The goal of any business is to create unconscious epiphanies of trust in their customers’ minds. This is especially true for online merchants who don’t encounter their customers face-to-face. Customer loyalty is hard to earn, and once earned is not easy to hold on to. Businesses need to steadily work to keep their customers loyal. Business don’t interact with their customers one time only, and each customer session might involve one or several of the many things digital marketers and ecommerce managers use to earn customer loyalty: ads, search results, landing pages, shopping carts, checkout processes, confirmation emails and customer service calls.
“You accomplish growth by creating many more fully engaged customers [those who are] “true believers” in your business.” – 2014 State of the American Consumer, Gallop
Through these points of contact, a company shows who they are, what they sell, and why they’re honest and reliable. Through them, a customer is either encouraged or discouraged from moving through the sales cycle and becoming loyal customers.
This infographic from Cirrus Insight by way of NewsCred, one of my new favorite content marketing blogs, looks at the ever present challenge of engaging customers and earning their loyalty. The interesting thing that emerges from this infographic is the critical issue of customer engagement. It cites a report about Salesforce users from Bluewolf that maintains customer engagement is the number one priority for enterprise level users of Salesforce. It also cites the 2014 State of the American Consumer report from Gallup which offers the compelling idea that, ” … you achieve the highest-quality growth by getting a lot more business out of your existing customers.”
So how do you go about creating engaged customers? One way is to make sure that everyone in your organization understands your unique selling points and what separates you from your competition. I find it noteworthy that most consumers think social media is completely ineffectual at influencing buying decisions, yet gamification tactics have a massive influence on sales, website visits and click throughs to shopping carts.
Do you have any good stories that show how engagement creates loyal customers? Tell us about them in the comment section!
