8 Ways to Maintain Customer Loyalty in 2020 amid COVID-19

According to a study by Digital Commerce 360, 67% of online shoppers have changed their shopping behavior and 55% of online shoppers have placed more orders online owing to the Corona outbreak. This shows that customers are turning to online shopping in the wake of this pandemic.

However, keeping your customer base intact amid the prevailing times of uncertainty isn’t that easy. And customer loyalty may go down due to one or more reasons below:

• Lack of engagement or interest.
• Poor customer experience.
• Failure to fulfill customers’ demands.
• Weakened brand equity.

As a result, your overall sales and revenue may plummet.

Therefore, besides acquiring new customers, maintaining existing customer loyalty is also crucial. To win your customers’ trust and loyalty, you may have to ‘walk the extra mile’ to retain your customer loyalty – especially this fateful year.

Read on to know a few customer retention strategies that can come in handy and retain your brand loyalty among customers.

• Ensure to take Emergency Measures

This is the first and foremost step towards retaining customer loyalty. Setting up an emergency response team is crucial for timely measures. This team can help assess the risk factors, supply or inventory related issues, online store operations, workforce,
and consumers’ sentiments.

After considering all these factors, this team can plan and work out strategies to adopt for marketing and sales. Further, it can also discuss these strategies with the top officials and experienced employees in each department and tweak them further.

Thus, it will help create an effective roadmap to guide your company through this crisis.

• Assure Customers about Product Safety

The word ‘social distancing’ has had a deep impact on people’s minds and hearts. Trusting your brand would be difficult for even your existing customers– unless you show them you care for them. Reassure them that you follow stringent hygiene procedures and guidelines for customers, employees, and products with utmost attention.
For that, you can inform your customers by creating a video, blog(s), or even a full dedicated website page for CORONA where you can inform them how your brand is responding to this global pandemic.
For instance, if you have an in-house manufacturing facility, you can record a small video showing the entire procedure of manufacturing, packing, dispatching and delivery. You can also post videos of your employees following precautions like wearing masks and gloves, sanitizing machinery, cartons or other packaging materials, etc. on social media.

This all will help customers regain confidence in your brand and win back their trust.

• Provide Personalization

Personalized approaches may work well for an online store seeing the current scenario. Let’s understand it with an example.
Suppose, you are an online print store owner. In general times, people would buy anything and everything from your store. But would they do that today? Of course not! The reason is the change in customers’ shopping preferences. They have grown smarter and research everything before buying anything – especially in current times. They won’t pick anything that can’t stand out or isn’t ‘really’ valuable.

What to do then? The answer is – offering personalization. By providing freedom of customization through product design software like Magento Product Designer or any other, you can engage customers better.

• Accommodate New In-Trend Items

Hunt for the products or services people are seeking in your industry. Incorporating in-trend items or services is highly helpful.
For instance, if you own an insurance company, it is high time you covered Corona under your health coverage policy just like other renowned insurance companies like Reliance General Insurance.
Similarly, you can offer COVID-19 masks to your customers if you are an online fashion store just like Wildcraft has done.

• Prompt Online Customer Support

While online customer support is always a valuable asset, strengthening it further can help even more in such times.
Equip your customer support team with all they need to respond to customers anywhere anytime. Keep multiple lines of communication open for your customers. Facebook Messenger, official whatsapp number, customer service number, or other messaging platforms can help. You can even offer them the ‘video conferencing’ option through Skype or FaceTime for a face-to-face interaction and strengthen your customer relations.

• Zero-Contact Delivery

Out of the fear of getting infected, people are abstaining from touching any surface, or even each other! To allay such fears, offering them ‘Zero Contact Delivery’ can be a very innovative option. Adjust your store backend configuration and display the option of Zero Contact Delivery on your product page or Checkout page for customers. This will reassure them that you follow the social distancing norms ‘actually’ and their safety is your topmost priority.

• Social Media – Make it Your Right Hand

Undeniably, a website is a must for every online store. However, social media visibility is not behind. When people are indoors checking news about Corona now and then on social media, you can leverage this opportunity to strengthen your social media presence.

Keep posting useful content, details of new launches, offers or discounts, etc. on your social media pages on various platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. Remember, the content you post should be informative or exciting, and most importantly – positive.

You can also run customer loyalty programs, offers and discounts; and maximize their outreach via announcements on social media. This will help attract your existing customers’ attention back to your brand. Not only the existing customers, but also the new audience may stumble upon such programs or offers, develop interest, and become your customers.

This way, you won’t only be able to retain your existing customer base but also broaden it.

• Tap into the Real Power of Content

Last but not the least, make sure your content is meticulously created. People often fail to realize how content can work wonders for a business. After all the marketing efforts you invest in, it is the ‘content’ that they see first on your site, social media page, email, and literally everywhere.
Therefore, if you really want to rule the hearts and minds of your audience, making your content engaging is indispensable. Especially when decision-making has become harder for customers and they want help choosing between various products/services/offerings by various companies, content can be their guide.
Make sure that your content is insightful, informative, motivating, engaging and of course – optimized for keywords. Use various tools to research keywords around COVID-19 and optimize your blogs, articles, listing page content, etc. with them.

Afterall, CONTENT IS KING for Bill Gates and broadly – for every business.

Summing Up

COVID-19 crisis has undoubtedly toughened maintaining and building customer loyalty. However, with several effective customer retention strategies as discussed above, you can win back your customers’ trust and retain their loyalty.
Good luck with building your customer loyalty!