As a retailer and e-Commerce owner, have you noticed that brands today are facing a challenge of low customer loyalty? Because there are many so many similar products on the market and customers have too many choices. So membership management has become increasingly important for business owners to differentiate their brand and service to maintain a source of stable revenue.
How to Acquire Members and Build Close Customer Relationship
Usually, when people sign up for a membership, there’s a greater chance that they want to purchase from you again and would like to get more perks from your membership program.
There are two important factors for a customer to sign up as a member when:
1. They like your store, whether it’s because of the interior or visual design, product offering, ambiance, or the staff. They enjoy the shopping experience and resonates with your brand.
2. They see value in your membership and know they will purchase again from you, then signing to receive discounts for their next purchase is a must.
In addition, acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer, so being able to utilize collected customer information to stimulate sales has become vital for business owners. In this article, we’ll give you actionable tips on acquiring new members and building long-lasting relationships with new & existing customers.
Provide Members Only Offer and Coupon
Give out promotions, in-store discounts, coupons, and free birthday gifts are especially for members to attract new customers to sign up. The more attractive the discount is offered, the more your customers will consider becoming a member.
Provide Exclusive Brand Updates
Ask your new customers to sign up to receive exclusive brand updates and inside scoops via email, text, or Facebook messenger.
Provide Personalized discounts and services
The more you know about your customers, the better you can tailor your approach to each individual. Research has shown that 58% of consumers are willing to share personal data in exchange for personalized offers or discounts. For example, you can segment your customers by the birth of month and send out Birthday discounts or gifts to surprise them, and show appreciation.
Offer Supportive Customer Service
The best and most effective way to build customer relationship for any brand is great customer service. Members who receive attention and experience pleasant interactions with the staff are much more likely to stay with you. In addition, great customer service turns the relationship into a personal connection, and it’s the reason why so many people shop at specific stores and dine at certain restaurants.
Create Brand Story and Promote Your Brand Value
A brand is the story of your business, and emphasizing that story has a lot of benefits for your marketing and for your business as a whole. Nowadays, a lot of consumers are buying based on emotional connection, when facing a vast amount of brand options, they tend to go for a brand that they resonate better with, and storytelling is one way to engage emotionally, if there’s a story behind your brand, you’re likely to start ahead of the pack when it comes to selling.
Create Community Events Online or Offline
Consider holding events to gather your members to offer classes, workshops, or sales events to give your customers another reason to revisit your shop.
Create a Membership Reward Program
There should be a clear an obvious difference between regular customers and other customers, you want to show your regular customers that you value them. A good way is to tier your customers, give out different promotions based on their tier and let them acknowledge that the more they spend on your brand the more discount they will be offered. If done right, reward programs can really help build customer loyalty and increase sales.
Treat Your Customers as Individuals Instead of Orders
Encourage customers to give feedback on both good and bad experiences so you can improve customer satisfaction. Engage your customers in two-way communication to know what their wants, needs, and pain points are, and perhaps take this information into future product development.
Conclusion
It’s important to stay in touch with your members and provide incentives, according to Marketing Metrics, the success rate of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, while the success rate selling to a new customer is only 5-20%. Brands these days need to keep on earning customer loyalty, so having an effective loyalty program gives you the ability to identify, track and sell more to the customers who are most likely to become your long-term source of revenue.
With SHOPLINE’s O2O Solution, merchants can easily coordinate and manage member data from both online and offline channels. In addition to sending out personalized messages (FB Message, Line@, Email and SMS) through the broadcast center. Also, Shoplytics provide data visualization reports on sales trend, web traffic, inventory, marketing results, and CRM, to give merchants a holistic overview for merchants to increase their operational efficiency and sales.
Marketing Associate at SHOPLINE. A digital marketing nerd and a podcast fan. You can find her out in the woods once in a while but most of the times she’s glued to her laptop screen indoors.