The key to a successful business is maintaining a steady customer base. After all, successful businesses typically see 80 percent of their business coming from 20 percent of their customers. Too many businesses neglect this loyal customer base and chase new customers instead. Since it costs significantly more money to attract new customers than to maintain relationships with existing ones, your efforts toward building customer loyalty will certainly payoff.

Here are ten ways in which you can build customer loyalty:

1. Communicate: Whether it is an email newsletter, monthly flier, a reminder card for a tune up or a holiday greeting card, reach out to your steady customers.

2. Customer Service: Go the extra distance and meet customer needs. Train the staff to do the same. Customers remember being treated well.

3. Employee Loyalty: Loyalty works from the top down. If you show your employees loyalty, they will feel good about their jobs and pass that loyalty along to your customers.

4. Employee Training: Train employees in the manner you want them to interact with customers. Empower employees to make decisions that benefit the customer.

5. Customer Incentives: Give customers a reason to return to your business. For instance, children outgrow shoes quickly, so a children’s shoe store owner might hand out a card that makes the tenth pair of shoes half price. Likewise, a dentist may give a free cleaning to anyone who has seen him regularly for five years.
6. Product Awareness: Know what your regular customers buy and keep those items in stock. Add other products and/or services that go with the products your regular customers buy.

7. Reliability: If you say it will be there on Wednesday, deliver it on Wednesday. Be reliable. If something goes wrong, let customers know immediately and compensate them for their inconvenience.

8. Be Flexible: Try to solve customer problems or complaints. The phrase, “well that’s our policyâ€

Hi Everyone my name is Thabo Maleka, MD of Creative Intellect. We are a newly established through-the-Line design, branding, and advertising agency.
I totally agree with the ten suggestions, but i just would like to add on that all the above mentioned suggestions needs to be accompanied by Creativity. Consumers are bombarded with brands and messages everyday, so in order to break through this cluster of messages and brands...You must be CREATIVE. Being creative is the only way that you will get recognised.

Thabo I agree, too many companies forget that they need to brand their company properly. And an online presence these days is a must! That's where we come in

Moving your bussiness to internet can be a good thing because you find new competitors. new competition means new ideas, new ideas could mean lots of customers and so a great income can be made.

Very good points and useful for a business that is just starting out and getting off the ground. Thanks for the read Thabo.
Will need to make sure I work on all the points made as my business is always looking at focusing on recurring business instead of new business as much. I can see why people can get caught up chasing new customers but you have a very good point regarding loyalty here. We do Web hosting for the Top 150 or so companies in South Africa. We need to charge a little more then our competitors in order to keep it this way. But the benefits to our existing clients base are obvious and we also benefit well because of this loyalty to them. We compile new services that help them improve their website. Driving traffic which in turn gets them to acquire more powerful servers or cluster configurations from us. Success for them is a success for us in a way which just makes everything for a great mutually beneficial arrangement.

Hello,

I think a good communication is very important for build a customer loyalty. Thanks for your nice tips. All the points are really good.


Regards,
Olivia