In addition to reaching the appropriate audience in order to commercialize their products and services, successful businesses must conquer yet another thing in order to reach the top: the ability to retain clients. This is what we’re covering today! You’ll learn 7 effective methods for building customer loyalty through Social Networks.
As you know, Social Networks are the perfect place for companies to find and conquer their target public. However, they’re also ideal for providing people with a reason (or multiple ones) to always stick with your brand. How? Through interaction and reputable content.
The Importance of Retaining Clients; Why You Should Build Customer Loyalty through Social Networks
According to professors Werner Reinartz and Kumar in the Harvard Business Review, “The best clients are loyal clients. It takes less money to serve them, and they’re more likely to spend more money than other clients and usually work as “word-of-mouth” publicists.
The experts additionally add that, “If you succeed in building customer loyalty, earning will follow you like night follows day”. Thus, building customer loyalty is the best way to take advantage of commercial relationships established with the public in the long run and for getting the max out of it.
Now, how do you retain customers through Social Networks? How can you build and measure a loyal relationship with your audience? To do this, you must pay special attention to engagement, the involvement or interest demonstrated by your audience on Social Media.
So, in order to get good engagement out of your content you must respond to your followers’ replies. Favorable comments or anything else which denotes interest, Likes and the number of times people share your publications are indicators whose abundance means your strategy is functioning quite well.
In short, the best way to build customer loyalty on Social Networks is to work on maintaining a high level of engagement through the creation and/or release of quality content (publications relevant to your audience that entertain, inform and move people), and meaningful interactions with the public.
Now that you know the importance of retaining clients and know that engagement is the parameter you need to measure to check if your Social Media strategy is functioning, let’s move on to what you’re really here for:
7 Effective Methods for Retaining Clients by Using Social Networks
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Ask your Audience Questions and Interact with Them
An excellent way to involve your audience and peak your fans’ interest on Social Networks is to ask questions. This technique is very effective for a few reasons: it makes people feel valued and important when inviting them to give their opinion on something (as you know, people love giving their opinion!).
Therefore, you can pose questions, for example: “What’s your idea of the perfect vacation?”, and even refer to your products: “What’s your favorite dish on our menu?”. A fun way to question your fans, which is also helpful to you (since it creates metrics), is to use Twitter polls.
As you can see in the GIF above, you just go to the Tweets Editor and press the “Add Poll” option. Then you can pose your question, establish two, three or more options for your followers to respond and select a length for your poll. That’s it! Your public will start to respond right away.
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Share Emotionally Impacting Content
Another way to increase your engagement on Social Networks in order to retain clients is to share moving content. As you know, people love to get excited and experience feelings such as empathy, endearment, happiness and be able to identify with other human beings.
These emotions are comforting and make people feel more human. In order to accomplish this, I suggest that you publish emotional content (always of good taste). And if this content is a video, the impact will be much larger, statistics point out that in 2018 79% of Internet traffic will be via videos.
In this sense, the emotionally moving content you find (and share) from pages such as UpSocl (take a look!) will be very effective. Videos of pets and small, cute and fuzzy animals are very popular on Social Media, just look below:
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Share Valuable Quotes and Sayings
We as people love (LOVE!) to feel things, things that make you feel “This is true!” or “That’s exactly what I think!” That’s why a good way of building customer loyalty is to help them feel identified with your business’s values, through valuable quotes, reflections and sayings.
A quoted phrase is capable of bringing a smile to whoever is reading it, change a bad day or even teach someone a new way to look at life. SO, to find the best quotes or reflections to share with your audience, there are two methods I advise using:
- Selecting phrases that seem enriching and placing them in an image by using programs such as Canva and Infogr.am.
- Searching on Google to find famous or enriching quotes whether by searching sites with quotes to share or by directly going to the image search as shown below:
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Offer Truly Useful Information
In order to retain clients on Social Media, there’s nothing better than making them feel like they should follow you. How? By offering really useful information to them. First off, to make sure that your content is truly useful to your audience you must put yourself in your followers’ shoes.
The idea is to think about what type of data could help them live better, resolve a problem, get the max benefit out of something, etc. For example, if you have a restaurant or a healthy food business you could share wholesome and simple recipes, health information, tips to use up all the nutrients in vegetables, etc.
I advise creating content on your blog and sharing it on Social Media and email through newsletters, since, according to the Sheffield University, “email marketing is the king of engagement”. This just means that email campaigns get a higher level of involvement on the audience’s side.
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Show Your Human Side
As specialists from the Social Media Examiner explain, people tend to be more open to doing business with you when they connect with you on a personal level. For this, it’s important that you include some “posts” on your life or “behind the scenes” of your business among your posts.
So, for example, if you have a company that employs numerous workers you can share images of your team members having lunch together, or if you work for yourself you can share a photo from your pet’s last trip to the vet.
In this sense, in order to determine if a particular content is appropriate (don’t go overboard sharing too much information!) you should strive to maintain good taste and consider what are the values you’re transmitting with this particular image (companionship, love for animals, etc.).
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Re-Share Your Best Content
This technique is highly effective, especially because its supported by facts: sharing your best content, meaning the ones which received the highest interaction rates and favorable responses from your public, it’s a no brainer that they contain something people love.
So I suggest that you review which of your posts we’re best received by your audience on each of your social accounts and create a document so you can easily reference it in order to re-share these posts every so often on your Social Networks (every 8 days for example).
In order to make this job easier for you, I suggest installing Postcron for Chrome on your browser. This extension enables you to schedule publications so that they’ll be shared on your social accounts automatically (on the date and time you establish!), while you browse. This will save you a lot of time!
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Offer Benefits and Discounts to Those Who Have Already Bought from Your Store
When it comes to building customer loyalty, there’s nothing better than offering benefits for having bought something from your business. This technique is very effective, since it makes people feel valued and privileged in a certain sense for having chosen your products and services.
Furthermore, this method for retaining clients functions marvelously in terms of giving people reasons to follow you on Social Networks. Therefore, I advise that you provide discount for your products via Facebook or propose contest to users that have made a purchase in your store or who have used your services.
I suggest using SocialTools for this task, it enables you to very easily create contest to entertain your followers on your Fan Page. So for example, with this tool you can invite your audience to participate in a photo contest displaying your products and the winner gets, for example, a free purchase.
That’s all for today! Apply these 7 methods for retaining clients on Social Networks and you’ll get the best results right away. Tell us about it later!
To go even more into depth on the topics we covered in today’s article, I suggest reading the following:
- How to use Postcron: Step by step tutorial!
- How to Use Twitter to Attract Clients in just 4 Easy Steps!
- What is Content Marketing and how can it take your Business to the Top?
Did you like this blog post? Which of the proposed methods for building customer loyalty on Social Media seemed most beneficial to you? Tell us your opinion! And please, remember to share this article with your contacts. See you next time!