The objective of customer loyalty is to keep a regular customer who has previously purchased one of our products or services and prevent them from buying from the competition. It is one of the most important marketing and sales strategies and techniques for a company, but it is often overlooked because it prioritizes attracting new customers.

Loyalty impacts two customer-related outcomes: word-of-mouth promotion and willingness to pay more. Companies that provide online services must first determine the means to increase the overall interactivity of their website, and then begin to look at customer loyalty.

Customer loyalty is becoming an area of ​​great interest for companies. The rapid development of Internet technology has increased the number of companies that try to retain customers through their online stores. Customer loyalty has a direct impact on a company's revenue and profitability. The interface of a website plays an essential role in customer and customer loyalty. The interactive content of a website creates added value, which motivates customers to repeat visits.

The rise of e-commerce reflects the advantages it offers over conventional stores. It includes greater flexibility, greater market reach, low structural cost, faster transactions, the broadest product lines, and greater convenience and customization.

Basics of customer loyalty

Companies face fierce competition, both locally and internationally. In order to improve the chances of survival and growth in this uncertain environment, many organizations are forced to restructure. The restructuring efforts include the emergence of the "new paradigm," which is commonly known as the relationship to commercialization. This considers marketing as an integrating activity that involves the staff of all organizations, with an emphasis on building and maintaining relationships over time.

Retaining customers throughout your life will help improve the profitability of your business or brand. This implies that companies have to learn the needs and expectations of customers, which are changing and are not always predictable.

In transactional marketing, most of all a company's customer contacts are associated with the product itself. Therefore, when a competitor brings a similar product to market, then price usually becomes an issue. In this way, customers can easily switch to a lower-priced product or service with better conditions. In transaction marketing, the price sensitivity of customers is often high. Therefore, a company must, on the one hand, establish a marketing strategy, and on the other hand, create more value for its customers than is provided by the core product alone. 

When a company develops bonds with its customers, it is necessary to strengthen them over time. Such ties may, for example, be technology, knowledge, information related, or social in nature. If managed well, they can offer customers added value, something that is not provided by the core product itself. Therefore, the marketing relationship makes customers less price sensitive.

The 6 Phases of Customer Loyalty

While it's true that customer loyalty focuses on customer loyalty efforts, it's also important to understand customer loyalty as soon as they learn about your business.

1. Know: the client discovers your business and what you offer.
2. Search – The customer searches for information on your website.
3. Buy – The customer buys a product or service from your store.
4. Use – The customer uses the product or service they purchased from your store.
5. Repeat: the customer repeats a new purchase in your store.
6. Suggest: The customer recommends your company to family and friends.

Given this 6-step process, we can say that every time the customer moves from one stage to another, their level of loyalty increases. This means that a customer who repeats a purchase on your website (Phase 5) has a much stronger commitment to your business and brand than the one who just made their first transaction (Phase 3).

Advantages of getting loyal customers to our company or brand

If we compare the cost of acquiring a new customer with that of another customer who often repeats their purchases, the figures will surprise you: it is much cheaper to get a repeat customer than to find a new one to make a single purchase.

Customer loyalty with our company is essential since otherwise, we will not be able to benefit from advantages such as:

• Keeping old customers is cheaper than acquiring new ones. This is because there is no need to implement very expensive marketing measures that do not always guarantee a good ROI (Return on Investment).
• Customer loyalty generates more revenue, which can then be used to cover fixed costs or to create new lines of business.
• The loyal customer does not compete, which helps us weaken him.
• Loyal customers have valuable information that our competitors don't know, which puts us at an advantage.
• Customer loyalty also allows you to increase both the average ticket and the frequency of purchase.
• The loyal customer tends to become a "commercial" of our brand, that is, they will recommend us as soon as they have the opportunity.

Customer loyalty strategies

(I) The use of online tools

Relationships can be improved in many ways through electronic means. They are an easy source for customers and vendors to interact with each other. Through electronic media, customers can share their experiences with other customers more easily. They can easily compare the prices, delivery times, and terms and conditions of their suppliers in the market.

The advent of the Internet has made the world a global village. The rapid growth of technology will penalize organizations that do not follow it. Therefore, companies that can get information and ideas quickly gain a competitive advantage over others.

To do this, we recommend you invest in digital marketing tools for web analysis, and at least in CRM software to better understand all the aspects you manage with your clients.

(II) The added value of relationship marketing

Relationship marketing is very important to retain a customer for a long time. This means increasing the profitability of the business over the years. Customers are generally loyal to a company that adds value and offers to its customers according to their needs and choice. The basic idea behind relationship marketing is to create customer loyalty. A customer becomes more loyal to an organization when he or she feels that it is the best way to fulfill his or her requirement in a competitive environment.

The role of traditional relationship marketing is changing, as technology has a significant impact on customer choice, satisfaction, and repurchase. Relationship marketing makes the interface with the customer somewhat broader, and the company has the opportunity to offer customers the added value of various kinds. When several companies can offer a similar technical quality of a product, then relationship marketing plays a critical role for companies to gain a competitive advantage. 

(III) Business assets

Companies that treat their customers as assets and go to great lengths to retain these assets and design different pricing policies, product lines, and incentives are able to improve customer loyalty.

For example, a company should consider offering language switching options from their website so that it can be accessed from around the world. Also, it is advisable to change the content of a site to local conditions. This concept is successfully applied by companies such as Amazon and StepStone, which is a European online career portal. Local adaptation must be based on a complete understanding of a client's culture.

(IV) Customer retention

The issue of customer retention is particularly important in e-business. The Internet presents a multitude of companies that act as your competition, offering new and different opportunities. Companies must understand the specific environment of the electronic market in what is necessary to achieve the goal of customer retention.

To avoid unnecessary leaks, one of the best customer interaction strategies is to optimize customer service channels. For this, we offer you our selection of tools specialized in live chat and customer service. However, before you install anything, you need to keep two things in mind:

• Direct attention: the client must feel that they are taken care of and that their doubts are resolved. And for this, you have to do it in the most personalized way possible.
• Real-time responses – When solving a problem, the response time should be almost immediate. If you can't set up a customer support center or through WhatsApp, you should try to reply to emails in a short time.

(V) Promises are to be kept

Successful companies retain their customers with strategies based on meeting the expectations they generate. However, if customer expectations are higher than the service you can provide, you will never receive repeat orders because your customers will want nothing to do with your online store.

Think about shipping times, for example. Most dropshipping stores cannot compete with Amazon and their product delivery times unless you have an Amazon marketplace. However, you can do your best to keep your customers informed of delivery times.

(VI) Online advertising is also engaging

There are many online companies that only launch Facebook advertising campaigns to attract new customers. However, one of the best ways to use these online advertising tools is by designing loyalty campaigns for customers who have already bought from your dropshipping store more than once.

It is about creating different audiences for the ads that you define. For which you can follow different criteria such as, for example, the pages visited. You can target your audience to show your campaign only to people who have already visited the "Thank you for your order" page (so that the ad only shows to people who have already bought it once).

(VII) Social networks with attention channel

If social networks are part of your customer interaction strategy, you should exploit them by placing links to your social networks in your footer, on your payment page, and on the contact page. Your social profiles should always be visible.

You can also improve your customer loyalty rates by announcing new products, offers, and other updates on your social media marketplaces. For example, designing a Social Media Marketing plan is a great excuse for your customers to talk about your business on their social networks.

(VIII) Loyalty through email marketing

Email marketing tools are a great ally when it comes to retaining your customers. The customer retention policy through email marketing is based on two different types of messages:

• Emails to generate sales: You need to create an email content strategy that will allow you to generate more orders.
• Secondary Emails – Every time a new order is placed, there are some emails sent that many online store owners give little thought to. Confirming the order, preparing the shipment, or thanking after receiving the product are perfect ways to build customer loyalty.

The 8 web experiences that influence customer loyalty

The experience of consumers on a website is very important for business. Having a dynamic website is very important for companies and the expansion of their business on the Internet. The quality of the website is very important in the online experience, and if the design and type of the page are poor, it can create problems for the company. According to research, 50% of Internet users who have a negative online experience have left online orders halfway. While the other 50% have moved to physical stores, towards traditional shopping.

There are a number of factors that influence the effectiveness of consumer perceptions in a comprehensive model for evaluating page and website effectiveness. Therefore, it is essential that you do a UX – UI design audit on your page. 

The 8 web experiences that influence customer loyalty

The experience of consumers on a website is very important for business. Having a dynamic website is very important for companies and the expansion of their business on the Internet. The quality of the website is very important in the online experience, and if the design and type of the page are poor, it can create problems for the company. According to research, 50% of Internet users who have a negative online experience have left online orders halfway. While the other 50% have moved to physical stores, towards traditional shopping.

There are a number of factors that influence the effectiveness of consumer perceptions in a comprehensive model for evaluating page and website effectiveness. Therefore, it is essential that you do a UX – UI design audit on your page. You must carry out A/B tests to be able to: optimize, convert and increase the sales of your website.

This model was proposed by arguing that an effective website must meet four main criteria:

1. Attract.
2. Report.
3. Position.
4. Deliver.

Therefore, web pages could be evaluated in terms of their contribution to these objectives.

(I) Security and privacy

The basis of e-marketing responsibility is focused on ensuring the security and privacy of customers in order to establish trust. One of the essential requirements for all websites is the Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTPS). These types of measures are directly associated with trust and are an essential advantage for promoting security in electronic commerce. However, sometimes companies' efforts to ensure the security and protection of customer privacy make it difficult to access websites.

Consumers have to apply a password to ensure the security of the company. In addition to having to update your browser to get a more sophisticated encryption technology. As a result of these cumbersome procedures, security and privacy strategies provide a winning combination for companies to “e-adapt”.

(II) Ease of navigation

Effective marketing communications, accessibility, and reach have always been major focuses for reaching your target audience. There are a variety of methods to attract interested parties to a page. URLs and the web are a good way to access well-known companies with established brands and create a competitive advantage.

Information technologies are a new trend in web page design used for e-business. They offer a choice to the user as to whether they want to browse your website with or without graphics to make the page more interactive and animated. So they greatly improve the level of interactivity for those who want to see the graphs or want to see the simple page.

However, it is not enough that the navigation is good, it also has to be responsive. With so many different devices and screen sizes, it can be difficult to make your site universally accessible. 

(III) Web positioning

Positioning strategies have always been used to establish the competitive position of the company on the Internet. These positioning strategies have become more important in electronic commerce because the client can change websites simply with a 'click' of the mouse. Discounted prices, convenience, and unique merchandise are some of the market positioning strategies approved by most online marketers. 

(IV) The use of cookies

Everyone wants to get the most out of web technologies to ensure their own benefits. The concept of database marketing or data mining is becoming very popular. Cookies are used to track consumer preferences for a better market position. 

(V) Clarity of objectives and content

In the first place, companies must decide what is the scope of the application and the products or services to offer on their website. Companies must create websites, not only to have a presence on the Internet but with a clearly defined purpose. Otherwise, the websites create a bad image and the results are unsatisfactory for the client.

On the other hand, if the information is organized in a clear and logical way, it results in repeat customer visits, positive word of mouth, and customer loyalty.

Consistency, menus, and website maps are some of the essential elements of a web page design. 

The pages of an ideal website would be those that summarize it and keep it short. Companies should avoid using unnecessary data. However, in order to provide more details of a link, it is appropriate to separate the link rather than provide all the information on the main page.

The use of headings and paragraphs on the web page is as important as in any book, magazine, or newspaper. There should be a button at the bottom of the page to provide each user with the ability to return to the top of the page.

The web pages contain a physical address of the company so that customers can contact the company or verify its existence. The Internet is an open source for everyone, and it has become a new space for fraud, therefore, customers want to verify that the company page is truthful.

If you have no design or programming notions, these web design tools will help you easily build what you need: sites, landing pages, pop-ups, alert bars, and much more.

(VI) Customer Service

In every business, customer service plays an important role in delivering quality service. In the online environment, there is no interaction or face-to-face, so companies must offer a telephone service to create an interaction with customers. However, these tools to work remotely will be of great help to you.

(VII) Customer recognition

E-business allows you to analyze and evaluate trends by using customer history to forecast sales. Companies use customer history, business interests, and other information to understand their customer. Therefore, every owner of an online business must have the best tools to sell online.

(VIII) Customer Response Platforms

There is a growing need for customer feedback platforms where customers interact with e-business. This type of interaction builds an online community where customers can share their experiences and receive help from one another. If you want to get feedback from your customers, there are many online tools (free and paid) to take surveys.