How to Turn Your First Time Buyers into Lifelong Accounts

While it’s important to attract new customers to your brand, it’s also important to retain these customers and build them into loyal lifelong accounts.  Offering a standard discount promotion or special offer is no longer enough to keep your consumers engaged.  In this article, we’ll talk about specific tactics to turn your first time buyers into lifelong accounts.

How to Turn Your First Time Buyers into Lifelong Accounts

Get to Know Your Customers

Getting to know your customers shows that you value their business.  Customers especially love when they feel personally connected to a brand.  Make it easy for them to reach your business online through social media, online chat or technical support lines.

Showcase your desire to talk to the customer by focusing on their needs, and not just closing sales.  This will help build trust and create loyalty in a world where dozens of competitors are just a click or call away.

Create Unique Offers

Creating unique, timely, and personalized offers is an easy way to keep engaging with customers, and email automation is just one way to keep the conversation going.

For example: two weeks after a new customer makes his or her first purchase, send an email asking them how they are enjoying their product and offer them 20% off a purchase that month. If they redeem the 20% off coupon, you can start sending additional offers or promotions that are relevant to the customer’s purchase history.

These small touches are a great way to keep your customers engaged and encourage brand loyalty (as well as future purchases).

Acknowledge Your Customers

Customers love to be acknowledged, and social media is the perfect environment for growing businesses to publicly connect and thank their clients. If a customer tweets something positive about your product or service, retweet and thank them for sharing.  Spread some social media love.

Demonstrate Integrity

If you know that you made a mistake, own up to it.  Sometimes a simple apology is all it takes, but going over and above and offering to compensate for the mistake by offering the service for free or at a discount is a good way to turn the situation around.  When a company models this kind of behavior, it establishes a solid foundation that customers can trust.

Maintain Consistency

It takes more than a one-time gesture or discount to build a loyal following. Consistency means that your customers should expect this level of service each and every time they interact with you.

If you have already drawn customers to your brand, you’re halfway there.  Now, work on those relationships to ensure they are lifetime accounts.