10 Ways to Drive Customer Loyalty and Engagement
By Onur Ibrahim.
Driving loyalty and generating engagement has always been a challenge for for any brand. The preverbal ‘shelf space’/’share of pocket’ is limited and as customers get more price savvy brands and their marketers are looking for new ways to engage and keep customers loyal. We have seen an increase in both the very public CSR policies and also special offers and price sensitive promotions. However, this is not the only way to grow engagement and drive loyalty. Below, I have outlined 10 ways that are relevant for any company large or small and can be implemented almost immediately. These 10 points will hopefully make you think differently about how you communicate with your customers across channels and across products.
Remember, people are people and not just numbers.
Ten ways to drive loyalty.
Always provide a clear call to action and never rely in user to interact of their own accord. Relying on users to interact without expressly asking them to is like ‘fishing without bait’ and will be unpredictable at best. You should try to influence the potential outcomes for every interaction you offer or at least measure the effects at each stage.
Run multiple engagement programmes across all of your channels simultaneously. Provide users with multiple ways to engage for each campaign and category. Then give them ample reward for participation. This will increase the time they spend with you and get them coming back for more rewards and getting their friends to also participate. Some examples of these rewards could be:
Giving them something relevant to their purchase or interest that is regularly updated. This could be some digital content, a review or ‘money off’ voucher.
Allow them to ask you a question, create and update their profile, or subscribe for more information
Deliver company information highlighting your company values and positive practices that they may align with
Link to your social media hubs where they can interact with you and find out more about the products and interact with others who are either at a similar point in the cycle or who have completed the cycle and are leaving positive feedback. (Pinterest pages are a great and unobtrusive way to do this.)
Extend your communities cross channel and cross category. Don’t forget to cross promote and also to keep trying to engage your customers at different ‘landing points’. By bringing customers into your eco-system at different points and also cross promoting product categories you can maintain interest and test new ways of communicating with them. A sportswear brand may find that they get higher referrals to their ecommerce site by recruiting participants via SMS and then asking them if they would prefer email communications. This shows that you care and are giving them a choice, it might not seem like much but the freedom of choosing is more powerful than one way forced communications.
Try to stay real-time. There are many real world and timely influencing factors that should be considered when designing these journeys. One of the most powerful is trend hopping; a recent example was the 2012 London Olympic Games. With the heavy sports coverage and national pride at stake TV sales increased due to people wanting to have the best possible experience of the games. Granted that Olympics licencing rules do not allow use of the logo, name or other assets without permission. Nevertheless this was a massively influential factor that created huge purchase intent.
Keep your groups small, mix up campaign types and create new offers based accurate targeting. Some marketing campaigns naturally inspire customers to participate and to share their interactions and experiences. Research by social app creation company Wildfire has shown that campaigns that have heavy user entries do not perform in the same way as campaigns which are heavily shared. It is better to promote to a smaller base of advocates and give them the tools to participate and share their activity rather than running competitions where customers might be hesitant to broadcast the fact that they just entered.
Use image, video and testimonials as much as possible. Users want to see, feel and experience the product before deciding to make a purchase leveraging their passions and taking them across the journey of Dream, Locate, Explore means you can influence how they purchase and the factors that contribute to them coming back for more.
In summary you should stay relevant. It is ok to cross promote products and even to put promotions or in your communications but keep to the point with your main message. If you have categorised a person as an influential decision maker and they are interested in buying your product then make sure that they can do the majority of their research with you. You have to talk to as many groups as possible and remain relevant to the personas in each location.
Three ways to stay relevant.
If you want tocreate loyaltyin your brand, being available for your audience is vital. Through being genuinely useful to customers in their moments of appreciation you can earn their trust and their loyalty. Here are three ways you can create loyalty through being present.
#1: Be there in the moment
Your customers will research and verify their needs before transacting. How do you research their needs and provide solutions whilst hey are at the point of research?
Spend time looking at what people search for and the how-to videos and tutorials they’re watching on YouTube. Try to “hack the mind of your consumer.”
Use these insights to power your creative.
Ask yourself: Am I obsessed enough with winning pre-sale traffic? Do I know my share of these pre-sale moments and how do I track engagement on my management dashboards?
#2: Re-imagine storytelling
The growth in video content is amazing. This is mainly led by the growing access of mobile broadband. Because of this, YouTube is also winning more traffic than ever. There is now a YouTube production for almost everything in your customer’s life. On YouTube, the average watch time length on mobile is 40 minutes!2
In a mobile world, marketers now have tremendous reach, but there is a far bigger penalty for boring. We have to match the right videos and messages to the right moments and earn consumers’ attention.
Ask yourself: Am I shaping a mobile-first creative strategy, Am I earning attention in the first six seconds with highly relevant and engaging content?
#3: Track the right KPI’s
The connection between mobile and desktop presents huge opportunities to reach and engage customers at more relevant junctures than ever. As our lives become more reliant digital environments we are less aware of how to measure the effect of our work. Traditional metrics shaped at the beginning of the web make it challenging to tap into and learn from this new behaviour. Often traditional metrics can restrict our ability to open up much larger and more qualified audiences. We need a mobile-first and a solution first approach to measurement.
Ask your teams if you are challenging legacy KPIs and prioritising the ones that reflect true customer behaviour.
These three lessons will allow you to remain relevant and keep providing value in ways that matter most to your customers.
Using technology to build loyalty.
In today’s society, it is almost impossible to stay on top of your personal game without utilising a multitude of devices and apps. Whether it’s just the alarm on your smart phone getting you up in time, or a calming meditation app to still the jostled waters of today’s pressurised society, we are eagerly lapping up advancements as fast as they can be developed.
The same goes for effectively running a business; if you’re not making the most of current tech, and staying abreast of trends and keeping a weather eye on potential future products, is your company really working to its full potential?
Loosely speaking, tech is created to facilitate a role undertaken by a human, but in less time and for less money in the long term. If we take data capture as an example, sure an employee could go through a list of sign up email addresses and manually add them all into a CRM but it is quicker to ensure you have software that auto-merges the data across from website to CRM.
Tech is also revolutionising the way we interact with customer service departments, making that touchpoint with clients a much more positive experience and reducing churn. By 2020, experts project that more than 85% of all customer interactions will be handled without the need for a human agent.
Let’s take a look why tech is so vital and at what is out there right now that could save you some time, some money or both.
Chatbots
Chatbots are becoming increasingly more common, with many being so well refined in terms of programming that users aren’t aware they’re actually engaging with a computer. This rise in a Artificial Intelligence is cultivating a much more customer centric environment where wait times are kept to an absolute minimum.
This is great news for the 65% of you who expect a response from a business via social media in under 2 hours!
A basic chatbot can be purchased for around £200 per month, and can serve an unlimited number of customers all at the same time. Even if you were to employ just 1 full time customer service agent, this employee alone would cost you upwards of £1000 pcm.
Chatbots are one of our favourite pieces of readily available tech around at the moment; adding the savings to the increased customer satisfaction and thus, increased repeat business, the ROI on these AI masterpieces can be huge.
Social media
Social media is next on our techradar. Whilst it’s not really a “new” thing, social media and the ways in which we interact with it evolve quickly and organically, and with over 2.5 billion people using social media, allowing yourself to fall out of sync with the trends can potentially stifle your growth.
Whilst just getting onto social media platforms is a great first step, without proper planning and implementation of any sort of social media strategy, attempts to build a community may well fall flat.
Pro Tip – Utilise Customer Personas! Customer Personas have never been more useful than when it comes to deciding where, when and how to share information on social media. If you’re on Facebook but all your potential business is on Twitter, you’re going to lose out. Try gathering this info from current clients, store it in your CRM and analyse your metrics to find what’s right for your company.
Video
Again, video has been around now for decades, but the way we interact with videos as a society is morphing.
With the rise of YoutTube to one of the biggest social media platforms in the world, video sharing has become a trusted vehicle through which to address multiple audiences.
However, video has evolved beyond unwieldy episodes, down to short clips and even gifs that are digestible to even the most time poor viewer, watched on the commute, waiting for the kettle to boil or mid-scroll through a social media feed.
Ever increasingly, companies are utilising short, snappy gifs, emojis, cartoons and memes to portray feelings and situations that words would struggle to capture. Leveraging this emotional connection with your audiences builds trust and community, from which you can assemble an army of promoters to market your business.
Pro Tip – Lift the curtain! A whopping 69 percent of millennials believe brand recognition and trust are the most important aspects of brand loyalty. Humanise your staff and your company…think Elon Musk & Tesla/Space X, Richard Branson & Virgin.
Not sure where to start on Social Media? “Going Social – Driving Loyalty Through Social Media”
With tech continuing to advance at a rate consumers can barely keep up with, who knows what’s round the corner; our money is on Machine learning, virtual reality and 360 video becoming more mainstream in the following months.
Loyalty without the loyalty card.
The points mean prizes model of loyalty programmes will always have its place but, this era is now coming of age. Customers now want a more engaging relationship with brands , there will still be space for rewards and points are one way of delivering these. However the battleground is no longer for share of wallet but for ownership of the digital endpoint. Customers no longer care how they get the product as long as they feel like they have some level of control in and get the best value from the purchase. Brands are moving away from a purely transactional relationship with customers and travelling together into a more emotion led purchase journey. Google’s ZMOT study illustrates this fact really well in terms of flight paths:
Google ZMOT flightpaths diagram
would like to expand this even further for you. Each of these locations contains further data and information about the customer. They are interacting with each of these “data points” multiple times throughout the journey and through agile analytics structures we can harness insights and decisions that they are making along each part of the journey. This enables us to build a deeper understanding of the customer and also serve them with demonstrations of value relevant to them and their purchases at each point. The true value of this additional data is that we can personalise the journey to an individual and make them feel special. Every shopper is unique and expects to be treated as such, shoppers want to feel like they are buying from a brand they relate to and that is relevant to them at that time. There is a level of computation that has to be undertaken around capturing and translating this data and then assigning the correct response to each individual. This can be simplified through clustering and profiling. If we start to categorise similar journeys and personalities using techniques learned from behavioural targeting and information retrieval we are able to condense many millions of individual journeys to a smaller group of persona types and provide relevancy through clusters of interest.
“We have to tackle the issue of data capture, but consumers are much more aware of the value of their data and the numerous things that organisations can do with it, that it’s not just enough to ask for it, but data capture must be part of a value exchange, one where the consumer is treated respectfully and honestly (they know you want their data to sell them more stuff, don’t lie or deceive them)”
So how do we talk with our customers?
Each customer will also have a personal communications preference. This will include things like frequency of communication, topic, and most importantly channel. Bearing this in mind we should note that it is very important to provide as many communication paths as possible for the customer to choose from. They may want to interact via SMS or email or direct mail or via a mobile website. And the purchase journey will be over multiple channels and multiple devices often simultaneously whilst dual or triple screening. As a modern brand you should have a foothold in each of these areas and maintain some level of communication preference for users in each.
We should now be able to imagine our customer flight paths with an additional layer of ‘craft type’ added to them representing the communication channel used to carry them to the next stop. After the initial purchase we should now start thinking about what earned content we can get the customer to create for us. The modern customer is more than happy to contribute product opinions and reviews, often just asking them for these post purchase will yield very valuable feedback and future testimonials. Another by-product of this is that the modern customer wants to feel empowered and that they have some control over future products created for them.
Asking for feedback and showing that you are implementing ‘consumer created change’ will make that customer feel closer and more affiliated with the brand. Bonds created in this way are stronger and more long lasting as the customer is now not only a user of the product but a brand contributor and as such feels part of a larger whole. These customers will advocate your brand and products without question as their co-contribution has made them part of your brand. This might sound difficult in practice but with a few tips and pointers this can be put into practice in a straightforward manner. My post entitled“Seven ways to generate engagement that drives towards loyalty” provides 7 tips are a good starting point.
More ways to keep customers engaged.
Mix up campaign types and create new offers based on season and topic. Some marketing campaigns naturally inspire customers to participate and to share their interactions and experiences. Recent research by social app creation company Wildfire has shown that campaigns that have heavy user entries do not perform in the same way as campaigns which are heavily shared. It is better to promote to a smaller base of advocates and give them the tools to participate and share their activity rather than running competitions where customers might be hesitant to broadcast the fact that they just entered. In short highly shared campaigns will generate more earned media per participant. So you should have a healthy mix of both types in order to keep a steady stream of new entries to build the value of your owned media, and get those new entries to start sharing and participating to grow your earned media. The infographic below highlights this quite nicely:
Use data and insights to elect the content and locations where your brand participates.
Stay relevant. It is ok to cross promote products and even to put promotions or ‘wildcard’ topics in your communications but keep to the point with your main message. If you have categorised a person as an influential decision maker and they are interested in buying a new TV then make sure that they can do the majority of their research with you. Provide a decision journey that takes them to your affiliates giving them your voucher. You have to be in as many places as possible and remain relevant to that persona in each location.
Please share your thoughts below, I look forward to the discussion!
Read next: The Business Growth Skills Checklist for Owners and Could Your Business Sell Without You?.
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