Acquiring new customers is good, but taking care of your existing customer base is better! Indeed, these are consumers who have already been convinced by your marketing speeches and retaining them costs less: it is 5 times cheaper to retain customers than to acquire new ones, as we explain in our article 7 steps to premiere your customer experience.
The Pimster team explains how to leverage your existing customers to build loyalty on your products. 👉
While this is probably the most obvious point, it is also one of the most important pillars for brands. A loyalty program allows your brand to collect customer data, and track the purchases of your customer base. It is a real asset to understand not only what your customers' favourite products are, but also to analyse the purchase frequency of each of your customers. This last data will be crucial to send marketing campaigns at the right time and to follow up your customers.
This program can take different forms:
However, there is one last challenge for your brand: how to convince your customers to join a loyalty program? Indeed, the topic of data collection has become sensitive, and many customers have become reluctant to leave their contact information with brands. The best way to get your customers to sign up for your program is to provide them with benefits in return.
Sephora, for example, offers regular promotions at key times with its benefits card: Christmas, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day and Father's Day. This encourages customers to sign up for the program to receive these benefits in return.
By creating a community, you create an attachment to your brand, with an emotional connection that proves to be very powerful in bonding your customers. By establishing a feeling of belonging to the same circle and to common values, you truly engage your customers with your brand. This community can be established around common interests, such as a passion for sports or the mountains, for brands like Nike or Salomon.
To grow and feed this community, there is nothing better than social networks. The sportswear and hiking brand Patagonia, for example, uses its Instagram page to display its values: “We're in business to save our home planet”, and to raise awareness around sustainability and preservation of natural spaces. The page does not highlight products, but instead proposes content that Patagonia's customer base is sensitive to: nature preservation, awareness of climate change issues, sustainable consumption… The customer engagement is real and concrete, as more than 5 million people follow the account.
Building a community will really serve your bottom line, as customers who are used to and engaged with a brand spend an average of 31% more than new customers. (Forbes, 2020)
To build customer loyalty, nothing is better than knowing them and especially understanding their needs and desires. The easiest way to do this is to conduct regular surveys of your customer base on the one hand, but also of your prospects and potential future customers on the other hand. These surveys can take several forms: open-ended questions, online questionnaires, post-purchase satisfaction questions…
To know the satisfaction rate of your customers, you can try to calculate your Net Promoter Score (NPS). This allows you to measure the image of your brand with your customers to better understand them, and then take the appropriate measures to improve their loyalty to your products.
The British jewellery brand, Monica Vinader, surveys its customers after each sale, to assess customer satisfaction, using sample questions to calculate its NPS score.
If you want to become NPS experts, we recommend our article on the subject.
It may seem obvious, but inspiring trust and reliability in your services and products will allow you to consolidate your customer base who will not hesitate to come back to you to find quality products.
To do this, you can build an original brand image, which is recognizable among thousands. This is the case of the clothing brand Sézane, which has built its credibility around a sustainable, quality brand and above all, transparency on the places of production of its products. Another particularity of the brand is that it never sells out its products, which contributes to establishing the image of a reliable brand.
Here is a list of KPIs you can track to understand your customer base and retention rates:
We keep reminding you, but the customer experience is the keystone of fidelity. By improving your customer experience, you also improve your brand image, the trust your customers have… and at the same time, it allows you to better know your customers and their expectations.
The first building blocks of a good post-purchase experience are laid as soon as the payment is made, the order is received and the first time the customer takes possession of the product. This last stage is decisive for the consumer's subsequent adhesion to your product. 75% of users who have received a bad onboarding do not return to the brand for a future purchase.
If you are still not convinced, we suggest you to read our multiple articles on this subject on our blog.
Keeping a post-purchase link with your customers means building a lasting and trusting relationship, which is a long-term task.
To do this, the best way is to offer services that are different from your competitors, and in particular accompaniment on how to use your products. This key moment of product discovery is part of our expertise and is what we have analysed as the most neglected and yet most effective link to establish a lasting relationship with your customers.
The best example is Apple and its online user guides, which allow for an effective product introduction. In addition, it is interesting to note that the customer experience created by the brand has fostered the so famous community of fans and followers around the world. This was not a specific move by the company, yet its post-purchase customer service was a big part of its success.
Another point to take into account in the post-purchase is that your customers can abandon your brand by lack of use of your product or by misunderstanding or misuse of the latter. For example, Nike has created its Nike Training Club application to encourage its users to start working out and therefore to use their product. This is the best solution not only to keep your brand in mind, to collect customer data, but also to offer complementary products and keep your customer as a loyal and regular consumer.
30% more loyalty on products, that's on average what our clients have observed! Convinced that you can optimize your customer base? But you don't know where to start?
We can help you build a sustainable post-purchase customer relationship. Just request a demo.