The art of Customer Loyalty in Digital Marketing
Knowing how to build customer loyalty, whether you’re an agency or a freelancer, is one of the biggest challenges digital marketers face in their careers. After all, many decision-makers are still unable to understand what results digital services can bring to their companies.
In this way, agencies and freelancers continue to struggle to retain and win these clients, so that, in addition to continuing projects, they can also get future brand promoters.In this article, you can check out which key factors influence account retention, and learn about four critical tips on how to build customer loyalty.
Customer retention is a common challenge for agencies and freelancers
Customer retention is still one of the most significant difficulties for those who work with digital marketing, and several reasons can lead to this reduction in the number of accounts.
According to the Digital Agencies Panorama 2019, a survey developed by Rock Content and Resultados Digitais, the reasons are related to both the internal and external environment.
Below is a list of the main reasons cited by the study, that suit both the reality of agencies and freelancers:
- 8% of respondents point to direct competition from other professionals as one of the factors that hinder customer retention;
- 7% find it difficult to deliver results;
- 4% say that customer internalization of agency services and activities is a problem;
- 8% indicate that customer demands go beyond the technical capacity of the team;
- and 6% report that the agency lacks proactivity.
Among these reasons, we can see that most of them are linked to a common factor: the lack of communication between professionals and the decision-makers of the companies that hired them.
It is this difficulty in communicating that negatively influences the alignment of expectations and ends up causing the customer to see in competition the solution to their problems.
Some strategies directly assist in improving customer relationships and, consequently, retaining them, as you will see below.
Four tips on how to build customer loyalty
If the reality of your business is linked to the challenges we listed earlier, then it’s time to roll up your sleeves and start focusing on customer loyalty.
After all, maintaining customer loyalty is always more comfortable than acquiring new accounts.
So to help you circumvent all these obstacles and improve your results, we’ve selected four essential tips on how to build customer loyalty. Check out each one!
1. Commit to your work and your customers
If you want your customers to trust and recognize your work, you must first be proactive and commit to delivering your best service at all times.
It requires knowing their pain, their objectives, and the goals they want to achieve with digital marketing services.
The first step is to aligning customer expectations with the services you can offer, and thus starting a project that is customized and tailored to your needs.
Another right way to reinforce your commitment and thus ensure retention is to draw up a contract that is fair and provides all rights and duties of both parties.
2. Educate your customer about the importance of marketing
As pointed out in the Digital Agency Panorama survey, it is normal for customers to have difficulty understanding the depths of results that digital marketing can deliver.
The study points out that 27.4% of agencies interviewed have invested in content production to educate their customers.
To be most effective, this briefing process must also involve presenting results, as metrics are essential factors in understanding where the project is heading and how actions can be aligned with customer expectations.
3. Always keep an active communication
Communication should always be the main focus of those who want to build customer loyalty and thereby create lasting and productive relationships with them.
After all, it is through closer contact with customers that you can make them understand what your team can deliver and what results are generated from a particular service.
Communication is, above all, the bridge to the alignment of expectations. If the decision-maker always has a clear view of his work, he can never be dissatisfied with not achieving a result that was not promised.
This bond of trust built by proximity is essential for a relationship between client and agency/freelancer to extend over many contracts and yield excellent results such as referrals and brand promotion.
4. Present project results
Another solution that agencies have found to retain clients is the frequent presentation of the results of their projects.
According to the Panorama data, this strategy ranks first in the responses and is adopted by 64.2% of respondents.
The customer begins to see the information in numbers that exceed vanity metrics and assist in the process of internalizing the effectiveness of digital services.
In addition to presenting the results for each month, follow-up reports are also essential to show the customer what steps will be taken from the scenarios analyzed.
When you insert the decision-maker into this cycle of planning, execution, and analysis, he/she experiences the reality of digital marketing and sees that you know what you are doing and where you are taking it.
It helps you achieve the bond of trust, which is built through commitment and reinforced by communication.
At Reportei, our reports are structured to help you get closer to your customer through effective, results-based communication that you generate for their business.
In addition to containing critical social media metrics, Reportei also gives you the freedom to add open data analytics, add your insight into the project and structure your report as you like using our customizable version.
Liked our tips on how to build customer loyalty and want to present your results practically and educationally for them? Then login or register on our website to generate complete social media reports!
