Secrets to Creating Customer Loyalty

Last week I received an Email from someone who wanted to know how to find loyal customers. He wrote: "Customers don’t seem to care about anything except price. They aren’t loyal anymore."

SECRETS TO CREATING CUSTOMER LOYALTY
There are five critical components involved in building customer loyalty. If these five ingredients are in place, consumers WILL feel loyal and choose YOU over your competitors.

FIVE INGREDIENTS

1. TRUST
When you speak, do customers believe you? Customers will be more likely to WANT to buy from you if they trust and believe you. If you haven’t built enough trust, they will NOT place the order. (See # 5 below for more about how to build trust.)

2. CREDIBILITY
An experienced sales manager once told me: "Tell the truth, even if it hurts the truth will usually end up helping you." Two successful advertising campaigns illustrate the wisdom of this philosophy. One was the old Volkswagen commercial: "This car is ugly it looks like a beetle." Another was the famous Avis commercial: "We’re number two, so we try harder."

TIP: One very powerful way to project credibility is to use testimonial letters from REAL people or companies your customers have heard about. Collect a portfolio of testimonials and keep them current.

3. PRODUCT KNOWLEDGE
People will believe you if they think you have more expertise than they do. In your field, if you are perceived as being the expert the specialist consumers will WANT to buy from you. (Office equipment dealers can find out how to speed up product knowledge training time in last year’s Issue 12.)

4. BENEFITS
Customers will buy from you if they believe they will BENEFIT. Benefits are the FASTEST way to build customer loyalty. When customers feel you make their job (or their life) easier, that is a tangible benefit.

When the customer is convinced you will work hard for him or her, they will WANT to buy from you. If you send the best quality products in the fastest time and follow up afterwards to make sure the order arrived on time and in good condition, customers will feel they have benefited from ordering from you.

5. CONSISTENCY
Using all four components above will NOT win loyal customers unless you are CONSISTENT. Being able to prove successfully that you have a consistent set of standards and that you will never deviate from them, has an awesome effect on people. Consistency power grows and grows. The longer customers realize that you have a consistent set of standards from which you will never deviate, the more they learn to TRUST you. The more they trust you, the more they will want to buy from you.

About the Author

Reprinted with permission
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