Unique Ways to Delight Your Best Customers

Although your employees may be your most important business assets, there’s no denying that your company can’t survive without loyal customers. In the ever-competitive world of commerce, customer satisfaction continues to be one of the most important metrics you can analyze and focus on when building and maintaining a strong brand.

If you’ve found it difficult to retain customers or drive new business, you should consider looking for ways to delight your best customers. Placing emphasis on how your customers feel shows them that you care, and the best part is that there are steps you can take to build brand loyalty in the process.

To help you get ahead of the curve, below are some unique ways to delight your best customers and improve sales in the short term and the long term:

Offer Loyal Customers Rewards

One way to build a relationship with existing customers is to reward them for their business. You can reward loyal customers in a number of ways, including by providing discounts on products and services or by offering exclusive early access to sales or product releases.

Customer loyalty or rewards programs also give customers some power since they can earn rewards by making repeat purchases. This can be good since everyone likes to have options, and by relinquishing control over the brand-customer relationship, you empower your customers to choose your brand over your competition.

A loyalty program should be easy to join and participate in. When you make it simple for customers to earn and use loyalty points, customers will likely sign up. You’re also more likely to build real customer relationships when you make it simple to do business with your brand.

Showcase Customer Creations

User-generated content (UGC) is a popular way for brands to build relationships with customers online, and it’s particularly effective in social media. UGC is digital content created by your customers that is then submitted to your brand, where it can be showcased on social media, your company’s website, or anywhere else on the web where it makes sense to display it.

UGC rewards customers by making them a part of your brand experience. For example, you can hold a photo contest where customers take pictures of themselves, friends, and family using your products or services. Whoever submits the most creative photo wins a prize, and you agree to display the photo on your social media accounts and give the customer a shout-out.

This form of rewarding loyal customers is also good for brands with a large remote workforce. Since building a strong remote team often requires you to recruit talent from across the country or even the world, you will likely have employees spread out and decentralized.

This arrangement can make creating content with customers in person difficult, but UGC means customers from all over can submit content. Your team can then access it from email or remote servers and post it wherever needed.

Stay in Touch Using Email Newsletters

With all of the choices available today regarding online shopping, staying top-of-mind with your customers can be difficult. One way to overcome this challenge is to use email to stay in touch.

An email newsletter can be a powerful tool in the attention economy, and your newsletter can also be a sales tool. You can include interesting stories in a newsletter to your customers, but you can also promote new products and services or share the aforementioned UGC.

In some cases, it’s not that customers aren’t loyal to your brand; instead, they have too much on their plate to keep up. When you send out a newsletter to subscribed customers, keep your brand front and center and gently remind customers to check in with our company.

If you use this approach, include valuable content in your newsletter. Simply filling space for the sake of filling space is a pretty quick way to have customers unsubscribe. Instead, think about offering customers stories to connect your brand with your target audience and what matters to them.

As an aside, note that there are spam regulations regarding the use of email as a business. Sending unsolicited emails can land your company in hot water, and it’s also not a good way to build real relationships. If you’re going to send out newsletters via email, make sure you understand the rules that govern your industry and region. You also need to provide a clear way for subscribers to unsubscribe from each email.

Hold Live Events

Although this approach may be difficult depending on your market and availability, try holding live events to celebrate your customers and let them have fun. These can be fun events that have nothing directly to do with your products and services, but they can also incorporate your products into the event.

For example, if your company sells athletic shoes, hold an event where you assemble an obstacle course that’s easy enough for anyone to get through. Make it silly and fun, but find ways to incorporate your athletic shoes into the event. Your customers can show up, exercise, and make memories with your brand.

When doing this, you can consider keeping the event open to everyone or holding it just for your best customers. Each approach has pros and cons, so take some time to consider them. You don’t want to alienate customers by not inviting them, but simultaneously, you want the event to be a special occasion for loyal customers.

To overcome this challenge, you might consider opening the event to customers who take certain actions, like making a certain number of purchases in a specific amount of time. This way, you leave it up to your customers whether they want to participate actively or not. No one gets left out unless they want to be left out.

Every Business is Different

Although the above suggestions for offering rewards to loyal customers can be applied across various industries, every brand differs. What works for one may not work for another, so you should consider what matters to your customers. When you find a way to match your rewards with those desires, you will earn repeat business for a long time.

Contact E-Marketing Associates to Learn More About Building a Brand That Earns Repeat Customers

E-Marketing Associates specializes in providing personalized small business website design and digital marketing consulting. We help business owners identify ways to reward loyal customers and build strong customer relationships through the power of technology.