8 Tactics to Earn Your Customers’ Trust and Improve Brand Loyalty

Building Relationships / July 15, 2019 / Admin

Why is loyalty important? Loyal customers are the lifeblood of long term success for brands. They are less inclined to switch, less price sensitive and more likely to recommend your brand to others.

From a psychological perspective, loyalty to a person, cause or brand makes people feel good. By taking steps to establish trustworthiness and cultivate brand loyalty, you can create a positive feedback loop that benefits all concerned. 

8 Tactics to Earn Your Customers' Trust and Improve Brand Loyalty

Quality Control

Quality is foundational to establishing trust in your brand’s products or services. People will pay more for reliable quality, and they will spread the word to others. Set out to exceed consumer expectations and establish metrics for measuring service quality. Objective service metrics and subjective customer ratings are some of the ways in which you can track service quality. Other ways to gain insight into service quality include monitoring social media feedback. Once you have established measurable quality standards for your brand, you can use them as a benchmark for maintaining quality over time.

Excellent Customer Service

Great customer service is crucial to building trust and brand loyalty. Customers want to feel heard, especially when they have a complaint. Respond promptly and engage in Active Listening. This provides you with the opportunity to turn a potentially negative situation into a positive. Using customer services software packages like Zendesk, Freshdesk and LiveAgent that integrate with social media and other contact channels can help ensure that no query slips through the net. They also feature powerful tracking tools so that you can monitor key metrics like ticket volume and response times.

Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate Social Responsibility addresses the social, economic and environmental impacts of a company. CSR is often thought of as the domain of large corporations. But, even small companies can enact CSR by donating products or services to people or causes that need them and supporting charities. CSR can also include setting environmental sustainability goals and engaging in community-focused initiatives. The shipping container company SEA Containers is a great example of engaging in CSR. They undertake community-focused initiatives by donating containers to local community groups. CSR helps to humanise your brand so that customers will associate it with socially conscious endeavours.

Personalize Your Marketing

Combine smart data collection and analysis with advertising technology. By doing this, you can target specific individuals or customer groups with tailored marketing content. Email campaigns and product recommendations are a great way to do this. Add specificity to your marketing by targeting according to demographic, psychographic, transactional or behavioural data. Meanwhile, location-based advertising on platforms like Facebook is ideal for small businesses who wish to target their marketing to the local community.

Daylite Tip: You can segment your Contacts in Daylite by location, interest using Keywords, and all sorts of other ways. Check out this Daylite tutorial on how to segment your contact list. Once you have segmented your contact list, you can send individual or bulk email campaigns. Check out this Daylite tutorial on sending email campaigns. 

Stay On Top Of Your Operations

You can’t provide a great service to your customers unless you stay on top of daily operations. Create a checklist of essential daily operations, tailored to the needs of your business. Make sure it is clear who is responsible for which tasks, and how that responsibility is delegated if somebody is absent. Using software to automate key processes can eliminate human error and boost efficiency while reducing costs. But keep in mind that when it comes to dealing with customers, nothing can replace the personal touch. 

Daylite Tip: You can create checklists in Daylite Activity Sets or create them within a Project Pipeline to streamline your processes. These can be applied to a Project, Opportunity, or Person. To learn how, check out this Daylite tutorial on how to create a checklist. You can also delegate these tasks to other team members in Daylite. Check out this Daylite tutorial how to delegate tasks.

Follow Up Regularly

Keeping in touch helps to build business relationships that last. Don’t wait for your customers and clients to contact you: be proactive instead of reactive. Use follow-up calls to scope out what customers’ upcoming needs might be before they even ask. You can use a CRM like Daylite, for example,  to keep track of contacts and stay on top of follow-ups. So, that when you say you will keep in touch, customers know they can count on your word.

Daylite Tip: To make sure you’re following up regularly, check out this Daylite tutorial with best practices for staying on top of follow-ups.

Avoid Spamming

While you want to stay in touch and fresh in customers’ minds, overdoing contact can be deleterious to the perception of your brand. And if your email falls foul of spam filters, it likely won’t reach the eyes of your customers at all. Several factors can help your emails to evade spam filters. These include having recognisable from and reply-to email addresses and only emailing people who have opted in. You can even use personalised marketing to target specific customer personas. Spam filters are sensitive to sales terminology, so try to minimise your use of words like ‘deal’ and ‘buy’ for optimum success.

Cultivate Quality Engagement

Social media is a fantastic tool for engaging with your customer base in new and innovative ways. Small business social media strategies include user-generated content, contemporary meme humour and Facebook Messenger chatbots. Diversify your reach by creating interesting, relevant content for different platforms- from Instagram to YouTube. In doing this, you establish a personable, responsive brand and unique, tailored content.  This benefits your brand by cultivating positive regard, trust and loyalty within your customer.

About the author:

Cloe Matheson is a freelance writer from the South Island city of Dunedin, New Zealand. When she’s not crafting articles for businesses such as Keith Andrews, she enjoys travelling. To get to know more about her, visit her blog.

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