A brand that is directed toward customer loyalty is a brand that will continue to thrive. For instance, approximately 92% of Apple customers remain loyal to the brand. This means these customers will continue buying Apple products in the future, too, no matter the deal.
Acquiring new customers costs 5 times more than retaining your existing customers. On the other hand, existing customers tend to spend 31% more than new customers and have a 50% probability of trying a new product(s) from your store.
As per a report, using WhatsApp Business can help businesses boost their conversion rates by 20% and sales by 27%. Suffice to say, fostering customer loyalty via WhatsApp marketing is the new norm for boosting customer retention rates.
What is Customer Loyalty?
Customer loyalty marketing dates back to 1793. By definition, customer loyalty refers to a customer’s willingness and ability to engage in repeat purchases from a specific brand, primarily due to the wonderful experiences they’ve had with that particular brand.
Customer loyalty is vital to establishing and developing a sustainable and thriving business. Loyal customers are so fully committed to a particular brand that they can buy its products despite the price they are offering, even if and when the market has more inexpensive alternatives.
Loyal customers ultimately become brand advocates who endorse your products and influence their family and friends to buy from your store. In order to drive customer loyalty, your brand should create a meaningful and delightful customer experience that automatically influences them to buy again. Here are the most essential factors of loyal customers:
● Aren’t interested in or appealed by alternative brands
● Engage in repeat purchases
● Advocate for your brand to their family and peers
● Give you feedback on how to improve your brand
● Interact with you on multiple channels
Types of Customer Loyalty
While the idea of customer loyalty is very much the same, brands will often observe different levels of customer loyalty amongst their customers. This is because customers have different reasons why they choose to remain loyal to a specific brand. Having said that, here are five different types of customer loyalty:
1. Truly Loyal Customers
A truly loyal customer consists of a shopper who will serve as an advocate for your brand and never leave you for your rivals. They enjoy and love using your products and are fully committed to making repeat purchases without hesitation.
They often promote your brand, spread good word of mouth regarding their shopping experience with you, and influence other people in their circle, including their friends and family members, into buying products from your brand. Finally, these shoppers offer valuable feedback, interact, and repeatedly shop from your brand.
2. Satisfied Customers
These customers genuinely enjoy and like using your products/services and purchase products from your brand regularly. However, despite being happy and satisfied with your brand, these customers can be convinced to switch to the next best alternative whenever they come across enticing discounts, better deals, or if the other brand provides them a good experience overall.
3. Convenience Loyalty Customers
These customers often shop from a given brand primarily due to its convenience. The convenience factor can include ease of purchase, speedy delivery, location, preferred collection, etc. This convenience factor binds them to a specific brand and makes them stick around for a while. In fact, 97% of consumers often back out of a purchase solely due to inconvenience.
In another report, it was discovered that two-thirds of customers currently pay for a speedy delivery service like Shipt or Amazon Prime to get their products as soon as possible. In addition, 52% of shoppers report that half (sometimes even more) of their purchases are impacted mainly by convenience.
4. Loyalty Program Customers
Shoppers within this category are loyal only to the program, not the brand. They will shop from your brand only to avail the best discounts, deals, or freebies. As a result, their loyalty to your brand will only be limited until your brand offers benefits and discounts, so they can avail the most of your brand.
According to research, customers who sign up for loyalty programs are 47% more likely to purchase from the same brand again. Additionally, 80% of your business can be generated from 20% of your customers.
5. Low-pricing Lovers
Finally, a category is assigned for shoppers who shop from a specific brand because they offer the best deals or the lowest prices as opposed to their rivals. These people will shop as long as your brand provides them the best deals and rewards.
How to Boost Customer Loyalty Using Whatsapp
Establishing customer loyalty via messaging applications has become essential to present-day business operations. According to a study by Avochato of 1,000 US consumers, 69% prefer to interact with a brand via messages instead of calling them.
In addition, 72% of respondents are likely to buy from brands that communicate via chat. While WhatsApp is globally renowned as the go-to personal messaging app, over the years, it has proven to be a powerful and valuable tool for businesses.
Moreover, with more than, it has given businesses an excellent opportunity to connect with their target audience.
It has a significantly high engagement rate and open rate of about 98%, making it one of the most effective marketing channels for businesses. In addition, WhatsApp’s analytic feature can offer useful metrics for enhancing effectiveness.
WhatsApp Business – the business version of the app – offers a massive opportunity for businesses to get in touch with their target audience. This digital messaging medium has an engagement rate that is 17 times higher than other channels, making it an incredibly effective way to reach and engage your customers.
Using WhatsApp, you can segment your customers and send them messages that are targeted specifically for them with personalized offers that best match their interests. This enables them to feel heard, seen, appreciated, and valued. Ultimately, this boosts brand loyalty and encourages customers to remain loyal to your brand, no matter what.
Moreover, the WhatsApp Business API makes it more straightforward than ever for businesses to establish a one-on-one relationship with their valuable customers and maintain loyalty. Having said that, here are a couple ways to increase customer loyalty with WhatsApp.
1. Personalized Offers
A newly published report revealed that about 55% of people tend to connect more effectively with brands that communicate through messenger/chat applications. Since all communication mediums are saturated, WhatsApp enables brands to get in touch with customers on the go.
There comes a certain phase in the customer journey where they tend to become loyal to your brand, especially when you make them feel as if their needs and wants are understood. This is where personalized offers come into play.
A report also discovered that users tend to read messages on WhatsApp 99% of the time. As a result, brands must focus on creating personalized and relevant interactions if they desire to establish meaningful and long-lasting relationships.
With WhatsApp, you can simply categorize your customers and forward them targeted messages with exclusive offers tailored precisely to their needs and interests.
Just like we far out of our comfort zones to get a customized or bespoke gift for our loved ones, brands can also tailor a unique experience that establishes relationships and cultivates a sense of customer loyalty.
2. Special Events & Promotions
Another excellent way brands can use WhatsApp to improve customer loyalty is by sending special promotional messages and event invites to their customers. This enables them to feel they belong to an exclusive group, ultimately boosting your chances of gaining their loyalty.
For instance, you can send VIP access to special events, set up pre-launch offers, or entice them by introducing exclusive coupons and discounts. Unlike other marketing channels, businesses can quickly implement all these strategies using WhatsApp and effectively boost customer loyalty.
3. Abandoned Alerts/ New Product Alerts
To things up a notch, your brand can use WhatsApp to send abandoned alerts as a reminder to those who’ve placed items in their digital shopping cart but have yet to finalize the purchase. This is an incredibly useful approach to keep your customers engaged with your products and brand and recover lost sales.
Automated browser abandoned alerts, or cart messages can be highly effective in establishing good relationships with your existing and potential customers. For instance, in many cases, customers tend to browse throughout the browser before they eventually drop off.
Based on their browsing history, you can simply send them an abandoned cart alert to compel them to revisit your website and finalize their purchase. In this case, the customer will go back to your website, check out the products, select the items and add them to the shopping cart, fill in the contact, delivery, and payment details, and complete the purchase.
Sending alerts to customers based on prior purchases or their recent search history helps them better associate with your brand since they know you’re tracking their behavior and purchase patterns. This, in turn, helps to establish a sense of trust and foster customer loyalty in the long run.
Similar to abandoned alerts, brands can also use WhatsApp to send new product alerts to their customers, as it is their nature to always look out for new, engaging, and unique products. By sending them new product alerts on WhatsApp, you can update your customers with the latest product offerings, ultimately improving customer loyalty.
4. Ease of Transactions
Customers love convenience and simplicity as they browse, shop, and pay for the items. This ongoing flow is essential for customers with a relatively short attention span. Luckily businesses can now use WhatsApp to ease the purchase process for their customers.
This can play a significant role in establishing customer loyalty because as long as your customers know the checkout process is easy, smooth, and hassle-free, they will likely purchase from you again.
For example, your customer chose two clothing items from the product catalog on your WhatsApp channel. Customers find it simpler to complete transactions while they’re on the move.
Therefore, instead of redirecting your customers to your site or application, you can share a digital payment link through WhatsApp, enabling them to initiate their purchases via the chat interface.
When customers are offered this kind of convenience and ease with a specific brand, you can rest assured they will trust you and stick around for long.
In addition, you can conversationally engage and guide your customers on the go and use post-transaction alerts to update them about their purchases. Besides improving customer loyalty, it will also help your brand retain your customers in the long run.
5. Membership Scheme
A rewards program is a great way to speed up the loyalty life cycle of your customers. Moreover, you can conduct a rewards program using WhatsApp. The primary objective is to develop a strategy that can continuously educate your customers regarding the rewards they can earn, so they can ultimately be motivated to earn them.
Still, a brand should focus on providing the best value to its best customers in order to maximize profitability and loyalty. For this, it’s essential to segment and retarget your customers based on their CLV (customer lifetime value).
The best way to kickstart your WhatsApp loyalty program is to send loyalty alerts to your customers. For instance, let’s suppose a customer has to spend a certain amount of money to be eligible for your membership program.
By setting up a membership scheme, you can offer your loyal customers exclusive rewards, such as lower prices, early access to new products, free deliveries, accruing loyalty points for discounts, special events, etc.
You can start by sending alerts to your customers that inform them how close they are to achieving their membership goal. Zomato is a perfect example of membership rewards, having launched Zomato Pro.
This membership rewards program offers exclusive benefits and bonuses to its customers, such as 40% off on fine dining, 30% additional discounts on food deliveries, and swift delivery services. The membership scheme goes hand-in-hand with promotions and special events.
6. Customer Support and Feedback
Customer feedback is imperative for any business because it enables brands to gauge customers’ satisfaction with their product offerings and/or services. The only way you scale your business is by continuously gathering feedback and utilizing it to implement the necessary changes.
Brands can conduct surveys, gather feedback, and direct customer service on WhatsApp to improve customer experience. This typically includes everything from product design to the purchase process to customer service. For example, once the customer receives the item they bought, you can alert them with an automated message to provide their valuable feedback on it.
In case of any grievance, it can also be quickly resolved on the go. The natural language processing (NLP) powered chatbot can take note of your customers’ queries and solve them in real time. For instance, if customers demand an update regarding their delivery, the bot can promptly provide an update against their order number.
Merely giving your customers the option to give their feedback can eventually make them feel special and valued. Furthermore, brands that take customer feedback very seriously and focus on offering superior customer service can work on enhancing their customers’ overall experience.
The more delighted your customers are with your brand, i.e., from the start to the final stage of receiving the product, the more likely they will shop from your brand again.
SocialEpoch Social Selling Solutions
Indeed, the purchase process has drastically changed over the years, forcing sales teams to try novel strategies to establish relationships. Social selling has proved to be one of the most effective ways in achieving this.
Social selling is all about discovering and engaging with customers and prospects online. Every time you log in to a social media channel to look for new prospects, interact with them, and add value by responding to their queries, sharing relatable content, etc., you are social selling.
Even though we’ve listed the most effective ways businesses can improve customer loyalty using WhatsApp, most modern-day B2B businesses find trouble doing so because of specific problems that act as a hurdle in their way. Some of these current problems include:
● Fragmented and scattered customer information
● Loss of digital assets due to account suspension
● High advertising costs
● Low retention/conversion/repurchase rates
● Inability to accurately reach a massive number of users on social media
We at SocialEpoch offer a vast range of products and social selling solutions for businesses with sales teams and long customer journeys, such as intellectual property, B2B trade, consulting, insurance, logistics, legal, banking, finance, automotive, taxation, real estate, education, SaaS, etc.
Our target audience primarily consists of retailers, casino/call center/cryptocurrency/consultant/lottery/real estate, eCommerce businesses, and several B2B businesses.
Moving further, we are SocialEpoch believe three most important things can help shape your business:
Customer Data Platform
● A centralized customer database containing data on all touchpoints and interactions with your product/service
● In-depth insights into business opportunities via precise customer persona
SCRM
● Store customer and prospect contact information in one central location
● Socialize, centralize, and digitize the sales process
Marketing Automation
● Personalized marketing campaigns productively based on segmented database
At SocialEpoch, we take great pride in two of our most popular products, namely WhatsApp SCRM and SocialEpoch Facebook RPA (Robotic Process Automation) Tool/Marketing Automation Tool, which can help your business with precisely these three things.
Let’s take a closer look at the two key social selling solutions we offer and how you can use them to scale your business.
1. Social Epoch Facebook RPA Tool/Marketing Automation Tool
SocialEpoch Facebook RPA Tool/Marketing Automation Tool is an excellent product that can help you with branding, generating leads, getting traffic on your Facebook channel, and much more.
● Proactive Social Engagement
Our SocialEpoch Facebook Marketing Tool can boost team productivity by combining Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
● Sales Intelligence
For sales intelligence, you can use our SocialEpoch Facebook Marketing Tool for an array of things, such as list building, data scraping, and AI social prospecting.
2. SocialEpoch WhatsApp SCRM (the mobile version for Android is WaChat)
SocialEpoch WhatsApp SCRM is one of the products we take great pride in. This product will help you with everything from pipeline management to lead management to task management.
Moreover, it can help your sales teams in improving their productivity, drive the speed to lead, boost your lead coverage, understand your existing customers and prospects in a better way, and ultimately score more deals.
● Customer Retention
In order to effectively retain your customers, your business can significantly benefit from our star-selling SocialEpoch WhatsApp SCRM. Using this product, you can increase your repurchase rates, establish customer loyalty, and maintain lasting relationships with your valuable customers.
● Technology-led and Community-led Sales
SocialEpoch WhatsApp CRM effectively helps close deals and preserve your valuable digital assets, outbound messaging, researching and segmenting leads, and managing prospective leads and existing customers.
Wrapping Up
Undoubtedly, customer loyalty is crucial if you want your brand to flourish and sustain in the long run. Brands that are successful devote their efforts and time to better understanding their customers and creating one-of-a-kind experiences and products that suit their needs.
Using the most innovative private social marketing technologies, we at SocialEpoch aspire to provide our clients with all-encompassing lead-generation approaches. If you believe in the same vision, we are eager to collaborate and achieve a win-win solution.
