Changing Human Values Through Customer Loyalty
In any market – especially ones where growth can be increasingly challenging to capture, like the one we’re currently facing – customer loyalty is the most vital foundation a business can find to build upon.
With the Australian public currently facing high interest rates and inflation proving trickier than expected to tame, finding ways to rely on your existing customers can allow brands to weather the storm and emerge unscathed.
Relying on your contractors who consistently hit monthly targets and have personal relationships with your team, your dealers who buy from you even when competitors offer lower prices due to their aversion to change, and distributors who give your business their full share of the wallet—the customers with emotional connections to your brand—can give your brand the life raft it needs to survive difficult economic factors.
However, a business that does not bring in new customers can only go so far.
We know the importance of establishing which customers remain loyal and identifying and nurturing the next level down to boost them up into your top tier.
That’s why we’re sharing some of the most important insights to bolster existing customer loyalty while encouraging new leads and prospects to join your customer base and convert them to true believers.
Understanding your customer base’s wants and needs isn’t easy.
Exchanging Dollar Values and Human Values – the Boon of Loyalty
Whichever pain point your brand faces, from economic to an oversaturated market, every manufacturer or distributor must find ways to address an absence of loyalty from their customer base.
Given the value of customer loyalty, cultivating it in industries that rely on emotional connections to thrive would seem easy. The simplest way might appear to be to reward these customers for their loyalty with a rewards program, providing a direct exchange of value for their connection.
However, this is more complex than it may sound. Driving a change in behaviour in industries that can feel very set in their ways requires more than putting out a message saying they’ll get X for doing Y.
This is because you must first establish what your brand can be to your customers rather than what you can give them. Rewards programs must work hard and find connections to drive loyalty, acquisition and sales growth across your customer group.
This may be an issue with how it’s named — rewards programs exist solely to distribute, whereas a customer loyalty program, which includes rewards, is designed around finding ways to reinforce behaviour change through a series of relevant and thoughtful value exchange gestures.
Creating authentic customer loyalty requires your brand to view customers as opportunities to develop lasting, long-term relationships rather than variable lifespans of value exchange.
Make Your Customers Think You’re “The One”
Customer loyalty programs work well alongside industries that flourish with emotional connections, as they thrive in an environment where love can blossom. These programs give your brand the necessary structure to obtain data, develop insights, and act upon them while optimising the efforts across an entire customer database.
This program structure allows you to tend to these relationships and strengthen the connections. However, you’ll first need to answer a few questions:
How can your brand add value to your customers’ businesses or personally?
B2B businesses can build personal connections with their customers, especially if you have a sales force. Adding a customer loyalty program allows you to demonstrate your understanding of moving the relationship from transactional to partnership.
Your customer’s first question will always be, “How can doing business with your brand enhance my position?” Using a targeted loyalty program allows you to add the value they’re looking for while gaining more insights about them on a personal level.
By understanding how your customers engage with your brand and their wants, needs and desires, you can effectively segment your customer base into easily digestible cohorts and find ways to communicate with them one-on-one in an audience of thousands.
There are many ways to segment these groups, or ‘personas’ —interactions with your program, sales/purchase contribution history, program redemption behaviour, and more.
Generally, there are six typical customer groups or personas within a customer loyalty program, but the largest are ‘Savers’, ‘Spenders’, and ‘On the Way Out’. We wrote about this recently, but as a reminder, find ways to target each group with relevant, personalised, and influential offers and messages that demand engagement.
Boiling it all down – be relevant to your customers, and they’ll like you enough to recommend you to others. Build relationships, understand each other, and find ways to tap into your customers’ business and personal needs, wants and desires. Find out who your friends are, treat them how they want to be treated, and they’ll never leave!