taking advantage of your data enables better customer segmentation and helps you understand the types of customers your online business attracts.

Today, a successful marketing strategy relies heavily on smart segmentation and personalization to connect with users on a more in-depth level. Personalization tactics allow online business to take advantage of data to craft custom user experiences and target loyal customers that are most likely to purchase multiple times. By segmenting your best, most loyal customers, you can also add more relevant marketing communications (such as using an email solution provider to address customers by name).

Create an Incentive Program
Loyalty or rewards programs allow an online business to reward customers as they complete certain actions (like account registration or referring friends). The goal for an incentive program should be to attract quality customers and create profitable long-term relationships.

An incentive program should give customers a reason to return to your business. This could range from offering free gifts, special discounts, access to exclusive sales, or similar. Keep in mind, not all incentive programs are tied to money transactions. They can come in a variety of forms like social sharing, emails, or other actions customers take to drive traffic to your site. It’s important to note, 77% of transaction-based incentive programs designed around discounts fail in the first 2 years. So, it is not wise to focus on making your incentive program purely transaction based.

Your most valuable and loyal customers are going to be repeat buyers. Every industry will have various ways of defining and measuring customer loyalty, but the most basic way is to look at the number of purchases over a customer’s lifetime. If you want to build a loyal customer base, consider every single way a shopper interacts and engages with your brand and ensure you are offering the best experience possible.