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Companies all over the world are trying new things to come up with solutions to keep the customers engaged and gain long-term customer loyalty. It can be a challenging task if you do not know where to start and what options to consider. Let us help you with that.
We suggest starting at the primary focus point i.e., Customers. A company must understand its customers’ mentality, traits, and preferences to encourage more engagement. It is undeniable that if a customer feels that a brand understands his/her needs and focuses on their likes and dislikes, they are bound to come back for more. Small scale shops have that nailed down as they keep track of which customer visits and when and they also try to remember their names so that every time they come around, the shop owner can greet them with a smile and make them feel comfortable.
These are some small things, but they can have a big impact on recurring sales. Talking about a big impact, the digital age is upon us and practically every industry on the planet has made its way to the digital platform. So, let us talk about customer loyalty in the digital space.
When it comes to the digital world where change is the only constant thing, a company must always keep evolving and forming new tactics to engage its customers. Providing the best of the products and services is no longer enough. It must go beyond the point of purchase to understand the customer mindset, to evaluate the habits and likes of the customers and the factors that encouraged them to choose your company in the first place. Only by understanding their approach towards selecting your brand can give your company the insight and an edge to win their long-term loyalty.
For an ideal Loyalty Program, multiple aspects must be observed that not only engages and extend the existing customers’ relationship with the company but also attracts potential customers. One of the key rules is to consider each customer as unique and develop a program based on their engagement with the company. It does not hurt to always keep an eye on the competitors. Most of the major break throughs happen when one is trying to outdo the other. Making sure that your loyalty program offers everything that no one out there is providing wins you that winning spot in the Loyalty Game.
To be a strong contender at the Loyalty game, the company must devote its resources to understand its customer base better. There are countless kinds of customers and understanding their expectations cannot be easy. In the rarest of occasions, if a company does come through by fulfilling not all but most of their expectations then too, that company would have nearly hit the bullseye.
The customer mentality and traits differ indefinitely, and it can be cumbersome to accomplish customization to gain long-term loyalty from every customer. Providing similar services to every customer is not the way to succeed in the Loyalty Game.
The customers vary and the reward programs should also be customized accordingly. The variety of customers can range from the ones who associate with the company just once a year to those who are so frequent as to even have steered their families and neighbors towards your brand. Hence, rewarding every customer equally would be an enormous miss on the company’s part, instead, it must strive to know its customers well to successfully ace the Loyalty Game.
An important key to unlocking the code is to understand and identify the uniqueness of every customer. The expectation for loyalty as a company should depend on your customer’s dedication towards your brand and then they should be rewarded at par with their commitment. This will lead to develop and sustain a long-lasting bond with them.
For a decade now, the Loyalty Programs have gained attention, and every company wants to join the race to come up with the ultimate program and accomplish the best results.
Knowing one’s customers well and trying to fulfill not only their current expectations but to even track down their habits, likes, and dislikes, for an ongoing commitment, can confirm a well-deserved spot in their minds and hearts. To achieve this, the company must analyze its customers, study them and plan for them accordingly.
Is the way of Customer Segmentation really important to acquire a long-lasting commitment and strong customer loyalty? Let us see. Analyzing customer behavior and their engagement with the company helps to bifurcate the customer pool into various target groups based on important key factors. These multiple target groups can be combined into making fewer but well-defined segments of customers.
The segments will further outline the level of profitable relationship the customers have with the company and assist the latter to come up with optimal Loyalty Programs, ensuring to win the attention of all the segments equally. When we dive a little further by pivoting and learning it from the customer’s vantage point, we sure can see that it is the perfect approach.
Dividing the customer base into appropriate lots to have well-defined segments can be done using the past data and conducting surveys on the customers’ purchases and interactions with the brand. As a company, you can also jot down important dates such as birthdays and anniversaries of your most trusted and loyal customers. Pulling up all this data on the customer will help to target them with well-focused reward programs. Let us have a look at the range of segments that the company can have.
• First comes the most profitable segment of customers. This segment will have higher expectations from your company to recognize their consistent engagement and can be targeted with personalized and customized offers including offers specially designed for their special days and occasions. On acquiring recognition and attaining better rewards, this segment can be persuaded to the extent of accomplishing a lifetime companionship with your brand.
• Second, comes the segment of less frequent customers. They tend to always seek more attention from the company and can be usually attracted back to the brand by offering exciting retention options and making them feel that they are important to the company.
• Third comes the segment of strangers. This customer base can be called strangers because their association with the brand is next to nil as they are always on the lookout for better deals. They might have engaged with the brand once when there might have been an offer ongoing which must have caught their eye. To convert these strangers into frequent visitors, they should be targeted with campaigns offering more value for their time and money and making them give up their pursuit for something else by making your brand as their one-stop-shop.
• Finally, the segment of potential customers. This customer base can be a gold mine. They are new and unfamiliar so understanding their approach towards selecting a brand and making purchases can really open a wide gate of possibilities for your company. They should be targeted with attractive and ‘hard to say no to’ type of offers. This will help you nip the competition in the bud.
The fact is that the most profitable customers will demand the best rewards for their consistent loyalty and so will the rest of the segments. Each will demand and expect their respective level of perseverance from the company and will be in hopes of getting interesting programs to win over their long-lasting loyalties.
Hence, Customer Segmentation proves to be very appealing when it comes to strengthening customer loyalties. It seems to work on so many levels, it is hard to imagine any other way.
