Customer Retention through Brand Experience

Branding is the process of turning products and companies into brands. It is the consistent and disciplined way a company communicates a brand’s essence to the public. A consumer’s response to the brand revolves around the brand’s image. Today’s consumers have become brand-savvy, and with increased brand expectation, it’s becoming tougher for marketers to deliver on their brand promise to potential and existing customers.

So, how can marketers deliver on brand promise?

Brand Experience

Experiential marketing is a concept that integrates elements of emotions, logic and general thought processes to connect with the consumer. This ensures that there is no gap between the brand promise and the brand delivery. The goal of experiential marketing is to establish the connection in such a way that the consumer responds to a product offering based on both emotional and rational response levels.

Appealing to a variety of senses, experiential marketing seeks to tap into that special place within consumers that has to do with inspiring thoughts about comfort and pleasure, as well as inspiring a sense of practicability. It is all about interacting with person and bringing your brand alive. Personal experiences help people connect with a brand and make intelligent and informed purchasing decisions. It’s the difference between telling people about features of a product/service and letting them experience the benefits for themselves. When done right, it is the most powerful tool to win customer loyalty.

The Art of Customer Retention

Once the decision to buy has been made and the customer has been acquired, a different process begins. It is called relationship maintenance. Companies are realizing that it is more expensive to find new customers than to keep existing one. It is therefore important to invest in existing customer relationships and ensure that they keep growing in a mutually-beneficial manner. Customer retention techniques can help ensure that the customer stay loyal to the brand and is not lured away by competitors. Because we are living in the age of recommendation, experiential marketing gets people talking.

Understanding Customer Retention

Indicators of customer’s retention include customer’s actions, repeat business, demand and purchase of ancillary services, recommendation to others and frequency of purchase. In other words, customer retention is not customer satisfaction.

Customer retention rate is calculated by measuring the percentage of lost customers against versus that of existing customers over a quarterly or annual period without including new customer acquisitions. Customer retention strategy supports customers’ experience.

How to Build Customer Retention Strategy

For a brand to have a total customer loyalty then it has to give a “perceived” value to the customers. The customers must be connected to the brand emotionally and rationally. Customer must “trust” the brand. To build a customer retention strategy, it’s important to identify the target market’s lifestyle/behaviour and build a customer experience around it. Once a customer could see a personal value in your communication, then you are building a customer retention strategy.

When building a customer loyalty strategy, business owners should ask themselves these questions:

1 Do we know our customer’s expectations? If we do, how can we exceed them?

2 What makes our brand unique in the eyes of our customers?

3 To what extent can we grow the business with existing customers?

4 How do interactions with customers affect their satisfaction and buying behaviour?

5 Are there any customer segments that require different treatment?

6 How loyal is the customer base and how can it be improved?

How to Implement Customers Retention Program

A plan for implementing a culture retention programme should include:

· Appropriate research for identifying the benefits.

· Testing them for prospective customers’ interest and effectiveness.

· Following this with further research once implemented to make certain that the customer retention program is working.

Summarily:

· A brand that gives customer satisfaction through customer retention will benefit with positive customer activation.

· The overall experience that the brand gives to the customer is very important. Is it positive? Negative? Or neutral?

· To succeed in today’s environment, brand owners must put themselves in the customer’s shoes.

· Brand experience must be looked at historically.

· Experiential marketing is not just for new customers but for all existing customers.

‘Yomi Olaniwun is in the Concepts and Business Development team of Bates Cosse Ltd and is a tested concept developer for a number of magazines.