When you’re running an online wholesale business, the most important thing is to keep your customers happy. Because when your customers are happy and satisfied, they will keep coming back to you.
Repeat customers typically spend more than new customers. It is easier to engage them because they have already purchased from you. When you offer them white-glove treatment, they are likely to recommend your services to others.
Encouraging customer loyalty is hard, but it is extremely rewarding. Building a wholesale business with a positive reputation will yield fruitful results in the long run.
While there has to be work put into encouraging and increasing customer loyalty, a lot of wholesale sellers appreciate the journey and the real connection they form with their loyal customers.
Here are 4 ways you can encourage customer loyalty to keep customers coming back.
- Focus on Customer Service
Customers don’t forget how you make them feel. By focusing on customer service, you can offer customers something more special. The popularity of Amazon among customers is due to the excellent customer service they offer.
By the way, do you know what the mission and vision of Amazon.com is?
It is to be Earth’s most customer-centric company!
That speaks for itself.
By priding itself on providing the best customer service, Amazon stands out from the competition and crushes them.
For customers to connect with you, provide them with great service. You don’t have to match Amazon in terms of promptness and customer experience, but deliver them the best service you can.
Today, it is not only important to have customer care representatives attend to phone calls and emails. A lot of customers reach out to businesses on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. And, they expect prompt replies. Engage with your audience on social media and respond to their queries. It is easier for customers to tag businesses in social posts asking questions. By answering them in public, you will gain a lot of attention and a positive reputation for being a reliable business that cares for its customers.
Focus on providing an all-around exceptional service on phone calls, emails, chats, and social media to win the loyalty of customers.
- Start a Loyalty Program
Customers love being a part of exciting loyalty programs. You can set up a points loyalty program, tier-based loyalty program, or spend loyalty program.
In the points loyalty program, you can reward customers with points on every purchase. They can accumulate points and in exchange redeem them for discounts or products from your store.
A tier-based loyalty program can have tiers that customers can reach when they hit a certain total spend. These higher tiers can offer more rewards on every purchase. This will make the customers work towards reaching higher tiers to gain more rewards on every purchase.
Spend loyalty program focuses on more rewards for customers based on the transaction amount. They will be rewarded more when they place large orders with you.
Pro Tip: When you start a loyalty program, make sure you reach out to existing customers and excite them by offering a leg-up in the race with initial bonus points/rewards. This will get them excited and be more interested in your loyalty program.
- Increase Convenience for Customers
By increasing the convenience of your customers, you make them more likely to shop more from you and become loyal customers.
You can increase the convenience of your customers in a few ways.
If you have sent surveys to customers after their first purchase, asking for suggestions, you may have received a lot of improvements customers would like to see in your store.
For example, it can be a sharper-looking website, an intuitive interface, and smoother checkout options.
If you have limited payment options, you can gain more customers by adding more payment methods. Be sure to include popular payment methods customers would like to see in your store.
As a wholesale seller, it is always a good option to mention the bulk discounts you provide on various minimum order quantities.
- Strengthen Customer Relationships
Everything you do doesn’t have to be about getting more sales. We understand that sales are important and are the lifeblood of your business. However, if you are retargeting your customers and trying to upsell or sell new products to them all the time, you will fail miserably at encouraging customer loyalty.
Understand that customers love being appreciated, helped, and guided along the way. Email marketing will be your biggest friend when it comes to strengthening your relationships with customers.
Create an email marketing flow for your customers where they receive useful information from you. This can be blogs, helpful tips, videos, and more. Add value to them and they will love that you care for them. This will show that you are truly committed to strengthening your relationship with them.
Upsells and marketing additional products can be a part of an effective marketing strategy. But they have to be combined with value addition to the customer. The more you deliver value and strengthen the customer-seller relationship, the more you encourage customer loyalty.
Customer loyalty cannot be bought, it can only be earned. It takes a lot of time and effort to earn the loyalty of your customers. But once you’ve earned the loyalty, you will have an army of reliable customers who will love you for what you do and bring in more customers.
If you’re a seller looking to reach more customers worldwide with your products, register for a seller account on Strade. We are revolutionizing the global wholesale marketplace and have thousands of verified buyers from 100+ countries around the world looking for reliable wholesale vendors just like you.
