In the past, customers were informed primarily through regular mailings, calls or, if necessary, visits to representatives and motivated to make new purchases or orders. Depending on the industry and target group, this type of customer loyalty still has its reason for being. Especially for smaller companies, perhaps even regional ones, the telephone acquisition and customer care remains very useful.
With the modern technology, the Internet and social media now offer additional opportunities to get to know our customers and their wishes. Instead of “letter, call, representative visit”, the motto is now increasingly “post, like, chat”. For businesses, social media is one big customer retention measure.
Social media as a communication channel for companies has several advantages over traditional communication channels. In my opinion, the most important of these advantages are follow.
Close Relation with Customers
Internet communication between customers and companies is usually at eye level, making it extremely low-threshold. This applies in both directions, both for inquiries from customers to companies and your reaction to them.
A quick reaction is always desirable here; To do this, however, the discretion and the desired freedom of action of your social media team must be defined beforehand. At the same time, you can not only address individual customers, but always the (hopefully!) Large group of your fans.
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Well-connected followers are the best brand ambassadors today. To do this, they do not even have to be the much-touted “influencers”; this also works with “completely normal” satisfied customers.
Extreme Flexibility
Thanks to the many different social media channels, you can implement your customer loyalty measures very precisely. Depending on the industry and target group, networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn are available.
You can tailor the content to your target group and distribute it via the most suitable channel. A social media strategy tailored to your company, your product or your service can minimize wastage here.
Customers Control
No matter how satisfied existing customers are, a frequent criticism of the communication behavior of companies is the frequency of contact. Sales researchers find that employees in sales and marketing set the optimal frequency of customer contact higher than the customers themselves.
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This means that customers do not want to be contacted as often as the marketing or sales department does. With social media, the customer / fan / follower can control how often and intensively they want to deal with the information. This avoids over-saturation with advertising messages and / or interesting content.
Incentives are Easy to Create
Competitions, promotions and offers are classic customer retention measures. Roll out, communication and monitoring of these measures is easier than ever before on social media.
Perfect Research Tool
Social media is not only suitable for “direct” customer care, ie answering inquiries, clarifying problems, etc. You can find out here, so to speak, what your customers want, what their opinion of your brand is – and also to the competition – and respond better to the needs of customers thanks to the knowledge gained. This enables customer loyalty that can only be of benefit to your customers.
In a nutshell: Social media is great for customer loyalty.
Conclusion
Now you have two options: You sit back, say “Great! The sales trainee is such an Internet type, he can still do it on the side! ”Or you can spend a little money and get professionals on board who will take care of customer loyalty measures for you via social media , either permanently or until your own employees are adequately trained.
However, the inclusion of social networks does not mean that customer care is now easier or requires less work than before. The care of social media accounts is not something that the trainee can do on the side. To stay with our houseplant analogy: the trainee may be able to water the plants regularly, but he does not necessarily know whether they are in the right place, get enough or too much sun, how often and with what they need to be fertilized.
