17 Nov Creating Customer Loyalty

When you reach a stage in your business where you have achieved a healthy number of clients and customers, it becomes essential to look after them to ensure they are loyal to you as a supplier. If you don’t, they can easily switch to someone else at the earliest opportunity, due to poor service, price or a lack of interest in their business goals.

Creating an effective customer loyalty scheme for your business can help protect against this and it can be done quite easily by taking a structured approach.

Understand your Customers

This may seem like an obvious one, but you would be amazed how many clients I deal with who do not have an “intimate knowledge” of their customers. By understanding your customers business, helps you to understand their challenges and needs, which in turn will help you achieve their loyalty as they view you as a trusted solutions provider.  A great starting point in understanding your customers is to segment and structure your customer base via a CRM system and then filter it by business type, turnover, services, products supplied etc…

Understand What Makes Them Tick

Before you can target your customers effectively to drive more business from them and create more loyalty, you need to develop an understanding of their challenges and future business objectives.  It may be improved pricing, added value goods or services or even rewards like free vouchers or gifts. Customer surveys or regular face to face meetings helps to build up your relationship with them as well as this intelligence. This can then help you to develop a clear picture of what you can offer them going forward that others do not.

Clear Communication

It is essential once their “needs” have been identified, that you are clear and concise with your client how you can add value for them, what their loyalty means to you, and what they will get in return for their commitment to you as a business. Many businesses put some controls around this such as an annual rebate agreement for reaching a certain level of business, or free vouchers if the customer spends a certain amount of turnover with you. It is essential that both sides agree on what will be provided and what is needed to achieve it.

Delivering On Your Promise – Exceed Expectations!

Most important of all is to deliver on your promise and if possible, exceed it. The best example of a loyalty scheme I have done previously involved free  love2shop vouchers which were provided to retailers if they hit different spend levels in a product promotion I was running. In addition, new products were added to create some extra excitement and the products offered were tailored to appeal to the different customer base through channel segmentation.

It had a fantastic impact on sales, growing the promotional sales consecutively by 40% each year, for 4 years.  The reason why it was so successful was that the Retailer was getting a “ free reward” for his business, along with exciting new discounted products in a promotion. The supplier was getting “increased revenue” from the promotion, along with “extra cash margin”.  Long term, the supplier had secured the future business loyalty from his customer as they became more entrenched with the supplier and his new products, and a delighted customer who was seeing his business revenue grow from the exciting new products introduced.  Everyone was a winner.

If you believe your business would benefit from a market audit and some fresh thinking developing a new sales and marketing strategy, contact PMF Marketing today for a free 30 minute consultation.