Marketing a product or service isn’t easy. It takes a lot of effort to keep the interest alive. When companies and businesses are at it, they spend a lot of money to sustain that interest among people, and also to generate curiosity and retain possible customers. Yet, many businesses often forget a crucial part of the whole marketing exercise.
This usually involves ensuring that your existing customers remain loyal for a lifetime. It is difficult to build lifelong loyalty but when you manage to do this, you will have created a valuable source of word-of-mouth marketing. Loyal customers often go out of their way to promote your product or service, even without any extraneous benefits. This is mostly a psychological phenomenon.
The very fact that your product or service makes them happy is enough for them to promote or recommend your services and products. What we need to remember here is the word ‘happy’. Happiness or contentment with a product or service will ensure that a person remains faithful to a product or service for a lifetime. In this article, let us take a look at how we can build lifetime loyalty and which marketing tactics help to ensure this.
One of the best ways to build loyalty is by getting personal. What we really mean by this is, you should personalize your marketing message to suit your target audience. Firstly, identify buyer personas. Create content that is targeted at buyer persona and tweak it each time you send these messages out to different people. Personalizing marketing communication drastically helps in connecting with a customer emotionally. Personalizing messages also helps customers to feel valued, and they will remain customers even when a competitor targets them.
A positive reinforcement is defined as anything that is given or introduced to reinforce a desired behavior. Your loyal customers’ desired behavior is to purchase again, write great feedback or simply have a good opinion about your product or service. If you recognize someone doing this, reward them with whatever your company can afford to. This is a positive reinforcement and it makes it likely that the desired behavior happens again.
In order to make sure that your customers and clients come back again, try to bundle your products and services in a personalized manner. Your customer may not need a product at a particular time but if you understand his or her needs and club a couple of products or services together, you might end up making more sales, and also build loyalty.
One of the most important characteristics of a good brand that has many lifelong customers is that it provides a unique experience. In fact, identify what kind of experience you want your customers to have. Once you identify that, you will be able to provide valuable experience which your target audience will cherish. This helps to build lasting loyalty. It helps to invest both time and money in identifying personalized experience that different demographic groups might want to enjoy.
Often, businesses forget to give attention to their customers. You need to remember that sustaining and nurturing a customer for a lifetime is similar to nurturing a spousal relationship. This means, you need to provide constant attention. If you feature your loyal customers in events, blogs, or marketing communication, they will be happen with the attention they receive and chances are likely that lifelong loyalty is built.
This might sound a little preposterous but in order to remain in someone’s memory, you need to be around. Human memory is quite fallible and they often forget if something is not within their sight. If you want to remain in your customer’s memory, you will have to show up often. This means, you will need to communicate with your clients and customers as often as possible, and also be available when they want to contact you. Automating your customer service and adopting chatbots or AI could be a good start too.
Building brand loyalty is not just a marketing exercise. It also seeps into human resource departments. This is probably why you should consider training your employees to provide customer engagement. This should be part of the program right from the induction period. This ensures that your employees carry your branding’s essence along with them, and ensure that customers feel a sense of harmony in your messages and the way your employees treat them.
One of the ways to get attention from someone is by asking for their advice. It usually boosts their ego and they feel important. If you ask your customers for advice regarding how you can improve your product or service, they will probably feel that you are giving them the attention they deserve. This is usually a good thing because this helps them to cultivate loyalty toward your brand. Your feedback forms can have a couple of questions that explicitly seeks for your customers’ advice and suggestions. However, you will need to use these advices and suggestions to actually convert them into lifelong loyal customers.
Nurturing lifelong brand evangelists
As we can see, it is quite difficult to turn customers into lifelong loyal brand evangelists. However, this is possible when you combine a mix of psychological and marketing tactics. Firstly, begin to use personalized messages and target your audience individually. Use positives reinforcements to encourage desired behavior and offer products and services in a customized bundle. Focus on creating unique brand-centric experiences that cannot be replicated by competitors.
Start featuring your customers in your content and be available when they have something to share or ask. Train your employees to soak in these aspects and seek advice from your customers. All this will help in nurturing the relationship your customers have with your brand, and helps in converting them into lifelong brand evangelists.
