Creating brand loyalty and customer retention is one of the most significant areas to focus on when growing a company’s revenue.
If you're a Director of Customer Retention or Customer Loyalty for a brand, you know that managing loyalty and retention programs can be supremely difficult. Customers are not experimenting with new and pricier brands in a recession. They're more likely to keep a close eye on prices and shop for economic value. Moreover, they just want to trust their brands.
What are the things you do to make someone a fan of your brand? How do you keep them coming back to your products again and again? How do you make somebody just love your brand? Clearly, there is a deeper way that your brand can connect with your customers to create loyalty.
Building Customer Retention
Brands need to work hard to retain customers. Maybe you are a clothing brand selling a range of shirts, pants and accessories. You want your younger target market to not only buy once from paid ads, but you want additional orders. You want to retain their business.
Some brands reward frequent shoppers. For your loyal customers, you might want to offer discounts, freebies, or product add-ons. When you do this, you win customers' loyalty.
Retaining Customers Saves Money
Plus you'll save money. Many studies show that retaining customers is usually less costly to companies and brands than acquiring new ones. (Don't they say the same thing about good employees, too?). More often than not, a company's growth depends more on recurring revenue than on gaining new customers.
Consultancy IDC reported that with everyone working in a digital business environment, companies and brands must prioritize customer experiences to continue to hold their business. Having a great product, and giving your buying customers a great experience, should be your top focus to build and scale a resilient and successful brand. Once they stay with you for a time, then you've succeeded in your goal to convert high-value customers at the lowest possible cost.
Increase Repurchase Rate
Two of the most important goals for brands are to increase the repurchase rate with customers, and increase the average order value repurchase rate. Some market estimates see as ideal a 20%-40% number above the original order. However, brands we work with often benchmark a 30% repurchase rate, meaning 30% of their original customers return for additional purchases.
In these inflationary times, competition is rising to attract and retain consumers. A 30% benchmark may be low, and is likely to increase. Brands have to keep in mind that online advertising costs will likely rise. Finding innovative ways to retain customers will become a clear key to survival in the future.
Creating the Audio Bond
Since brand loyalty aligns your customers closer to your brand, this should lead to a more personal affinity with your products. That emotional bond is a key driver behind customer loyalty. Hopefully, that can help build higher average value purchases in the future.
But if your brand delays in creating connections with favored customers, you may lose them. Using voice engagement solutions in your marketing strategy can help reduce churn and build higher average customer purchases.
Voice marketing via smart speakers in the home or car helps customers connect with your brand in ways that resonate more profoundly. Customers hear your brand's name, bringing your products into their minds. Shopping on a laptop is much more visual, and since we see logos and products every day, our visual connection is dimmed. But hearing the name of your brand, or even something as simple as a delivery notification for the product your customer has ordered, is a valuable experience.
This is brand recall. We wrote about this in a recent blog post on brand recall. It noted:
“Brand recall helps to fuel repeat purchases when your product’s brand recall is high among customers. When your brand has high customer recall, it’s likely your customer loyalty and retention are equally high.”
Voice Commerce Can Help
As more consumers worldwide use voice-activated commerce, these conversational sales transactions are rising. We're seeing a very effective way to build customer loyalty and retain your most preferred customers.
Voice commerce figures heavily into marketing by Modcup, the NJ-based coffee brand. Modcup wanted to create a new type of discount deal for its customers. So it reached out to Blutag to create a voice promotion for a new blend of coffee, with purchase only on Alexa smart speakers.
To get there, Modcup first connected its existing WooCommerce store to the Blutag platform. Then generated a branded Alexa Skill that was live within three weeks on the Alexa Skill store. , Modcup then promoted the deal to their existing customers as well as inside a retail industry newsletter.
With Blutag's help, Modcup coffee saw a 72% conversion on the deal through Alexa, resulting in the highest number of new customers acquired in a day. Modcup continues to see a 4x increase in reorder frequency for customers that use the voice app for reordering.
With voice commerce, your customers become aware of your brand through voice and sound. These interactions happen with voice-based systems in mobile apps, cars, smart home speakers, and customer hardware products.
When you log into your customer data and sales dashboards, you're excited to see customer loyalty increase, retention numbers increase, and overall revenue generation from existing customers rise. Voice can be the answer to boosting your retention ROI.
Need more insights into voice commerce? Contact Blutag, and we'll show you how we're working with brands to increase average order values, customer lifetime values, reorder frequencies, and more. Visit https://blu.ai/ for more information.
