The Sunday Mail
Cresencia Marjorie Chiremba
“Loyal customers, they don’t just come back, they don’t simply recommend you, they insist that their friends do business with you” – Shep Hyken
A great marketing effort is only considered ‘great’ when customers are happy with the experience they receive from the service provider(s).
Such happy customers will willingly pull out their wallets and do business; if this is not the end result, then the efforts come to naught.
Every corporate success story has a common denominator, and that is the customer.
You may run the most talked-about campaign, with the biggest budget and be visible everywhere. But all that effort may count for nothing if your customers do not give you a seal of approval.
This approval is shown by their positive responsiveness to your marketing efforts.
As we navigate the last month of 2022, there are customers who have stood by your organisation during the highs and the lows of the year.
These customers deserve a Bell’s because they have invested their trust in your brands, and have shown great loyalty.
But how do you appreciate them, when you do not recognise them?
It is crucial to be able to identify the customers who have been faithful to the brand, so that when it is time for acknowledgements you honour the right ones.
To this extent, there are several ways you can use to determine who your most loyal customers are.
Here are some of those ways:
1. Number of Purchases
An organisation can do a trend analysis on the number of times a customer has purchased its products or services.
Information like this is easy to obtain when you have a system that captures the customers’ data whenever they make a purchase with the organisation.
The system must be able to match the purchase with the purchaser, whenever a transaction is completed.
In the event of a review of the purchase history, one can simply log on to the customer file name and a statement of their purchase history will come out.
One can simply check the number of purchases that were done at a certain period, and the value of those purchases.
Frequent buyers, or those that buy large quantities, are likely to be loyal customers.
2. Referrals
Loyal customers are particularly known for being their service providers’ ‘mobile billboards’.
Normally, people become loyal when they are happy and satisfied with the customer experience received from brands, over a certain period of time.
If they consistently receive good customer experiences, they are naturally compelled to refer other like-minded prospective customers to try out your brand(s).
Referral codes are sometimes used by organisations to encourage their customers to refer their friends, family, colleagues, neighbours or even strangers.
Although they may use rewards to encourage them to refer more, but with or without rewards delighted customers cannot keep quiet.
They will always share their experience with anyone who cares to listen, at the same time encouraging them to patronise your brand(s).
The referral codes will then be used to see which customers referred more customers.
3. Customer Life Time Value
All business relationships are not eternal and have a lifecycle.
During the extent of the relationship, businesses have certain predictions on the amount of money that will be spent by certain customer segments.
So they may also predict how much a specific customer segment spend will determine profitability of the business.
If the organisation determines that a certain customer segment is loyal, chances are that if it is nurtured well it will spend more.
That organisation will then invest in increasing the lifetime value.
Strategies that enhance loyalty management, to either increase the purchase behaviour of the customer base or increase the size of the customer base and/or increase the tenure of the customer base, will be used.
4. Purchase Incidence
When serving customers, the relationship does not end at the payment till; rather this is where real business relationships take shape.
For products and services that are frequently purchased or that are not a once-off purchase, repeat purchases must be the number one priority that is encouraged by the organisation’s representatives.
Checking your customers’ data helps to the company to see who is already making repeat purchases, and who should be pursued for continued business.
Customers that call again often are likely to become loyal if managed well.
Nonetheless, organisations that manage to identify and nurture unfaithful customers to faithful ones, tend to enjoy the benefits associated with loyalty.
It is very true that loyal customers will market your business.
The fact that they know and trust your brand is evident enough that they will spend more.
Their lifetime value is also higher than that of new customers.
Above all, loyal customers are not as expensive compared to nurturing a new customer into a loyal customer.
Next week, I will touch on how these loyal customers can be acknowledged this festive season.
*Cresencia Marjorie Chiremba is a marketing enthusiast with a strong passion for customer service. For comments, suggestions and training, she can be reached on [email protected] or on 0712 979 461, 0719 978 335
