Why Marketers Should Care About Keeping Customers Happy
Consumer satisfaction is vital to your business. If your customers aren’t happy, they don’t just stop doing business with you. Instead, they leave for your competition and may even post a bad review about your company online. Too many unhappy customers and you’ll struggle to attract new customers.
Marketing isn’t just about bringing traffic to your website, creating leads and turning those leads into sales. It’s also about keeping your current and new customers happy. Through good inbound marketing, you have the opportunity to create excellent customer loyalty, which is one of the main keys to running a successful business today. Here are a few stats about customer happiness you should become familiar with.
- According to com, the cost of obtaining a new customer is 5x more than keeping a current one.
- Loyal customers are worth as much as ten times their original purchase, according to the White House Office of Consumer Affairs.
- Harvard Business Review states that nearly half of customers going through a negative experience told at least ten people about it.
- 59% of customers said they’d try a new company in search of better service, according to American Express.
- A customer’s name is only asked for by employees 21% of the time, according to Help Scout.
- Increasing your customer retention by just 5% can lead to 25% to 100% more profits for your company through repurchases, referrals and upsells, according to Fred Reichheld the author of the Loyalty Effect.
These stats are very powerful and make it pretty clear how important customer loyalty is today.
The only way to create loyalty with your customers is to make them happy.
Keeping Customers Happy with Inbound Marketing
One of the best ways to help keep your customers happy is through inbound marketing. With the ability to delight your customers through the entire lifecycle, you’ll be able to gain more repeat purchase, more referrals and more up sales. Here are a few ways to use inbound marketing to help keep your customers happy.
Make Social Media a Relationship-Building Weapon
Social media has become one of the most powerful ways to connect with customers and create a relationship. With the right use of social media you can build great relationships by engaging fans, sharing valuable content and keeping your followers up-to-date. Make sure you act like a human and not a corporation, however. Respond to posts, like or favorite anything you’re tagged in, share posts from fans, ask questions and run contests.
Create High-Quality Content
Content focused on the reader provides something they need. When you create high-quality, reader-focused content your customers will develop trust with your company. Sending them the same old things over and over again or focusing too much on SEO instead of the reader won’t help you create high-quality content.
Educate, address issues, features real customer stories and solve their problems through the content you provide. When they can read a blog post, use the tips immediately and they help solve an issue or answer a question, you’ve created high-quality, reader-focused content your customers will love.
Ask for Feedback
Your customers are the best source of information when it comes to finding out how to make them happy. By asking for feedback you can find out what they want and need. This can simply be done through social media or through email and a handful of responses can give you a great look at what your customers need to remain loyal to your brand.
Study and Track the Data
No matter what you decide to do with inbound marketing, you have to study and track the data. This is vital to find out what your customers like, need and want. Look at on-screen time, conversion rates, click-through rates and views to discover the content connecting best with your audience.
Using inbound marketing to keep your customers happy will create incredible loyalty. You won’t have to replace customers as they leave and count on expensive marketing practices to keep your business rolling. Instead, you can gain a steady flow of new customers to add to your already loyal and happy customers.
