It’s important for any business to work hard on drawing new customers. However, according to statistics, a new visitor to your website is only about 20% likely to make a purchase. A customer who has already purchased something from you, on the other hand, has a 60% chance of doing this at least once again. Therefore, it’s vitally important for business survival to dedicate an equal amount of attention and effort to both attracting new buyers and making the ones you already have happy and loyal. And to achieve the latter, you need to avoid some very basic, yet common mistakes that ruin many a relationship between a brand and a customer.
Top 4 Mistakes to Avoid to Keep Your Customers Loyal
1. Not keeping in touch
Not staying in touch with your customers loses you said customers. Today people seek recognition and personalization from brands, and you have to provide to keep them satisfied and loyal. One of the best methods of staying in touch is through emails. You should send out regular updates on the brand news as well as occasional surveys and discounts. Be sure to highlight in your messages how the discounts are limited to your valued subscribers.
Surveys are an extremely powerful tool that can help with customer retention. Therefore, you should use a variety of them regularly to both learn new facts about your audience and to find out whether they are satisfied with you. If you are in the retail business, be sure to take a lesson from the KFC brand and engage your buyers in a satisfaction survey after every purchase. Study the KFC survey and its application to see how you can adapt them for your own business. By sending out the survey immediately after the transaction, you will be able to get a fuller understanding of the actual customer experience and satisfaction.
2. Providing an inconsistent customer experience
You need to ensure your customer experience works like clockwork and remains consistently high quality. Note that it doesn’t have to be an ‘out of this world’ experience with champagne as a bonus. However, it has to be good, solid, and above all, consistent.
When a customer returns to your shop, they have certain expectations. This already means that they were satisfied with the quality provided the last time. If you can’t deliver the same, this is the last time they are buying from you. Therefore, focus on ensuring stability before you try to grow your business too much too fast and end up slipping in the quality of both products and customer service.
3. Not offering customer loyalty encouragements
Of course, it’s best when people stay loyal to your brand because they believe it is the best. However, in the majority of cases, you need to go out of your way to offer extra encouragement to keep them interested in buying again.
Loyalty programs are your most effective tool for this. And you need to start them from the first purchase in order to boost your chances of landing the second, and many more after it. HubSpot offers many ideas on how to encourage customer loyalty through different methods, ranging from gamification to VIP benefits. You should use several strategies that will meet the needs of different customer groups to achieve the best results.
4. Forgetting about inactive customers
If the buyer hasn’t deliberately unsubscribed from your email newsletter/social media account, you still have a chance. Never disregard a customer who has been inactive for long. Instead, sent them a personalized special offer based on their past experiences on your website.
Always strive to show your customers how much you value every one of them. This kind of personal touch and a gentle (and flattering) reminder that they are important is exactly what you need to boost the retention.
