Customer Loyalty: How to Build and Increase Emotional Commitment
Customer loyalty is an emotional connection between a company and its consumers. It reflects the level of trust and loyalty of buyers to a particular brand and plays the most important role in the successful development of a business.
Why is customer loyalty important?
The latest research in the field of marketing shows that increasing customer loyalty by just 5% leads to an increase in profits by 25-95%. And since attracting "cold" customers costs companies 5-25 times more than keeping existing ones, building loyalty should be one of the main priorities of a developing business. And therefore, investing in this area requires no less resources than attracting a new audience.
By strengthening consumer loyalty, you receive not only a direct financial benefit, but also a number of other serious advantages:
- Increasing the effectiveness of marketing. A customer who has already made a purchase from you does not need to be re-convinced as a product or demonstrate the benefits of the company. He already knows everything and is more likely to make a new order.
- Stable demand for products and business stability in the event of a market crisis.
- An opportunity to form a stable price policy without resorting to dumping.
- Advantages over competitors when introducing a new product to the market.
Loyal customers are not likely to quickly switch to other brands, for example, because of a low price or fast delivery. They are ready to overpay and even wait longer in order to receive the expected quality of the product in which they are quite sure. Moreover, such consumers tend to recommend their favorite companies to their friends and acquaintances, thanks to which the business receives stable organic growth of sales and target audience.
The Ladder of Customer Loyalty: How Customers Become Loyalty
The ladder of loyalty is a model that describes the gradation of levels of customer loyalty to a brand or product. It consists of four main stages and is aimed at helping companies better understand their customers and develop the most effective retention strategies. What are these steps and how to work with clients at each of them - we will tell you further.
Level 1. First contact
This is the initial stage, when the client knows almost nothing about the company, service, prices and quality of goods. He went to your website or offline store for the first time by clicking on an advertising banner or using the recommendation of his friends. After that, one of three things usually happens:
- The client leaves the site without making a purchase. The client was not familiar enough with your company and does not yet trust it, or did not find what he needed. This option is the most common.
- The client postpones the decision . He is interested in one of the offers, but is not yet ready to make a purchase. Perhaps now he does not have enough money or wants to promote the offers of competitors. The probability that such a customer will return later is quite high, and in order not to lose the deal, you can already influence his decision now, with the help of remarketing
- The customer makes a purchase. The visitor liked the company's offer. It is possible that before that he went through the first two steps — at first he simply viewed the offers, planned the purchase, and as a result made it. Such a customer moves to the next step in the loyalty ladder.
Level 2. First purchase
After making the first purchase, the user begins to analyze and evaluate the entire process of interaction with the company - how competent its employees are, how quickly they answered him, the convenience of the site and the terms of delivery. But the most important thing is the quality of the product or service. And if all factors left the client with a pleasant impression, then there is a great chance that the business will get a loyal customer.
If the consumer did not like something, it cannot be ignored. The company needs to find out why the dissatisfaction arose and try to find an optimal solution to the problem. Here it is worth clearly understanding that negative customer experience is rarely caused by the individual requirements of a specific person. Most often, it points to very specific shortcomings in the company's work, which means that competent processing of each such situation will contribute to increasing brand loyalty.
The Ladder of Customer Loyalty: How Customers Become Loyalty
Level 3. Repeated contacts
If the customer liked the product and the quality of service, he will probably return for new purchases. At this stage of the company, it is important to conduct customer satisfaction research to understand what exactly motivates them to come back and what they expect in the future. In this way, the client will be convinced that his wishes and needs are important for his favorite brand, which will become a solid foundation for the future emotional connection. The business, in turn, will be able to find the optimal approach to each consumer.
Various tools can be used to measure audience satisfaction, such as surveys, SMS, messengers, or e-mail. Social networks are also perfect for surveys, where the company can interact with its customers directly. In the future, to strengthen relations with customers, it is worth implementing a loyalty program, which may include:
- Temporary promotions
- Various contests and raffles for valuable prizes.
- Cashback on purchases.
- Personalized discounts for each consumer.
- Cumulative bonus system.
All these tools are aimed at building loyalty and increasing audience engagement. But it is not enough to implement them easily - it is necessary to make them convenient and attractive for their consumers, and here one cannot do without the appropriate digital infrastructure. But we'll talk about that a little later.
Level 4. True loyalty
The customer develops an emotional connection with the brand — he keeps coming back for purchases, happily participates in marketing activities and surveys, and also recommends the company to a wide range of his friends and acquaintances. Such a consumer can be called loyal, and he will bring the largest, and most importantly, constant profit to the business.
Such customers should be given the greatest attention and constantly fuel their positive attitude towards the brand. To do this, you can give them unique gifts, assign special managers who will always be in touch and will be able to provide the best service. Also, loyal consumers can be better acquainted with the production processes and the life of the company or contact them more often with surveys to emphasize the importance of their opinion.
But in any case, even with the most careful attention, errors in the service and unpleasant incidents can still happen. If they arise in relation to loyal customers, the company does not need to be afraid to admit its fault - it is more honest to explain the cause of the problem to the customer and offer him the optimal solution. But to ignore the situation, and even more so to prove to the client that he himself is wrong, is impossible under any circumstances.
How EfirCards helps in forming and increasing customer loyalty
A loyalty program can be an effective tool for building and maintaining customer loyalty to a brand. But there is a problem here, due to high competition in the markets, promotions, bonuses and discounts began to be used everywhere, which affected the pampering of modern consumers. Now, in order to bring the buyer to the top of the loyalty ladder, it is necessary to take into account his individual needs, as well as offer modern and comfortable tools of interaction with the business. In other words, digitalization of loyalty policy is needed.
The EfirCards service was created specifically to solve this task. It is a multifunctional tool that helps to quickly develop and launch digitized loyalty marketing in almost any niche - from e-commerce and offline stores to the restaurant and hotel business.
Features of the EfirCards platform:
- Launch of personalized loyalty programs. Set the desired percentage of discounts, conditions of provision, amount of cashback and other parameters. Bonuses can be assigned to all customers at once or to specific groups of the target audience - depending on the level in the loyalty ladder.
- Issue of virtual cards. Create digital cards with individual designs and different loyalty programs that your customers can add to Apple Wallet and Google Pay.
- SMS and Email mailings. Use the built-in mailing module for effective communication with segmented customer bases.
- Push and Geo-push messages. Inform customers about the "hottest" offers with push notifications that have a record CTR, or invite consumers who are close to your outlet to visit the store with automatic Geo-push notifications.
- Chatbot in Telegram. Provide customers with a chatbot that will simplify their interaction with the company and help them stay informed about important developments.
- Automation. Synchronize EfirCards with your CRM and POS node to reduce manual operations and increase customer service speed.
What discount cards can be created in EfirCards
The ether service allows you to issue four types of virtual discount cards with customizable parameters that can meet the needs of any loyalty program:
- Discounted - with a fixed percentage discount from each purchase.
- Discount with accumulation - the percentage of the discount increases depending on how much money the customer has spent at your company.
- Cashback — part of the money from each purchase is returned to the client in the form of bonuses, points or cash equivalent.
- Stamp - put stamps on each customer's purchase, and when enough stamps are collected, give a gift.
You can use one or more Efir virtual cards at the same time, thanks to which you can test and implement different mechanics aimed at the individual interests of individual segments of the target audience.
How to start using EfirCards and how much it costs
Start using EfirCards now. To do this, create a company account on our platform and choose the loyalty mechanics that best suit your business goals and audience needs. For all users, we provide full technical support and provide a temporary free subscription, which will allow you to first evaluate the advanced capabilities of the EfirCards service, and only then decide whether to purchase standard tariffs.
