Customer loyalty – is it really that important?

The term customer loyalty is often thrown around as a buzz word in marketing and business, but how important is customer loyalty and more importantly how do we get it?

Retaining customers can be a difficult challenge in this current day, whether individuals or businesses, consumers are fickle. If something isn’t right with the service or product they are using then they will leave and go and find an alternative somewhere else.

So now more than ever it is extremely important to make sure that businesses have a strong Customer Relationship Management (CRM) programme in place.

Although new customers are essential for growth, retaining those customers is the key to long term success. Retained customers keep business alive and they are the heart of the business, boosting income.

Customer Loyalty

 © Justmeyo | Stock Free Images & Dreamstime Stock Photos

There are a host of tactics that can enable customer retention and here we give our top five tips for successful customer retention.
1.Keep in touch with customers

• Whether that is through surveys to customers who have used your service or product, or analysing customer usage of your service through some form of data analysis. If you can work out where the wavering customers are before they drop off, you have more chance of saving them.

2.Treat your customers as individuals

• Each customer is special and unique, so remember that when you are communicating with them. Do you offer different services like us? We offer a premium service as well as a free service and the customers in each of these segments are very different and therefore need to be communicated with in different ways.

3.Reward your customers

• A customer has chosen to use your service over one of your competitors. Yes you may have the superior product or service, but that doesn’t mean that they have to choose you. It is important to reward those customers who have rewarded you with their custom, whether that is through recommend a friend initiatives, or money off future sales etc. If customers are given extra incentives to stay, there is a greater chance of retention.

4.Learn from your past mistakes

• One of the biggest issues that companies have is that they do not learn from past mistakes, but this can be one of the biggest opportunities to be had. Learning from what has gone wrong for customers lost in the past can make you address issues and amend them for the future.  Customer loyalty is never ending and something that will always be adapting and changing and therefore if you can adapt and change along the way, there is a greater chance that your business will be successful.

5.Don’t lose the personal touch

• We live in an age of technology, but we don’t believe in losing the personal touch. There is nothing more frustrating than when you call to speak to someone (mainly because you haven’t been able to get what you need off the internet) and you end up with voice prompts and automated messages. We say – keep the personal touch!

As a free service with no barriers to sign up, we find that we attract a great number of initial customers that we need to activate, retain and grow. How we do this is by offering a quality service at the best value.  We don’t believe that because something is free that it should mean poor quality. Customer loyalty is very important, but without the quality service in the first instance it will be hard to retain them past the initial interaction with our service.

Customer loyalty should be at the heart of all our businesses. Happy customers become brand advocates and help generate new leads at very little cost, whereas unsatisfied customers can amongst other things cause PR disasters. In a world that is increasingly connected, customer loyalty is one of the most important marketing assets. How loyal are your customers? What are your views on customer loyalty?