Marketing automation is the fuel that fires every business, including small businesses.
If perpetual growth and expansion of your small business are in the cards – you’ll need the perfect marketing automation strategy to achieve both.
A good marketing strategy can have a stunning effect in raising customer lifetime value. This is why small businesses need to put their main focus on what matters – implementing the aptest and automated marketing strategies.
The end result? Attracting potential customers, retaining them, making profits, expanding – need we say more?
Gauging customers’ interests, triggering their curiosity, and nurturing their affection for your business – this is the recipe to direct success. The core of this simple strategy is not to sell alone, but to engage, ignite, and inspire the community that trusts your business.
Customer loyalty takes time to build and retain – but we have all the small business tips you need! Here is how small businesses can put customer loyalty front and center of their business by introducing a fitting marketing automation solution.
How Customer Loyalty Has Changed for Small Businesses
Before small business marketing automation entered the scene, customers had a very different experience in purchasing products or services.
If we take a look at the past, a person who wanted to buy a home appliance would typically be taken on a tour through the store and physically presented with the best products at hand. After a mild persistence on behalf of the salesperson, the still just-potential customer would have exited the store with a feeling of satisfaction.
Putting such a situation up to today’s standards is incomparable, as now, we have what is called customer loyalty for small businesses.
Today, customers will not only be fully satisfied with the product they buy from your business but they will be provided with a pinpointed product or service, one that matches their requirements.
Knowing and understanding your customers will then open an opportunity to enable them a better experience, which will next turn into loyalty – in the long run.
This can all be done thanks to small business marketing automation. Upgrading your business strategy with such refined software will enable you to target numerous segments thus increasing your sales.
Defining Customer Loyalty Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is the king of scaling any business – big or small. With the latter, it allows small business owners to automate the entire process of appealing to, attracting, and ultimately, impressing and retaining their customers.
To put it in a better perspective, let’s say a user visits your website and fills out a form. You can use this action and create automation that takes that user on a specific journey based on what they filled in the form. Or, here’s another idea – you can send users an email, and in it, feature a link for them to click. When potential customers click on that link, you can add a specific tag and usher them into a new sequence. So, really, it’s just about customizing journeys for customers – based on the things they prefer in a brand.
The biggest benefit of being able to build marketing automation for a small business is that you are better able to create more customized experiences for individual users and subscribers. The people interacting with you online are not all the same and neither are their needs.
So, we don’t want to put all of them in the same bucket. Hence, by creating marketing automation based on a variety of experiences, you can better nurture these customer relationships and provide them with a more personalized experience.
The end result? Guaranteed customer loyalty for small businesses of all sorts!
Before you get there, there are a few general practices to help your small business make the most of your marketing automation.
Always Provide Value
You have to remember that your automation is first and foremost concerning your users – not you. The only thing on your clientele’s mind is ‘what do I get out of this’ – and you can be the business to answer those questions and offer solutions.
Give Before you Take
It’s okay to occasionally ask your users or customers for their feedback. Make a survey and inspect the things they would like to see from your small business. Let them have their say in the matter, so you can have a better response and give them exactly what they hoped for. By automating these queries, you will facilitate your fishing for answers and will get you the information you need faster.
Customize Your Automations
It is wise to build marketing automation to really cater to different customer needs and requests. The person who filled out your website form probably looks for different things than the person who clicked the link in your email. So make sure you have separate automation that delivers unique content based on the actions all users are taking.
Building a Customer Loyalty Marketing Strategy: The Stats
The benefits of building a customer loyalty marketing strategy are tenfold. But, it is better when such things are expressed in numbers.
• Your most devoted clients spend 3 times more on each order than the lower 90%, and your top 1% spend 5 times more when compared to the lower 90%.
• The cost of getting a new client is 5 to 25 times higher than the cost of retaining a current customer.
• Customers who are loyal are valued up to ten times as much as those who make their first buy.
• Customer retention may boost a company’s profitability by 75 percent with just a 5% increase.
Retaining clients not only helps your small business expand through upsells and cross-sells – but also saves you the money you’d otherwise spend on training and implementation. With marketing automation, your business spends less and earns more, whereas your loyal suitors are spending, referring, and engaging more with your brand.
This is the perfect example of the Pareto principle in full action: only 20% of your efforts will yield 80% of your outcomes. So, go ahead and double down on that 20%.
However, you can’t just snap your fingers and make your customers loyal out of nowhere. Customers will only stay with you if you provide a better experience than your competitors.
According to the Kampyle study, 87% of customers believe businesses should put more effort into creating a consistent experience. According to Kapow, close to 70% of customers break their relationship with businesses due to feeling neglected by them.
This opens a window of opportunity to improve the numbers you don’t like and ameliorate them with the future goals of your small business.
The Benefits of Building a Customer Loyalty Marketing Strategy
It doesn’t matter if the product you are selling is the best on the market as long as your marketing strategy is timid. Fortunately, digital marketing demands that you do everything in your power to make the best out of it.
Hence, you should grow while maintaining a personal touch as well as to constantly yet authentically engage with a growing consumer base you’ve never met before.
Upgrading your business in such a manner can harvest 5 major fruits:
Identifying Brand Advocates
Use marketing automation to track and establish contact with brand supporters. Send relevant content and impactful offers to these micro-influencers. They’ll enthusiastically spread your message, effectively boosting its impact. Understand influencers better, know who you can trust, and use marketing automation’s lead scoring tools for the rest. The feedback will provide information about users who download, share, and comment on your material on a frequent basis.
Brand advocates strengthen brand commitment, far beyond the value of a repeat client who is eager to promote you to others. Invite your most ardent supporters to participate in rewards, referrals, or affiliate programs. This way, you’ll demonstrate your gratitude for their patronage while also encouraging repeat purchases.
Personalize the Customer Experience
The psychology of current consumers is clear as they choose businesses that treat them as unique as possible.
Small business marketing automation enables you to create customized, cross-channel campaigns that make your customers feel valued in every aspect. Moreover, combining your CRM (customer relationship management) with your automated marketing allows you to deliver an even bigger blow. Finally, you’ll be able to send the perfect message at the right moment.
You can follow clients across many communication channels and social media platforms rather than assuming who they are and what they like. It’s like the classic salesperson who knows your favorite color and style, as well as when your child’s birthday is.
A good place to begin is to create buyer personas based on your current client base and your target market. Then, deliver tailored yet relevant material and offers to individuals via triggered messages – to spark up their curiosity.
Gather Customer Feedback to Improve Relationship
Marketing automation is a simple approach to maintaining steady consumer loyalty and gathering their feedback. Divide customers into different nurturing streams, and then ask how they feel about their present business relationship. This will let you know how and where to improve the approach strategy and avoid unwanted scenarios.
Customer loyalty marketing relies on positive experiences. Therefore, you must understand what your consumers desire and what they would like you to improve.
And, you will also learn where to navigate your small business development and fortify the correlation with your customers.
Relevant Content, First
It’s simple human psychology that we enjoy conversing the most with those who pay attention to us.
According to Gallup, B2B marketers who score high on client involvement generate 50% more revenue, 34% more profit, and 55% more share of wallet compared to their competitors. Another thing worth remembering is that each piece of publishing material your consumers want to check out is the key to great and long-lasting engagement.
Instead of sending out generic, impersonal information like newsletters, tailor your content to your audience’s previous involvement and behaviors. To maintain and expand the client connection, use the customer information saved in your marketing automation software. You’ll increase engagement, sales, and customer loyalty – all with just appropriate content.
There are people and companies that continuously bring about new ideas to improve marketing automation efficiency. To offer timely and accurate information, some of the automation technology leverages behavioral indications and interaction history.
For example, after searching for ‘content marketing’ multiple times, you will most likely receive an email displaying such marketing material.
Small business marketing automation in all its glory can be achieved by using such strategies wisely.
Create a Seamless Customer Experience
Customer loyalty is earned through providing continuous, high-quality service throughout the customer’s engagement with your small business. Following the initial transaction, you must never forget about tending to your consumers.
Remember, marketing loyalty is a continual effort – not a one-time hustle.
So, give consumers a reason to stay after they’ve checked out, by offering information tailored to their separate needs.
This unique content can include segments such as:
• Exclusive webinars, or eBooks
• Regular newsletters
• Specially tailored discounts
• Offers, rewards, and referral programs
• Event invites
• Surveys
Make use of your social media accounts as well. According to Business News Daily customer service and social media are already fused together. People will utilize your social media sites to follow up on orders, ask questions, and discuss their product experiences.
Marketing Automation Scales Your Small Business
Leading businesses employ marketing automation software and tactics to ensure that customer loyalty marketing, in general, is as efficient as possible. This goes across all of their communication channels including social media like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Customer loyalty is a result of paying attention to your target market.
Making the client feel valued and involved is all about reaching the individual. Actions included with such an engagement range from personalization to feedback, sending personalized emails as well as sharing user-generated material on all social media platforms.
A perfect synergy and symbiosis create such a win-win situation as everyone benefits when marketing automation takes over the task of getting to know your clients.
Marketing automation is the most efficient approach to keep up with and engage your audience, regardless of their background and location. As long as you put your customers first and implement the right marketing automation techniques – your small business will keep engaging, retaining, and thriving on the market!
