why is customer loyalty so important?

It is becoming increasingly important not to end the buying process at the point of sale, it makes sense to build customer loyalty as it is much more difficult to acquire new customers than it is to keep new ones. So in a marketing strategy, the focus should be on the moment after the sale.

what is customer loyalty?

Customer loyalty is a marketing concept whose objective is to achieve through a series of techniques that a customer who has already obtained a product from your company chooses you again for their next purchase. What you want to achieve with this is that the user becomes a regular customer and thus ends up recommending your brand to other people. For this, what you have to achieve is that the customer feels comfortable with the entire purchasing process, only then will they buy again and recommend the product. You will achieve this through the strategies that you think are most appropriate according to the type of customer.

This is one of the pillars of relationship marketing, in which the relationship is defended as the very axis of marketing, this places the customer at the base of the strategy, and is based on trust and on establishing lasting relationships in which both parties win. On the one hand, the customer wins the satisfaction that the company and the product provide and on the other hand, greater profitability for the company.

Advantages of building customer loyalty

1. Much more economical
   Retaining customers who have already purchased our products or services is much simpler and cheaper than generating new ones, as it is not necessary to implement very costly marketing actions.
   
   
2. Customer Lifetime Value
   

   The CLTV or customer lifetime value is a formula that you should use in your marketing strategy if your objective is to build customer loyalty, because thanks to it, you will be able to analyse the "useful life" of a customer in the long term, and with it you will know which customers you should direct your strategy towards.

3. Revenue
   Thanks to the loyalty of potential customers, we generate more income than if we get new customers, this income can be used to cover other expenses or to start new businesses.
   
   
4. Competition
   If you have built customer loyalty, they will decide to buy what they need from you rather than go to the competition, this will help us greatly to weaken it, we take away customers permanently and also we have people recommending our brand before the competition. All are advantages!
   
   
5. Information
   Linked to the previous point, by having loyal customers to our brand, we have a lot of information about them, we know how they behave, their basic personal data, what interests them more and what less, and thus, what their needs are. So what you are getting is to have much more information than the competition has.
   
   
6. Increase
   By building customer loyalty, not only are we getting them to buy more frequently, but the customer tends to increase the money they spend on a brand once they are loyal, i.e., by trusting the brand, they will spend more on it.
   
   
7. Recommendation
   Once the customer has become loyal, it is as if he has become a little brand lover, so he will recommend the brand whenever he has the chance, which implies a very valuable publicity.
   
   
8. Lost customers
   All this also has an impact on lost customers, what are these lost customers? Those that the organisation itself loses because of its indifference and because it does not manage the complaints that come in from its own customers. What customer loyalty achieves is to reduce the number of lost customers, which is very important because a loyal customer will recommend us, but a dissatisfied customer will do the opposite.

Objectives you should have to build customer loyalty

1. Increasing the frequency of purchase of our current customers is very important, but we also need them to increase the volume of purchase, so it is a good objective when it comes to customer loyalty, that they are more committed to invest their money in the brand.
2. Get recommendations from our customers so that they serve as advertising and end up directing other customers to our products.
3. Improve our offers and everything we offer to our customers once we have obtained their data, so that we can improve our content and our offers and thus improve the relationship with our customers.
4. Establish communication channels that allow us to increase interaction with our customers, which helps to improve their perception of the brand and also helps us to generate quality content with personalised information.
5. Greater profitability because once we have customer loyalty, they will not look so much at the price and we can increase it. Higher price = higher income.
6. Improve metrics, we will achieve an increase in new customers and greater loyalty from previous ones.

Customer loyalty strategies

1. Loyalty programmes: This solution is not exactly new, but it is still used because of its effectiveness. To build customer loyalty, a points system is implemented in which every time the customer consumes, they earn points, which they can use in the future to obtain an offer or advantage. This will make customers want to continue consuming to be able to enjoy these advantages.
2. Support your customers: You have to have a good communication with the customer, this way you will get the feedback that is essential nowadays for customer loyalty. If you also try to support them and help them in their personal projects, the relationship with the customer will be much better.
3. Seek excellence: It is essential to offer the customer a good service, but this becomes much more important just after the purchase. It is a very basic action that helps a lot when it comes to customer loyalty, often this step is definitive to achieve it.
4. Email marketing: Thanks to email marketing , we will be able to nurture the customer little by little, accompanying them throughout their purchase process from the moment they decide to buy until they become loyal customers.
5. Generate a community: This is a great idea within social networks, as we manage to create a community in which the different customers who are already loyal communicate with other customers and end up convincing them how good the brand is, thus creating a long-term brand-customer relationship.
6. Content: We will not achieve customer loyalty if they do not feel comfortable with the information we offer them, we have to work hard on the content, we must offer quality content that is personalised for the customer, only in this way will we give them the necessary confidence to build customer loyalty.

Customer loyalty has become a key strategy in marketing, we must always take care of our customers, from the moment they are prospects until after they have made a purchase. Don't wait any longer and build customer loyalty to keep them!