What makes a great customer relationship strategy? Speaking customers’ love language. Learning your customer’s love language is paramount in enhancing your customer relationship strategy so you can increase your customer retention rates.
Wondering how love languages can be applied to customers? Well, great question! A wonderful example would be to provide amazing experiences to customers. In fact, 3 in 4 customers spend more with businesses that provide a good customer experience? Yes, that’s right! This is one of the ways love languages can be applied to customer relationships. Want to know how to apply the 5 love languages to foster customer love? Keep reading.
This article will dive into:
What is a customer relationship?
That person that purchased from you, who just followed your business page, and reacts to your social media post, that’s your customer! These simple acts of interacting with your brand can be considered a customer relationship. Brands can build and foster customer relationships with the useful method of customer relations.
Importance of a customer relationship strategy
Customer relationships are important as they are the foundation of your business and contribute to your growth. So, let’s explore importance of having a customer relationship strategy!
Increased customer retention
Acquiring customers can be difficult and costly. By focusing on building meaningful relationships, customers will see your efforts and choose to stay with your brand, thus, increasing your customer retention rates.
Increased customer loyalty
When you foster trust with your customers and maintain positive customer relations, it builds loyalty. A loyal customer will not easily be swayed by your competition so you can be sure that they will keep choosing your brand!
Increased customer satisfaction
Strong customer relations lead to higher customer satisfaction. Investing in positive customer relations and implementing customer relationship strategies pays off by creating happy and loyal customers. Understanding your customers and learning how to please them leads to a satisfied customer.
Increased customer feedback
Customers will be more than willing to share their thoughts and feedback with you when you develop a relationship with them. This allows you to create good customer experiences, thus, increasing customer loyalty, satisfaction, and retention.
Greater customer lifetime value
Customers drive revenue so you should put in effort to keep them. By using customer relationship strategies, you can increase your customer lifetime value. When customer keep spending with you your profits will increase too!
The 5 love languages and how it can improve customer relationships
Want to strengthen your customer relationships and create loyal and satisfied customers? Add and apply these 5 love languages to your customer relationship strategy.
Let’s take a walk through each of the love languages and how they can be used as tactic to foster and build a solid connection with your customers.
1. Receiving Gifts
Show your customers that you value them by rewarding them with gifts! Let customers know they are appreciated by incentivizing them with rewards such as discounts. In fact, rewarding customers strengthens customer loyalty by showing them they matter while also encouraging repeat purchases.
For their loyalty and dedication to your brand, here are some ways you can show appreciation:
- Reward them with product discounts, free trial, or a free sample.
- Offer them early access to special events, upcoming sales, and new product launches.
- Create wonderful experiences and improve your customer experiences as they can also be gifts.
- Start a loyalty program that offers exclusive offers and benefits to recognize their loyalty for their repeat business with you.
These customer relationship strategies that may seem like small gestures can leave a big impact on customer loyalty so try it out!
2. Quality time
Quality time is important to help grow and foster relationships. For this reason, you should create opportunities for your customers to engage with you. There are many ways to do so, below are few examples of how you can foster customer interactions.
What you can do to create quality time with your customers is:
- Engage with your audience through content and social media platforms by replying to comments or starting a topic on your posts.
- Create fun interactions by using gamification to entertain and connect with customers.
- Use Interactive Content such as Interactive Quizzes, Marketing Games, Social Interactive Content to foster two-way communication and encourage them to actively engage with your content and essentially you.
Use these customer engagement strategies to build genuine engagement with your customers.
RELATED: What Is Interactive Content? The Best Guide to Start!
3. Words of affirmation
Hearing words of encouragement can make anyone feel seen and recognized, it can also boost the relationship. Sometimes people need to be reminded that they are loved and so do your customers! They don’t want to be seen as a number or profits but as human beings. Using positive reinforcement can make your customers feel appreciated.
Here’s how you can apply this love language to your customers:
- Wish customers on their special day such as their birthday. Send them a birthday wish together with a special discount.
- Write and include handwritten notes in your packages that you ship out to customers.
- Send personalized messages to customers on email. Don’t address your messages generally, include personalization when you can and address them with their names and details.
Acknowledge and appreciate your customers with these small and thoughtful gestures that will go a long way in the relationship.
4. Physical Touch
Connecting with your customers physically is important. In fact, customers don’t buy products, they buy experiences. Focusing on appealing to their sensory inputs through your marketing can help them develop an emotional connection to your brand. Moreover, creating omnichannel experiences allows your customers to reach you through more than one channel, making your product or services accessible.
Some ways you can engage your customer physically are:
- Create physical touch points such as using print media, hosting events, creating in-store experiences and more! Packaging and branded merchandises are also considered physical touch points. So, try them out!
- Run a brand activation campaign that allows customers to emotionally and physically connect with you.
- Make use of technology such as AR or VR to create interactive shopping experiences.
Allow customers physically connect with you by trying out these customer relationship strategy examples.
5. Acts of service
Customer service is crucial in customer retention. It should be the heart of your customer relationship strategy. Businesses should go the extra mile in providing outstanding support and service to their customers by focusing on their pain points, resolving it, and meeting their needs.
Consider these methods to provide excellent service to customers:
- Send reminders to customers about their subscription renewal when it is about to end.
- Reach out to customers who show decreased usage of your product or platform to help them overcome roadblocks.
- Collect customer feedback by listening to their pain points and identifying their needs so you can improve your customer experience and product.
- Deliver exceptional customer service by identifying issues and resolving them within a timely manner.
- Provide helpful tools or resources such as eBooks, guides, or video tutorials that customers can easily access when needed.
Tremendously improve your customer service with these actionable tips and watch your customer retention rates increase. These are couple of customer relationship examples paired with the 5 love languages which you can use to foster long-term relationships with your customers.
Best practices to enhance your customer relationship strategy
Now that you understand love languages of customer relationships, here are some best practices to keep in mind to maintain customer relationships.
Foster proactive communication
Your communication with customers shouldn’t be a one-off thing. It’s best to foster proactive communication by anticipating their needs and reaching out to customers before a problem arises. Knowing what your customers want and keeping them informed can help you maintain customer relationships.
Ask and most importantly, listen!
Get to know how customers feel about your brand by asking for feedback and listening to them. In fact, feedback is crucial in your customer relationships, it helps you identify customers’ struggles and needs and improve your product or services. Moreover, attentively listening to customers shows that you care and that they matter.
Nurture trust
Building trust is necessary to grow customer relationships so how do you nurture trust? By delivering quality products and being consistent in the quality and services you offer. Being human beings, whether business owners, managers, or staff we occasionally slip up, and this can lead to dissatisfied customers.
What you can do is own up to it, improve, from it and take precautions to avoid it from happening. Ignoring customers and their bad experiences can poison and turn your customer relationship sour. By keeping these practices in mind, you can build trust and elevate customer relations.
Acknowledge that your customers are ultimately humans
Yes, customers bring in profits and for businesses it’s all about the numbers but it’s important to acknowledge they are individuals with unique needs. You can humanize your customer interactions and relationships with these personalized marketing examples. Moreover, you can show genuine empathy, respect, and care by listening actively, and by being transparent.
Create a community
Building a brand is not enough, businesses need to learn how to create a community. Creating a community makes people feel that they belong, and it also transforms your customer relationships. In fact, community fosters loyalty as it allows you connect with customers on a deeper level. Getting your brand community right will lead to higher customer engagement, valuable insights, and organic word-of-mouth marketing.
By implementing these customer relationship best practices into your customer relationship strategy, your customers will surely stay with you!
Speaking of relationships, Valentine’s Day is almost here. Are you ready to show some love to you customers? Use this customer relationship strategy together with these valentine’s day marketing ideas to create the best customer experience and grow your relationship!
Make Interactive Content the heart of your customer relationship strategy!
Customers are the foundation of your business, love them right with these love languages for a long-lasting relationship!
See how Interactive Content can blossom your customer relationships by making it the heart of your customer relationship strategy. Try out our 14-Day Free Trial at Dot.vu and explore over 20+ Interactive Experiences that create meaningful customer connections.
