Getting new clients is great, but real growth comes from repeat clients. Return clients spend 33% more per purchase than new customers.
Repeat customers are also 77% more likely to recommend your company to their colleagues, friends, and family, driving additional revenue. It’s crucial because 92% of consumers now trust personal recommendations more than paid marketing when making purchasing decisions.
To scale your business quickly, convert your customers into raving fans and brand advocates.
Offer Rewards and Loyalty Points
According to The 2016 Bond Loyalty Report, 73% of loyalty cardholders are more likely to refer their friends and family to brands that have similar programs.
Many brands in various industries and markets offer returning customers loyalty rewards. Also, they share some extra and exclusive offers and deals with them.
Further, when your customers aren’t happy about something, it’s your responsibility to keep them calm and solve their issues. Once the matter is resolved, you can offer them small rewards or loyalty points as a sign of goodwill.
Rewarding your customers can help you win back unhappy shoppers—and maybe you can convert them into raving fans and brand advocates.
If you successfully solve a problem, then you’re ensuring that you’re doing your best. Also, you can surprise your customers by offering them free upgrades. For instance, you can offer them package upgrades for their birthday or offer them rewards during the holiday season. Your customers will appreciate this, and it’ll motivate them to continue doing business with you, and they’ll even refer your business to their family, friends, and colleagues. Also, this converts passive clients who’re mostly delighted customers with your products or services into active customers because they’re getting a clear monetary value from your business.
Make Customers Feel Appreciated
Every customer must feel valued when they buy something from you. It makes them buy more from you, even recommend your business to their friends. Thus, you must make every customer feel like a VIP.
You can do that by giving them discounts and doing things that provide value to your customers. By appreciating your customers by giving them rewards, loyalty points, promotions, and discounts, you show that your relationship with customers isn’t just transactional; it’s more than that.
Ask for and Implement Feedback
To keep your customers happy, you need to know what bothers them most and what they expect from your brand. Thus, it’s crucial to seek customer feedback.
To collect customer feedback, conduct regular customer surveys to gather feedback. It gives them the impression that you care and value them. Also, it shows that you’re serious about customer service.
However, gathering feedback from customers isn’t enough. You must translate customer feedback and recommendations into action. This will gratify your customers, and they’ll become raving fans and refer your brand to others.
Create a Memorable Onboarding Process
The first impression often leaves the strongest mark on customers’ minds. So, your product’s onboarding process directly influences your customer churn and retention rates.
Research shows that 86% of customers are more likely to stick longer with a company and even spend more than before if an exceptional onboarding process helps them make the best use of purchased products.
When consumers genuinely understand the value they can derive from your products and use them to their full potential, they’re more likely to become raving fans and spread the word about your products as well.
How do you create a memorable onboarding process?
- Ask customers why they’re buying your product and what they wish to accomplish with it. Then, guide them to the most valuable features that align with their needs.
- Give them templates that they can use at once.
- Eliminate friction points so that your clients can use the core features of your products right away.
- Create an onboarding process with an email series that guides and educates your clients on getting the maximum benefit from your product.
Provide Actionable Value by Leveraging Content Marketing
Content marketing isn’t just valuable for generating leads and turning them into customers. It’s equally crucial in educating your clients on getting the maximum benefit out of your product, keeping them, and converting them into raving fans and brand advocates by giving them loads of free, actionable information.
If you publish high-quality content frequently, it gives you more odds to engage customers with your products and strengthen their relationship with your brand.
Today, online marketers and business owners consider content marketing a critical part of their overall marketing strategy.
The long-term return of investment makes it worth every penny. However, to leverage content marketing effectively to generate word-of-mouth marketing, you must regularly publish highly engaging and well-researched content.
This not only keeps your customers hooked on your brand but also helps you achieve your business goals.
Encourage User-Generated Content (UGC)
User-generated content refers to the comments, videos, pictures, reviews, or any other content your clients create for your company. Encouraging your customers to create content for your brand is a fantastic way to engage them with your products or services, boost brand loyalty, and drive word-of-mouth marketing.
According to research, 86% of millennials believe UGC is a sign of the quality of the product, service, or brand. The same research also shows that UGC impacts the purchasing decisions of over 80% of millennials.
However, how do you encourage your customers to create user-generated content for your brand?
Hold social media competitions or incorporate UGC rewards as part of your loyalty programs. Sharing client success stories is another brilliant way to encourage more clients to share how they benefited from your brand.
Create a Customer-Centric Culture
Jay Nathan notes the future of customer success is community. Further, customer experience largely determines if a customer becomes an avid fan and word-of-mouth marketer for your company or your most prominent critic. This can cause you to win or lose future business.
Research shows that 55% of consumers are ready to pay more to companies that offer an exceptional experience.
A customer-centric culture is where customer happiness and satisfaction are at the center of your company’s decisions. Customer-centric businesses don’t just outsource customer support to just one department.
Instead, customer experience is part of their core value system, and each department is equally responsible for ensuring customers’ success.
Thus, you must develop a culture where customer questions and complaints have the highest priority in every department and section to offer a memorable customer experience.
To develop a customer-centric culture, you must hire people with the right skills. Here are the essential customer support skills for modern-day businesses:
- Active listening
- Clear communication
- Ability to multitask
- Ability to mirror a customer’s tone and language
- Excellent interpersonal skills.
Customers may forgive and forget occasional technical hitches and a lack of features in your product, but many of them may not forget a poor customer experience.
If you invest in providing exceptional customer experiences, customers will stick with your brand longer and drive more referral sales.
Final Thoughts
Avid fans and brand advocates play a significant role in driving more referrals and sales. Fortunately, at the age of 24/7 connectivity and social media, it’s easy to engage customers with your brand. However, the challenge is to be consistent with your brand advocacy strategies. Consumers have short memories and will quickly forget your company if you don’t engage them frequently.
Also, you can rely on customer support tools, such as Zight (formerly CloudApp), to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, ultimately converting passive customers into raving fans and brand advocates. By leveraging Zight (formerly CloudApp) for bug reporting and troubleshooting, companies like Outreach save 21 hours a week.