How to Drive Business Growth Without a Loyalty Program

About half of the dealerships today offer some form of loyalty program. Many originate with the OEM like Ford or GM but what if your OEM does not offer such a program? Should you Opt in for a third party solution? Lets look at what you can do on your own with the absense of one.

1. Recognize your customer. All customers want to be individually valued and appreciated by businesses. Hence, think of different ways your brand can add value across their entire customer journey. This can be as simple as demonstrating or explaining your offerings to your customers, providing tips and advice or be responsive in your support so that you can empathize with them every possible way you can.

2. Use data for personalization. Data is vital for any business. Therefore once you fine tune your CRM the more time a customer shops with you, the more information you will be able to collect in the CRM database that can help you to know your customers better.

Data collected and analyzed by your business growth technology and tools can even enable your brand to anticipate your customer’s future needs and thereafter put them with the right kind of engagements on a path to re-purchase from your company.

3. Focus on the customer experience. In this present age of rapid digitalization and ever-growing social media platforms customers (who are most time-poor) expect made-to-measure experiences that they can avail on the go.

Therefore, Customer Experience (CX) is presently considered as the new battlefield where scores are gained or lost in the present marketplace.

This is because, nowadays customers have endless choices and so if the customers receive poor experience, it is easy for them to switch brands and also tell others about it.

Hence it is necessary that in this present market scenario brands must deliver outstanding and world-class CX so that customers do not find a reason to look elsewhere.

4. Have a planned communications strategy in place. Just because you have your customer’s phone numbers and emails it does not necessarily mean that you can misuse and abuse it by sending irrelevant messages, as and when you feel like to your customers.

Always remember that your customers are people and just not numbers on your mailing list stored in your CRM database.

This is because, you must always remain fearful of the dreaded ‘Unsubscribe’ button that can make you lose your customers forever, as nowadays most customers do not provide any brand a second chance for reestablishing their relationships.

Therefore, only contact your customers when you really have something important to say, which will no doubt boost the success rates of your engagements.

5. Consider the customer lifetime value. As a growing business, you always need to look just beyond today’s sale and think in terms of the long-term value of the customers.
According to researches done, it has been found that it costs approximately 10 times more to acquire new customers than it does to retain the old ones.

Therefore, keeping this stat in mind, determine the value of your existing customers and invest in ways to keep them happy over time.

As a suggestion, we advise that you must allocate at least 10 percent of your annual marketing budgets to activities that can keep your existing customers happy which will drive them back to buy more from your company.

6. Give them a reason to come back for more. There are several brands that offer incentives to drive back customers which according to researchers can increases sales by even 500 percent.

Hence think of a valid and beneficial reason (like providing aid after a natural calamity or help a child in need) for the customers to return to your store.

Therefore, it can be said nurturing customer loyalty comes down to having a strong relationship with your customers by anticipating their wants, desires, and needs and thereafter keeping communications with them by capitalizing on the data that you already have in your CRM database of your customers in a timely and relevant manner.

For this, you can use CLM CRM software for recognizing where your consumers are in the Customer Lifecycle and continue the conversation with each of them, but never have the same conversation with all of them since personalization is the key for providing your customers the true world-class experience and keep them loyal without investing in a loyalty program for your brand.

Thanks to Patricia Jones at ConvergeHub for portions of this fine article. Reprinted in part from Customer Think.