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You may have heard that customers are not loyal to you, your products, or your services but loyal to the experience that you give them. When it comes to running a successful online business, building a relationship with your customers is crucial, and emotions arising from their experiences play an important role. In fact, they are the fuel that propels the growth and success of every successful entrepreneur out there. Some of your customers will become long-term partners as they come to trust and believe in you as a business. This is a lifetime customer value.
A happy buyer is a repeat customer. One of the main goals of every customer engagement strategy is to create an emotional connection with shoppers. When you can connect with your customers emotionally, they feel understood, which leads them to fall in love with your brand. And when it happens, you don’t need a marketer to tell you how that can truly impact your business. I mean, people buy products because they feel connected to the brand — don’t they?
Now you know that customer engagement aims to create an emotional connection, how do you do it? The answer can be found in creating a unique experience for them. How personalized the experience is depends on how much time and resources you invest in communication. People want to feel appreciated, and they want to believe that they are valued. You need to show your customers how important they are to encourage them to stay loyal. So get inspired and learn how to build a lifelong relationship with your loyal customers with these practical tips.
5 Best Tips How To Build A Lifelong Relationship With Your Loyal Customers
1. Communication is The Key To Success
There’s no better way to promote your brand and establish an intimate relationship with your consumers than to stay in touch with them and learn what they expect from you. Whether you run a big or small online business, the first thing on your mind should be to find effective ways to communicate with e-shoppers. It is the best and surest way to build a reliable connection with your consumers. The better you communicate with your online customers, the greater chance you have of creating a long-lasting relationship.
However, communicating with your online customers can be challenging. There are so many channels available that make decision-making extremely difficult. Depending on your niche, you need to understand the best ways to interact with your e-shoppers. You can create your own client portal or use live chat to engage with customers in real-time, address their inquiries, and guide them through their online shopping experience, fostering trust and increasing conversion rates. Regular communication keeps your brand fresh in their minds and lets you share your hottest news and information. If you want your customers to choose you over any of your competitors, you have to show them that you're actively present in their moment-to-moment decision-making processes.
2. Thank Your Loyal Customers
Another essential thing is to build relationships that develop customer loyalty. Over 70% of consumers are more likely to recommend a brand if it has a good loyalty program. Winning customer loyalty doesn’t have to cost you much, either. We tend to offer discounts to attract potential buyers, but it is also a good idea to reward your existing customers. Offering special deals and gifts to them is a great way to remind your long-term buyers that you value the relationship between them and your brand.
It is true that customers love getting rewards and discounts, and that’s awesome as the more points and rewards they gain, the more they come back to buy from your store. The key is to make your customers feel special and to offer discounts where applicable. This allows customers to get accustomed and familiarized with your brand quicker by making them feel important and valued.
To make it easier for online business owners, there are many marketing apps for Shopify businesses like Growave, that can help you design loyalty and reward programs. Growave helps you offer value to your customers and motivate them to like and promote your brand, repeat purchases, and increase their customer lifetime value.
3. Email Marketing
One of the foremost goals of any business is to create and keep their brand’s visibility. Since email marketing has been found to be the most effective form of communication, it’s also crucial to use this to promote a business. Email marketing is a great help in creating lifelong relationships with your loyal customers. The good news is that you can use it to communicate and increase customer lifetime value. Your email marketing campaigns will help you win customer trust and remind them of your brand regularly.
When it comes to acquiring new shoppers and enhancing customer retention, email marketing is still the most cost-efficient method. Yet, many businesses fail to understand that it is more than just sending out a bunch of ‘spam’ messages to random people to get a sale out of it. If you want to build a customer relationship, the quality of your email should be high. You can do this by using these tips:
- Segment your customers
- Handpick promotions to their shopping habits
- Create targeted email campaigns
- Keep your customers updated with the latest news from your brand
- Don’t be too pushy and annoying since we all know how much customers dislike unwanted and spam emails
- Use personalized, emotionally appealing email messages
- Create and nurture customer connections at all times
4. Gather Customer Feedback
While strengthening a lifelong relationship with your customers, it is essential to know what they think of your business. That’s why feedback is important - it’s the most powerful way to improve your business performance. If your products or services are not perfect, the best way to achieve better results is to obtain authentic insights from your customers. Without them you simply do not know how to improve in the future.
Rational feedback with details also provides customer data and helps you prioritize your online brand’s aspects. This can help you not only optimize your marketing and sales funnel, but also assess the various factors like customer support, user experience, design, and improve the product qualities. It is wise to collect customer feedback after each purchase on your website if you are running an e-commerce site.
5. Try To Exceed Customers’ Expectations
It is a big market out there. With competition on the rise, you need to work even harder to stay ahead of your rivals. It’s no longer enough to just have an excellent product or service, you need to go the extra mile if you want consumers to choose you over other players.. That’s why it’s important to always keep your promises and exceed your customers’ expectations.
Your customers are the ones who bring you revenue - if they are not satisfied, you won’t stay in business for long. Therefore, it’s essential to exceed their expectations and give them the best service, products, and after-sale support. Here are some ideas on how to do this:
- Focus on exceptional customer service
- Personalize their experience
- Provide them with something extra
- Send a Happy Birthday card with discounts
When you are launching your Shopify business, you’ll need to start looking at ways to get ahead of the competition. The number of online businesses is increasing year after year and it seems to be harder for new companies to get started and be noticed. But it’s not enough simply to be seen — you have to keep doing your best work to succeed. Remember that loyal customers are more valuable than ever, and only companies that go above and beyond will earn them.
Conclusion
We're sure you would agree that building relationships with your customers is absolutely essential for earning their trust. But simply creating a relationship is not enough, the relationship should continue to grow and improve over time. It’s important to understand how a lifelong relationship can help you gain more revenue in the long run.
However, it is also imperative to understand that customer experience is a continuum. When appropriately implemented, it is a process that will give you an advantage over your fellow competitors who do not have such an effective customer engagement strategy. The longer you can keep a paying customer as part of your business, the better off you are. If you do this with big enough numbers over time, your business will grow and expand on its own.
About The Author
Aida Kubatova is a Content Strategy Manager at Growave. She believes in the power of eCommerce and loves online shopping herself. Every day she creates useful content to help entrepreneurs around the world to learn more about the latest news and innovations from the world of Digital Marketing and eCommerce to grow their online business and, of course, sales.
