Every business owner try to develop and implement a strategy to entice loyal customer. In this strategy, there are two basic steps to be performed.

First step is customer acquisition. You can read a nice article discussing about the fundamental guide to customer acquisition here. In this article, you will find informative customer acquisition study case. Therefore, you can learn several ways to get a customer here.

The second step is convert current consumer to be a loyal customer. There are several articles that explains customer loyalty program here. We can draw a conclusion from them that all successful customer oriented strategies have one fundamental thing, namely customer oriented attitude. Attitude that has been owned and implemented by all people in your organization.

If all people have an excellent customer oriented attitude and all the activities are customer focused, you have a big intangible capital to retain loyal customer. The rest thing is enhancing your customer oriented strategy.

By James Dodkins [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Customer oriented activities examples

1. Creating a good customer experience.

After attracting prospect to buy your product. Make them remember to your product. How? by performing after-sales activities with them, such as: customer education program.

Before and after buying, product knowledge must effectively deliver to your prospect and your consumer. Create an outstanding learning experience with your consumer. Once they try, consume, mastering the product (know the product detail, know to utilize all features), and get benefits from the product, they will find that the product is match with their needs and solve their problem. Afterwards, they will be satisfied.

You will find that satisfied customer is more reluctant to shift buying another product.

2. Creating user club.

This activities is special for software makers, but it can be performed by other industry too. If your revenue generation is from in-app purchase, you can build paid user club.

In paid user club, the member receive newsletter of new apps feature, core tips, apps related guides, technical data, customer review, full support help-desk, and so on.

By building this club, you have created a fundamental customer relationship management system and symbiosis mutualism between you and your customer. As a consequence, the chance of retaining your loyal customer is higher.

3. Customer focused

In every activities, put your customer first. This is what we call customer focused. In this activities, you should see customers as a partner, not to see their transaction only.

There are three phases to implement this examples: introduction (customer acquisition), two ways communication (customer relationship management), and feedback (customer retention).

You can read my previous article how performing customer feedback can obtain loyal customer and retain your current customer.

4. Analyze big data

As you know, with appropriate data you can make a right decision. You can carry out some analysis and draw a conclusion with correct data. So, customer data analysis is included in one of the customer oriented activities.

How to get customer data? I show you the most favorite and basic example, by running a loyalty program. The goal of this program is to collect the customer data ( customer trend, customer behavior, customer transaction, customer complaint, customer satisfaction level, customer feedback, customer reason why they join, customer reason why they left, and so on ). Below are the basic example to get customer data:

a. Develop loyalty program.

For example: member card, frequent-flyer card, etc.

b. Introduce your loyalty program to current customer.

Encourage the customer to be a member. These are the sample how to approach the current customer:

- Communicate with your customer that they will get a reward for enrolling the loyalty program.

- Explain to the customer that they can obtain more tailored product and service based on their needs if they join the program.

Once you run the customer loyalty program, you can obtain the data. But, there is basic principle in customer data analytics, the main point is how to gather the right data  ( not to gather enormous data but not the correct  one )

Afterwards, with appropriate data that are collected to the correct source and based on your need, now you can perform customer analytics.

Through customer analytics activities, you can get some beneficial for your retaining loyal customer program in your customer oriented strategy implementation. They are:

a. You can pick the right segmentation based on customer need.

With this segmentation you can develop product and service based on the segmentation and focus on it.

b. You can understand your customer’s preference (incline).

With this good information, you can perform an action, a product, and a service based on customer’s need. You can also deliver list of products and let the customer choose based on their want.

c. You can get and measure the level of your customer loyalty.

You can analyze and group them in several tier, such as: general customer, special customer, elite customer.

You can develop a special program based on the level, for examples: for elite customer, they can get very special treatment in very special place, elite customer can have special access to your particular directory or sources, elite customer are always invited to very limited and special event and outstanding experience, etc. And disseminate your elite member special program through social media site, blog, newsletter, forums, group, etc.

By doing this program, it will encourage the others members to be a premium member or an elite member.

Summary

By enhancing customer oriented strategy and implement it persistently, you have big chance to keep your current customer and make better relationship, and also convert them to be a loyal customer.