Building business success starts with customer acquisition. Not need to say that customer retention is equally vital. The key thing is to magnet more prospects and build a loyal consumer base. People tend to return for a second engagement with the brands they find reliable and affordable. Usually, businesses focus more on expansion and targeting new customers. However, it’s much easier to persuade the existing consumers to stick around with your brand compared to introducing your products to new customers and convince them to buy from you.

How long-term customer engagement could be done? Give your prospects fully-formed solutions – address their pain points your competition not considering. Also, to stay ahead of the curve, you need something more. What is that? Don’t settle in winning new leads only, customer retention is also mandatory to bring your business more profitable success.  

Loyal Consumer Base – A Real Performance Indicator 

Customer retention equates brand loyalty and for this you need to ensure an unbeatable customer experience. Though the major concern for any business is getting more and more customers, retaining those customers is the actual win. Here’s some proven ways to earn brand loyalty and make more income through returning consumers.   

Seamless User Experience:
Since a website is an absolute necessity in our digital world, today, businesses need to be more proactive in delivering exceptionally streamlined user experience. The brands not proficient enough customer engagement soon knocked out of the competition ring. Only those brands survive that successfully comprehend the consumer demand and expectations – they must have a pleasant shopping journey with you and that also with absolute ease. 

People tend to keep buying from the brands, which delivers easy accessibility, affordability, and sustainability. So, make sure your business site provides personalized features, improved search, single sign-in, quick cart entries, and flawless checkouts – your eCommerce store must be mobile optimized to engage smart device users.

Above all, stay loyal to your words and deliver what you promise.

Value Consumer Interest:
Knowing the target audience and having a well-built buyer persona may bring you the customers, but to persuade them to keep coming back you must bring value to the fore. And, for this you should value their interest and give them what exactly they are looking for – both in terms of products and services. Customer satisfaction is that deep-dive you have to take as an indispensable part of your brand loyalty strategy. Bait and switch technique will surely help you acquire more customers, but it’s the personal gratitude, complementary services and promotional incentives to increase customer lifetime value.

Basically, you have to keep them engaged with what interests them the most. It could be a free membership, discount vouchers, themed gift boxes for festive seasons and holidays, etc. You can also add markdowns on bulk orders.

Keep modifying your business model to enhance consumer engagement.

Empathy is The Key:
People prefer brands that care for them. Empathy plays a vital role in coping with the rapidly changing market. Buyers seek for convenience and personalized solutions – it will help you fill the consumer retention gap. Emotional benefits help stimulate customer loyalty. So, the digital experience you are providing to your consumer-base must not only be aligned with their lifestyles but also supported by empathetically done customer relationship management.

It’s an open fact that customer acquisition is far expensive compared to customer retention – many studies suggested the same. Also, a mobile-friendly user interface can help businesses, especially eCommerce stores to have 200% increased retention rate. However, the much-needed thing here is how compassionately you deal with your customers – especially how you cater to their complaints. Deliver your message more creatively and empathetically, be it through conventional or digital marketing, and even PPC marketing ad campaigns.

Outsmart the competition instead of outspending in order to better nurture the buyers you already have and their valuable interests.

Swap Sell with Help:
Brands ultimate objective is to sell their products and/or services. But, keeping the selling approach at all times won’t take you anywhere. People want solutions and don’t really like listening to brands that keep on bragging about themselves at different verticals. People want everything better, different, and affordable. So, rather sticking to your sales pitch businesses who want to retain their existing customers should focus on ‘help approach’ to bring more comfort in consumers’ lives.

The persistent selling approach could backfire and may result in your brand’s reduced market share. Certainly, you don’t want a crashed brand value and therefore, put help first and tell your buyers what best you can do for them. While the selling approach can bring you more new customers, help approach magnets consumers for long.   

Make ‘help’ the ultimate objective of your advertising and selling approach.

In a nutshell, businesses of all sizes and types across any industry should break down the barriers and make clever use of the above strategies to build trust and retain the existing customers.