4 Tips To Understanding Customers – The Key To Customer Loyalty

It is easy for you to think or conclude that you know your customers. This might be because of your success in creating a few data around their necessary information, buying pattern, and needs. Well, that is good. But let us resurrect this question.

Do you know your customers? Don’t be quick to answer. When you finish reading this, then you can go back and provide an honest answer.

Benefits Of Understanding Your Customer To The Tiny Bits

Studies have shown that 80% of brands lack enough customer data to help drive effective marketing campaigns.

For your business to succeed, you have to consistently churn out products and services that your customers will prefer over that of other competitors. Feedbacks from the use of these products should come with tales of efficiency and effectiveness. The production also should be timely.

All of these are impossible if you don’t have enough information about your customers at your disposal. As a business owner, attracting new customers is a vital goal, but also important is the ability to sustain these new and even already existing customers. One guaranteed way to doing this is to know as much about them as possible. 

When this process is complete, you can take the typical customer-vendor relationship to an entirely new level. This point is the level where customers become die-hard loyalists and partners, and where dealings are beneficial to both parties.

Studies have shown that 80% of brands lack enough customer data to help drive effective marketing campaigns. Click To Tweet

The moment you decide to understand your customers, you are also taking a giant leap towards ensuring the delivery of efficient and satisfactory products to your customers and making your brand better.

As you read on, you will be open to critical principles that will help you better understand your customers. In the meantime, let us answer the question of why you need to know and understand your customers. A few answers are available at the beginning, but we can take it a little farther:

• Getting to know your customers will assist you in creating a better product; in rendering a better service, and creating a better user experience for your customers
• It will sustain you on the competitive chart while you cultivate loyal customers who trust you because you know them.
• By all means, your customers have the most significant impact on your business, so you need to know them.
• Many customers, especially the digital natives, are more likely to deal with brands that tailor their messages to meet them individually (personalized messages). Check out this post on buyer persona usage to understand this more.
• If you undermine the importance of knowing your customers, you will miss out on building a formidable and long-lasting customer relationship that may lead to a partnership.

Now, let’s look at the principles you can implement, to understand your customers for optimum service and output:

1. Don’t Make Assumptions

By now, you must be quite aware that assumptions are the lowest form of knowledge. In the same vein, assuming is harmful to your business. It would be best if you disregarded the assumptions you have on your customers’ preferences and beliefs.

Rather than assume, ask questions. Ask as many right questions as possible. Ask questions like “how”, “why”, “when”, “where”, etc. Do this and steer clear from assuming, because assumption is not a smart marketing strategy.

2. Take Advantage Of Social Media

A recent survey has shown that 38% of brands rely on data from social media to make crucial business decisions. What many of these brands are oblivious of is that social media can help them better target customers. Every brand must have social media accounts that they can leverage to interact with their customers.

38% of brands rely on data from social media to make crucial business decisions. Click To Tweet

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram, provide details on customer insights. Practicing social listening on social media platforms to gain further insights and engagements has proven to be valuable, as it allows for a more personal and emotional interaction between brands and customers.

3. Study Past Purchases

Many brands have a good understanding of how their customers have made purchases from them in the past. While having this data is excellent, this insight alone cannot be efficient in making informed decisions on marketing campaigns.

The reason is that; information about purchase history doesn’t have in-depth knowledge about the customer. This can be considered a starting point in building a relationship with your customers.

4. Use Every Data At Your Disposal

Data such as behavioral data, web analytics, social media insights, online/offline, and lots more, are all available to many brands. Unfortunately, a good number of these business owners are unaware of this. So, it becomes a real challenge for them to take advantage of these data to build a long-lasting relationship with their customers.

Eventually, once these business owners become aware that they have all this information about their customers, they can advertise in an improved manner, and they also can deliver effective and efficient customer service, ultimately understanding their customers better.

With the recent increase in the digitalization of businesses, one of the most effective ways for brands to remain competitive is to use all of the information of customers at their disposal to their most significant advantage.

Conclusion

The principles shared in this post are standard best practices that will help inform and inspire customer relationships. There are several tools, such as Advanced Analytics and behavioral recording tools, that can help you better understand your customers. Taking out time to understand your customers will help keep your business at a vantage position and make you a valuable partner that your new and existing customers will always want to work with.