Want Loyal Customers? Humanize Your Digital Marketing Programs

One of the most significant business metrics you can track is customer loyalty. Digital marketing loyalty programs are a necessary activity to take the pulse of your brand and your customers. Forecasting your future growth is also easier when you know how loyal your customers are.

Building brand loyalty through your digital marketing programs has huge impact on your bottom line, but to ensure success it’s important to focus on personalization. To start building loyalty, let’s look at the top tips to use in your digital programs.

Loyalty Requires a Human Touch

Brands that focus on humanizing their communications will see stronger returns when building customer loyalty.

One easy way to inject some personality into your communications is to use a human voice to alter your social media interactions and any videos you create. Allow your social channels to engage with a persona as opposed to just a brand. This means using personal pronouns, adding in a touch of humor, and avoiding the third person. It is critical to document this persona so that your brand stays consistent across all channels.

For your sales team and customer service representatives, allow them to sign their names at the end of notes, tweets, posts and more. Try having your marketing campaigns come from an account representative rather than the generic marketing department. Attaching a persona to your communications is an instant reminder that there are people working at your company to keep the customer happy, and that personal touch is key to loyalty.

 

Where should your brand interject? Read this blog to learn how to mine digital and social conversations. Know what’s really happening and where to focus your communications.

Advanced marketing organizations are using content as an opportunity to personalize the customer experience. Personalized communications yield higher retention rates and prevent customer churn. Using customer data to predict which offer or message to send your existing customer segments is a surefire way to keep customers engaged. Your existing customers should not be getting the same offers as your prospects. You will realize a significant increase in customer retention if you set up different programs informed by customer data with the objective of driving loyalty.

Loyalty Tips: Content Marketing Programs for Loyalty

Loyal customers consistently use your products or services. You can increase their loyalty by providing tips and tricks that improve the functionality of what you offer.

Tweak your content strategy so that you’re constantly creating and distributing special educational content for your existing customer base. Provide your repeat customers with education, tips and information that relate specifically to them. This personalization ensures subscription renewals, repeat purchases and more. Consider building a customer success team dedicated to driving loyalty, cross-sell and upsell.

After providing your central customers with tips, start to work on education programs for new customers acquisition. The goal in this education is to make it easier to understand your offerings and how people benefit from using your product or services. Have your customer success team manage customer testimonials and case studies to build a library of triumphs and stories for your sales team to leverage. Be sure to map your content to actionable personas and buyer journey stage. The best way to get started with matching your content is to look to your existing customer base to understand their path to purchase. Again, the demand generation team should work closely with the customer success team to ensure alignment and happy customers!

When building brand loyalty, keep your content mix exciting. Repurpose written content to easily turn around videos, guides, articles and infographics so you reach a diverse customer set with content in the format they want to consume.

What is content personalization? Let alone knowing what it is, 60% of marketers report it’s a challenge to execute. Read what it is and how to execute >

Celebrate Customers

Do your customers have success stories related to your brand? How often do you share their story with the world? Celebrating your customers can be a significant digital marketing loyalty tool, especially when you downplay your role in the initial announcement. Have a strategy for creating customer success stories. Don’t limit this to wins that you are involved in. If a client shares great news online, especially on social media, provide shares and retweets to build rapport.

Ensure Success

Building brand loyalty involves taking care of your customers. For example, if a new customer signs up for a service or product you offer, create information materials to assist them in getting comfortable with your brand. Digital marketing is the lifeblood of customer loyalty. These tips can help you build a smarter, stronger program and turn new customers into customers for life.

By 2020, >80 percent of the buying process will occur online without any direct human-to-human interaction. Download the Ultimate Guide to the New Buyer’s Journey for step by step strategies on how best-in-class organizations approach this challenge: