When dreaming up ways to improve search engine results, few SEO specialists consider customer loyalty. However, customer loyalty plays a very crucial role in marketing for a company.
Lessons From Amazon
Amazon never set out to become a brand driven by customer satisfaction. Their primary concern has always been to fulfill orders as efficiently as possible, but along the way they were able to gain valuable insights of customers. All reviews on Amazon are 100% due to the efforts of verified customers. By allowing consumers to share their own experiences, Amazon was quickly able to build an incredibly trustworthy service.
High customer satisfaction translates directly to customer loyalty. Any time a customer is dissatisfied with an Amazon product, they receive a full refund, and typically also gain a complimentary service from the company to incentivize the customer to come back. Customers love to have a voice, and Amazon is more than happy to provide them with a way to be heard by other target customers. Companies with a customer focus certainly have a thing or two to learn from Amazon regarding their customer loyalty methods.
6 Additional Components
It is no simple task to replicate the efforts of Amazon. For this reason, the search engine optimization specialists from Onimod Global are here to offer several simple ways in which you can develop better customer loyalty within your own organization. The following 6 tips are based off of Wesley Young’s article that was recently published through Search Engine Land:
- Social Loyalty: Social media has grown to wield an impressive amount of influence over any given company. Recently, Facebook began appealing to users looking for recommendations regarding any number of products or services. This feature allows other users to weigh in on the topic and recommend businesses that they find relevant to their friend’s search. This word-of-mouth by proxy through Facebook is significant because it disrupts typical search engine procedures.
- Narrative Control: As mentioned with the example of Amazon, online reviews carry an incredible amount of power. Make sure that you are giving customers a way to express their loyalty via online platforms such as Facebook and Yelp. You can even use this information as a testimonial to the benefits that your company offers.
- Forever Loyal: Truly loyal customers will seek out a preferred business no matter what the odds. Young used the example of Chick-Fil-A to represent this ideal. He noted that no matter where he goes, he can find a line out the door of Chick-Fil-A, even when other area fast food restaurants have no wait at all.
- Loyalty Economics: It can be difficult to track down truly loyal customers. Typically, a company’s marketing efforts toward new clients are much more expensive than if the company were to simply continue marketing toward dissatisfied customers. For this reason, it may be worth considering ways in which you can better the experience of existing customers rather than solely focusing on new customer leads.
- Loyalty Database: Data is an invaluable resource for any business. Data regarding repeat customers is even more essential to promoting growth and prosperity. Once you are able to gain information about current loyal customers, you will be more easily able to locate new ones, which cuts out a lot of wasted ad dollar being used in search engine marketing.
- Determining Improvements: Even if a company’s customer satisfaction ratings are high, there is usually significant room for improvement. This issue points back to the loyalty database and what insights it can provide to your business. By going back over the numbers you can begin to paint a much clearer picture for both current and potential customers about your business and why it is the right choice for them to purchase goods and services from.
