It’s not always enough to create the best products or offer the best deals. If you want your customers to stay loyal to you, you need to build a personal connection with them. The online world is competitive, but connecting with your customers on a personal level can increase the chance of them spending money with your business and coming back for more.
In this article, we’re going to outline how you can connect with your customers on a personal level to help increase their loyalty. Let’s dive in!
Request, respond to, and display your customers’ feedback
Requesting feedback from your customers will show that you care about their opinions and experiences with your brand! Additionally, once you get a review, you should respond to them and thank the sender for their comments — this will make them feel valued and like you’re taking their thoughts seriously.
Then, display your customer reviews and testimonials on your website. 72% of customers won’t take any buying actions before reading reviews (Testimonial Engine). So, by putting your reviews in a place where customers can easily learn about the great work you do, you can push them towards a sale.
A Gift Personalized, an online custom gift retailer, uses short and sweet reviews on their website to give details that prospective buyers will be interested in. This is particularly helpful because they are selling customized products, so people will be very interested to know things like how long it takes to receive their products or if there are ever any mistakes made.
If you have a product-based company, consider taking a leaf out of this company’s book. Ask your customers to leave a star rating out of five and a couple of lines about how your service was. Combined with your product descriptions, this will provide all of the information prospective customers need to make an informed decision.
On the other hand, Hunter Galloway, a mortgage broker in Brisbane, uses longer and more detailed reviews to build trust with their customers.
Buying a home can be a long, difficult, and stressful process. So, when looking for a broker, prospective buyers will want to know that they’ll be working with someone who consistently gets great results. These longer reviews are great for providing more context about clients’ situations, details about the process they went through, and in-depth information about the experience people had with this company. If you have a service-based business, detailed reviews like this are likely to be the most effective at helping you to connect with your ideal customers.
Engage with your customers on social media
It’s 2021, and just about everyone uses social media. Keep your business at the forefront of your ideal customers’ minds by staying active on social media and engaging with them regularly. This can attract their attention and build a better connection with them.
To start, think about what platforms you want to use to promote your business; you don’t have to use all of them, and different platforms have different audience bases. Facebook is a great baseline, for instance, as it has the largest number of users. Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest are great if your business can produce a lot of visual content, like if you have a restaurant or hair salon. If you market to other professionals and businesses, LinkedIn should be your platform of choice.
Regardless of what you use, there are social media analytics tools that can help to ensure you’re consistently posting at the right times to get the best engagement. Plus, they will allow you to bulk schedule posts on a range of different platforms so you can plan ahead.
Create content that shows you understand your customers
If you can show that you understand your target customers, they’ll feel more connected to your business. One of the best ways to show that you understand them is by creating content that addresses their common questions and pain points. That means it’s time to do a bit of keyword research!
Keyword research is the process of finding the words and phrases that your customers are typing into search engines. Free tools like Google Keyword Planner can give you a good place to work from. Start by coming up with a list of terms and phrases related to your business and plug them into Keyword Planner. Google will then give you a list of keywords that people are searching for based on how competitive they are to rank for and how many searches they receive, on average, per month. Now, you have a list of topics that people are searching for! This is a great way to come up with content ideas that address their questions and pain points.
Take a look at how RMIT Online, an online university, addresses customer questions in its content. For example, they have an article that outlines the major differences between business analytics and data science.
They cover expected salaries, career progression opportunities, key roles, and more. Because RMIT Online is a university that provides a lot of courses in the business and marketing fields, their target audience is made up of prospective students thinking about going down these paths.
So, content like this, which can help them make a decision about what type of career they want to pursue, helps RMIT Online build a connection with their potential students.
Could you come up with some content ideas that would help your ideal customers to make an important decision?
On the other hand, FreshBooks is able to build a connection with their audience using a how-to guide about writing invoice letters. They cover everything someone researching this topic would need to know, including templates, how to format the body of the letter, and more.
FreshBooks’ audience is largely full of freelancers and small business owners doing their own accounting. So, this type of content shows that they understand what struggles their customers are facing and know how to fix them, further building that connection. When creating your own content, how-to guides on topics related to your industry can help you connect with your audience if you’re able to help them solve a problem they’ve been struggling with.
Show customers behind the scenes of your business
If you let customers see behind the scenes of your business, they’ll feel a stronger connection with it and will be more likely to trust you. There are a lot of unique and fun ways to do this! You could show your customers detailed pictures or videos of how your products are made, host a live stream where you show a day in the office, or interview different employees about their roles and responsibilities.
For instance, General Electric shows some fascinating behind-the-scenes work through a factory tour. One particular video shows how GE manufactures jet engines, featuring interviews with different workers and impressive videography of the enormous jet engine materials.
This type of content humanizes the (admittedly arduous) process that GE goes through on a regular basis to create these products. By showing their projects and the team that builds them, GE connects with their customers on a deeper level.
On a different note, Sweet Cheeks Baking, a bakery based out of San Diego, introduces its customers to their team with photos of them hard at work. This behind-the-scenes content shows just how intricate and intense their baking process can be! This can give web visitors a new sense of appreciation not only for the process of cake baking and decorating, but for the team that makes the entire operation happen. Plus, looking at people decorating their cakes is just fun! All of this can help the company to build a strong connection with its ideal customers.
Use personalized marketing techniques where possible
If you’re going to stand out among your competitors, one of the best ways to grab your customers’ attention is through personalized marketing techniques. This can help them feel a stronger connection to your business!
Think about how you can incorporate a customer’s name, preferences, buying habits, and more into your marketing. When you have your own eCommerce website, you’ll have a huge amount of data at your fingertips that you can use to tailor your content and marketing.
TED Conferences, the creators of TED Talks, do this well in the way they encourage people to sign up for their email newsletters. Instead of receiving a constant stream of emails from TED, users can pick and choose which types of topics they are interested in and want to receive information on. This helps ensure that customers will actually be glad to receive their emails and should lead to a better open rate.
BirchBox, a monthly beauty subscription service, also personalizes its content well. Take a look at this email, for instance. By digging into their customers’ purchase history, they are able to offer personalized offers that BirchBox thinks they are most likely to use. This is a great way to get the customer to come back for another purchase. Additionally, offering discounts on products they already like is a surefire way to help build customer loyalty.
Summary
Earning your customers’ loyalty and connecting with them on a personal level is vital to running a modern business. Fortunately, you have a lot of tools at your disposal to help you get started. Creating great content, tapping into your customers’ needs, and personalizing your marketing are all great ways to begin. Get to creating!
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