How do you deal with long-standing customers? Do you have customer loyalty strategies? Entrepreneurs today are focused on winning new customers, worried about the competition, thinking of ways to attract a larger audience.

They forget, though, that a great commercial strategy is the customers they already have. If those customers have a great experience with your company, they can become excellent promoters, telling friends and family about it.

But what does customer loyalty take? Why do customers choose a specific brand and stay loyal? What strategies keep a customer interested? For the details, read on.

Why customer loyalty matters

Anyone who has a company knows how important customers are for a business to succeed. More customers, more revenue and growth. Catching a customer's attention is challenging, though. It involves strategy and excellent marketing, above all when it is a new brand, product or service in the market.

One loyalty strategy was what Nubank did in November 2021, offering shares to employees and customers as a new loyalty strategy, for example.

Here are some simple measures that can make all the difference to customer loyalty:

Serving the customer

A well-known strategy is customer service. Whether by telephone, chat, social media or in person, every customer deserves impeccable service. There are customers who buy purely for the experience of having been served well.

Offering promotions

The customer has to feel special. One strategy is to offer discount vouchers, or even gifts, on important dates. That is why some businesses offer a loyalty card to encourage the customer to come back.

Resolving conflicts

Life is not all roses. A customer often buys something and needs to exchange it. At that moment it is very important to give the customer full support and warmth, and the treatment has to be the same as when they bought the product.

The customer wants to be sure that, whatever the outcome, they will receive exceptional service and be understood by the staff, who should be ready to solve the problem. That applies to products and to services alike.

Knowing the customer's preferences

For customer loyalty it is important to understand, alongside the need they have, what they like, on what occasions they could use your product or service and what catches their attention enough to buy. That can be established through surveys with your customers. A CRM system will be important for recording all those details.

Every customer has a different need, and by discovering it you can close business more easily. It is essential, then, that you learn the techniques and develop, because knowledge is never wasted.

Handling feedback

It is extremely important to stay open to customer feedback, because success is not reached alone: it goes both ways. Customers buy your product or service and you, the entrepreneur, may receive criticism, praise and even recommendations of your brand. That is why customer satisfaction always comes first.

According to the scholar Kotler:

Value delivered to the customer is the difference between the total

value for the customer and the total cost to the customer. The total

value for the customer is the set of benefits customers expect from a

given product or service.

From that quotation we can understand that a customer wants to know the advantages of the purchase and the perception of other customers. It is therefore essential to improve continuously and to work hard on after-sales in order to raise the chances of customer loyalty.

Innovating for customer loyalty

Have you thought about running a business matchmaking event to build loyalty among your customers? Some schools are adopting that strategy by bringing parents together at a matchmaking event. Each parent or guardian sets out their work or represents the company they work for. The magic of networking happens.

The parents recognise that the matchmaking event brings benefits in the short and long term, so the schools found a great way of raising the chances of students staying at the institution. That distinctive feature is also used to attract new students.

Business associations likewise use the strategy of a matchmaking event as a benefit for building loyalty among their members. See it at this link.

Now tell us, what form of customer loyalty do you apply?

To find out more about business matchmaking, download our ebook by clicking this link. Take a look at the advantages of our software, which automates your event completely. The results go far beyond networking, partnerships and sales. Innovate by organising matchmaking events and win a great deal more visibility for yourself and your business.

Customer loyalty