Loyal customers are one of the most valuable assets your business has. They visit often, love your products or services, and refer their friends to visit your locations. They are your best advocates and have a strong relationship with your business.

Having loyal customers is essential to increasing your ROI and overall growth. So how can you begin building loyalty? In this post, we will explore several steps you can take to grow a loyal customer base and build a successful customer loyalty program.

Focus on your best customers by capturing the right data

While every customer is important, not every customer has the same amount of impact on your business. 20% of a business’s customers drive about 80% of revenue. Your VIP customers are the ones who visit and spend the most. They are also the ones who are the easiest to get to return and change their behavior. These are the customers who should be your most loyal, raving fans.

Engage your VIP customers by rewarding them and making them feel valued. Using a customer engagement platform like Thanx will capture the data you need to easily identify who these customers are, and how you can reach them where they are. For example, you can send personalized rewards to your top spending customers based on spend thresholds, which can increase their average check size by about 17%. You can also see item-level data to gain insight into which items they purchase, how often they visit, their lifetime value, and more.

The more you know about your best customers, the easier it will be to build a relationship with them and increase loyalty.

Send personalized and targeted communications

Once you’ve identified who your best customers are, send them personalized messages and offers based on the data you’ve captured, in order to ensure they are happy and feel valued. The more appreciated a customer feels, the more loyal they can become to your business. It can also encourage them to increase their average check size and visit more often.

You can create these targeted campaigns according to different customer attributes. Here are some examples:

• Milestones: Birthdays, anniversaries, national holidays
• Spending habits: Once a customer spends a certain amount
• Timeshift: Drive traffic to your business during slow hours
• Purchasing behavior: Once you capture item-level data, you can encourage a customer to purchase other items with a higher ticket price, and also use offers to advertise new products, menu items, etc.

With Thanx, you can track each of these campaigns in real-time, monitor how behavior is changing, drive valuable traffic, and measure the results in real revenue generated.

Use mutli-channel communication to reach customers where they are

In this digital age, customers are always online across different platforms, which makes it easier to build loyalty when they aren’t physically at your business. Sending offers, rewards and personalized messages to customers on a channel they use, is a great way to increase loyalty and build strong relationships.

For example, you can send them rewards through mobile and email marketing campaigns. Email marketing can deliver an ROI of $38 for every $1 spent – so seamlessly integrating email with your customer engagement data is a great way to drive revenue.

When you send real-time loyalty and reward updates via app/push notification, SMS, and email, you will be able to communicate with customers where they want to be talked to.

You should also make the purchasing process easy. No more punch cards or QR codes. The more effortless your customer experience is, the more satisfied customers will be.

Respond to feedback in real-time

It’s important to look beyond customer data like visit frequency and average spend so that you can understand how your customers feel about your business based on their experiences. Capturing honest customer feedback and responding in real-time won’t only increase customer loyalty, it will also prevent unhappy customers from posting negative reviews on third-party sites like Yelp.

Responding directly to feedback increases customer likelihood of returning in the next two months by 14%. When you respond and reward customers for their feedback, they are 22% more likely to return in the next two months.

You can identify how your customers feel about your business by collecting a Net Promoter Score. Use your automated customer engagement platform to send a 1-question survey. The question asks customers how likely they are to refer your business to family and friends. The customer responds by selecting a score on a sliding scale, where 1 means the customer is unlikely to recommend your business and 10 means the customers is highly likely to recommend your business.

Customers that give you a 9 or 10 are considered “promoters.” Those who give you a low score would be good customers to reach out to in order to understand why they had a negative experience and how you can make their experience better.

Winback loyal customers

There could be many reasons why customers don’t return to your business – and capturing valuable, behaviorally-driven data can help you understand why they churned and how to win them back. One of the best ways to combat customer churn is through a Winback campaign, which can deliver 6x ROI for today’s businesses.

A winback campaign is an automated method to re-engage churning customers. Winback campaigns use real consumer data to identify behavior patterns and offer value to customers who stopped visiting… because it’s 50% easier to sell to existing customers and returning customers spend 67% more than new ones, it’s crucial to invest in customer retention to strengthen ROI.

What does a Winback campaign look like with Thanx?

• Thanx uses data-driven AI to track customer visit frequency across multiple business locations. The platform discovers any previously loyal customers who are currently churning and have not made a purchase in a specified amount of time.

• Thanx automatically sends a personalized offer directly to the churning customer’s app or email. The platform knows which items this particular consumer used to purchase and uses this information to craft a targeted, special offer made just for each unique customer.

Winback is proven to drive 49% of churning customers back into the store, using data to increase ROI and impact your overall business’s growth and customer loyalty program.

Wrap up

In this post, we shared five essentials to building a loyal customer base. Having a customer engagement platform in place that enables you to know who your customers are, capture important customer data and send personalized campaigns is crucial to developing a successful loyalty program. The more your customers feel appreciated and heard, the more loyal they will be to your business, which will dramatically impact your ROI.