How Social CRM Software Can Help You Create Brand Loyalists

Marketers and business owners are always on the hunt for new and exciting leads, but who they often forget about are the customers that they already have.  What happens to those customers that you’ve already converted?  More often than not, those customers simply fall through the cracks.  Sure, you may add them to your email marketing list and send them messages from time to time.  But how many of them are still reading those emails?

What you want standing behind you is a crew of brand loyalists who are more than willing to sing high praises about your company, your products, your services, and maybe even you.

What Is A Brand Loyalist?

A brand loyalist is an individual who repeatedly buys your products or uses your services, and who speaks highly of what you have to offer.  Having even one brand loyalist in your corner will go a long way in helping convert leads and retain other customers (and possibly create other brand loyalists, too!).  Without you needing to even pay them, these individuals will go out there and tell people why you and your product rocks.

How Social CRM Can Help Create Brand Loyalists

We all tend to look at social CRM as a way to work leads through the sales funnel, but what we all need to also be focussing on is how we can use social CRM to retain our current customers and groom them to become brand loyalists down the line.  How can you do it?  Let’s start by looking at the first step of creating a brand loyalist:

Deliver And Exceed Expectations

Not only do you want to make sure that the product does that you say it does, but you also want to exceed all expectations that every customer has had of the product.  By utilizing your social CRM software, you can easily conduct some quality market research and find out how most of your customers feel about your product, and whether or not they’d consider purchasing your product again.

Regularly providing customer support on your social media sites will also give you a lot of insight into how well your product’s performing.  Look at the compliments.  Look at the complaints.  Make sure that you address every single complaint in a respectful and resourceful way, and take the time to thank customers for their compliments.

Let’s say you have someone on your Facebook who’s just always going on and on about how much your product rocks.  Get creative and come up with ways to reward them for their continued support.  Though you can’t come right out and say “If you promote me, I’ll give you 20% off!” there are other sneaky ways that you can offer that same reward.

Create An Emotional Connection

Again, you’ll be able to use the market research that social CRM provides as well as customer relations and support to get an idea of what your customers’ emotional needs are.  Once you understand that, you can then turn your company into an empathetic and helpful entity that your customers feel that they can trust and relate to.

Validate Your End User

You need to let the customer know that they made the right decision.  For starters, you’ll validate your customer simply by having your product deliver.  But if you really want to validate them to the point that they’ll become a regular customer and eventually a brand loyalist, you need to use the information that your social CRM can provide to answer the following questions:

  • Why is your company the one I should trust to solve my problem?
  • What’s the return on my investment?
  • Are other people like me finding this product or service helpful?