3 Critical Steps to Drive Brand Loyalty in the Digital Age

Brand loyalty describes the commitment consumers show to businesses' products and services through repeated purchases. Brands that build an emotional connection with their customers and provide experiences that surprise, amaze, or simply satisfy can expect strong brand loyalty. Every company hopes to engender wildly enthusiastic customers that build tribes of loyal followers around their brand, spreading their messages through social media posts and word-of-mouth. It’s a high benchmark, but there are clear steps to create raving fans of your brand.

Drive your Brand Story with Compelling Content

The idea that content and brand narrative (or brand story) should be in alignment is certainly nothing new, but driving engagement and passionate, repeat customers can be heavily influenced by delivering the right content. Customers consume large amounts of content as a course of daily life and businesses can be assured that by creating and distributing enough content they can achieve a layered impact where content trickles through to their customers in varied ways. Quality content builds credibility and when the content and the experience with a product or service track in parallel customer trust is born.

Personalization of content can also be a terrific way to drive brand loyalty. How do you respond to messages that seem tailored individually to you? If you’re like most of us, personalized content significantly ups the odds you’ll pay attention and act. People respond to marketing messages that make them feel special and unique. The more your business can tailor content and services to making emotional connections with customers the closer they will get too fanatical repeat buyers and brand ambassadors.

Another factor that will increase your engagement is to localize your content. Just as personalization creates an immediate customer connection to the content, localized deals, localized messaging with specific nuances of a regional or city-specific population, and other details that reach buyers with content they can call their own will drive loyalty and affinity.

Utilize the power of loyalty programs

The introduction of digital advancements and the changing face of the business that has accompanied the digital transformation has made the competition across every sector more fierce - and truly innovative brands win in this environment. It is a buyer’s economy and brands that do not provide exceptional, satisfying customer experiences will see their sales and market share erode.

Loyalty programs have become a key driver of high brand engagement and there are very proven models to learn from and repeat. Retailers like Bed, Bath, and Beyond and Kohl’s are famous for their loyalty coupon mailers that offer steep discounts during specific buying dates. They have successfully fended off the steep price and loyalty competition from eCommerce retailers for more than a decade. And research backs up this tactic - a 2018 report from Bond and VISA showed that 70 percent of customers trend as repeat buyers and recommend brands that offer them a good loyalty program.

To take advantage of loyalty shoppers, brands need to understand more about their customers and what triggers buying decisions. Understanding which customer demographics prefer a voucher program compared to 2-for-1 deals is critical to success. Points programs have gained in popularity because they gamify the shopping experience, tapping into the competitive drive many shoppers have to find the best deals. As consumers gain points - and spend them - they increase their brand affinity and by engineering points, programs to encourage sharing and discounts for friends and family loyalty programs can have an exponential growth impact on your business.

Improve Customer Experience with Bulk SMS strategies

Consumers use messaging daily - in fact, people spend more time using the top four messaging apps than they do the top four social media apps. Brands that implement bulk SMS strategies can help increase customer engagement and vastly improve the customer experience. The more advanced messaging and chat solutions (like those offered by Clickatell) include the integration of artificial intelligence, which will streamline your bulk SMS marketing and make the process quicker and more efficient. An example of such AI-empowered bulk SMS marketing is Clickatell’s Campaign Manager, a top of the range bulk messaging approach that enables companies to send high volumes of bulk messages to more than 1,000 global mobile networks.

Many brands now use both one and two-way messaging to build trust and loyalty among their customers. Businesses can communicate with customers in the messaging platforms they know and love and deliver highly tailored messages of all kinds.

Through one-way bulk messaging, real-time messaging can reach customers in a more direct way than other forms of marketing and communications and provide the convenience to open and act upon a message at the customer’s convenience. Also, the open rates are exceedingly high - with our own open rate for bulk SMS at 98 percent, and most messages opened within 90 seconds of being sent to the receiver.

Two-way bulk SMS solution opens up for more engagement with the customers. Research has indicated that 64 percent of customers want the ability to engage with companies through text. Two-way bulk SMS allows for that to happen with additional feedback from customers and the collection of data on customer preferences and behavior a significant part of the equation.

Conclusion

Brands need to consistently rethink the strategies and tactics they have in place to improve brand loyalty, customer retention, and customer experience. Customer relationship management is a key area to maintain market share, but also an opportunity to build ties to customers, deliver significant and scalable value and win new customers through innovative thinking.

Consumers prefer buying from companies that recognize them, appreciate them, and reward them. If you do not have any loyalty programs running, your chances of keeping your customers returning to you are getting slimmer by the day. And tailored content is critical to turn a skeptical shopper into a loyal brand enthusiast. Every aspect of your marketing efforts should deliver clear and measurable results and brand loyalty and affinity are no exception. Delivering premier customer experiences and providing chat and messaging solutions to reach customers in new, creative ways are all part of a larger, more integrated solution to building valuable and lasting customer experiences that make your relationship with your customer enduring.

Want to find out more about how to use SMS campaigns to engage and transact with 85 percent of the world’s population in real-time? Let’s connect.