Your Customer: “Are You Listening to Me?”

You might have noticed that it’s harder to get customers’ attention and keep it once you have it these days. Between marketing overload, over-abundance of choices, and the ease with which competitors can replicate products or services, customer loyalty is increasingly difficult to maintain. Your ability to hold onto your customers is becoming less dependent upon your products and services and more dependent upon the relationship those customers have with your company.

How do you keep your customers’ loyalty once you have it?

1. Get to know them. Your customer base is unique to you. Invest in marketing communications that allow your customers to provide you with feedback on what they are thinking.

2. Listen to what you hear. Use your customers’ feedback to develop insight into their needs and wants.

3. Talk back. Feed this insight back into the dialog using data-driven messaging so that, over time, you build a stronger relationship. Communicate any actionable steps you’ve taken based on their feedback to those customers so they feel that their input was heard and valued.

4. Do it all over again. Developing customer loyalty is not a once-and-done campaign. It is an ongoing business commitment. It takes a commitment to nurturing customer relationships over time.

There are many ways you can go about nurturing your customer relationships. You can use personalized invitations to focus groups. You can use send customer surveys, whether print or online. You can use personalized URLs to gather insight you’re your customers’ preferences and needs. There are many forms of personalized communications that solicit customer feedback. Once you have this data, you can wrap it back into highly targeted newsletters, e-mails, birthday cards and more.

Research has shown that strengthening customer relationships over time increases the likelihood that customers will stay loyal, buy more from you, and tell people about your products, services or brand. That’s customer loyalty!

This post is adapted from “Listening to Customers Leads to Loyalty,” from 1to1Media (http://www.1to1media.com/video/).

Linemark is a privately-owned and operated printing & communications company headquartered within close proximity of the Washington DC / Baltimore Metro areas (Upper Marlboro, MD). Linemark is one of the fastest growing companies in the region within the communications industry. Operating 24 hours a day from a 90,000sq ft facility, the intensely customer focused company delivers solid and innovative solutions to their client base of associations, corporations and non-profit organizations.