Two critical things for big players in the food industry are generating new customers and retaining existing customers. As all the businesses are moving to the online domain, there is a basic concern on how to retain your customers online.
For every business, building trust and maintaining a healthy relationship with your customers is very important to retain them. After all, trust is what makes your customer confident to choose you again and again over your competitors and hence, benefits you in the long run by helping you build your brand with the trust earned. In this guide, we have mentioned 5 impactful ways to retain your customers online.
5 Ways to Retain Your Customers Online
There are many ways to retain your customers online. Let’s take a look at some of them: –
1. Engage with Your Customers
Engaging and networking is the basic requirement for building a connection with anyone both in personal and professional life. In fact, when it comes to professional life, it becomes a key factor in retaining your customers online. You can use SMS and email service to connect with your customers and create healthy connections. You can even build up a system where you can ask for the customers’ e-mail address and his/her phone number.
Let’s see how you can engage with customers:
- Small gestures like wishing someone a happy birthday or sending wishes on different festivals are very important in maintaining a healthy customer relationship.
- Send multiple offers and discounts on various occasions to give a special treatment to your customers.
Making a small effort to serve your customers will help you to create faith as well as strengthen the relationship with them. Such healthy relations and regular engagements will help you to retain your customers online and will also help you to increase your customer loyalty.
2. Run a Loyalty Program
Everyone loves to feel special. We human beings are social animals and craving for value and attention from others is our instinct. Whenever someone does something special for us or gives us attention, we feel happy and strengthen our relationship with that person or brand. This is the basic principle of loyalty programs used by multiple businesses for customer retention online and increasing confidence among the customers.
If you’re also looking at ways to retain your customer online for your business, entice your customers with a well-structured loyalty program for your loyal customers today.
Here’s a step-by-step process of creating a good loyalty program: –
- Begin collecting personal data such as mobile numbers, e-mails, birthday and anniversary dates, and use them to send personalized messages and offers.
- Keep a loyalty point system for every visit and purchase they make and help them avail tempting discounts.
- You can even give gifts when they reach certain loyalty points.
- Further, you can go one step ahead by giving some free service or a dish on the 10th or 20th order they make.
These slight gestures keep your customers engaged and make them come back to you again and again.
3. Build Connections through Social Media
At present where everything is accessed through the internet, one element that is making a drastic change and gaining huge popularity over the internet world is Social Media. According to many reports and surveys, a person spends most of his time surfing on social media while using internet services. The immense popularity of social media can help you to build up a community and retain your customers online. Social media is such a great tool that connects you and your customer directly.
Here’s how you can leverage social media to its fullest:
- Make your presence on all possible social media platforms by starting with Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest.
- Post curated and beautifully captured images of all your dishes on these platforms to engage, excite, and entice your future customers.
- Design creative posts on the occasions of festivals or any other important days of celebration.
- Build connections and look out for the comments and feedback of the customers in the comments section.
- Give a quick and timely response and also try to convert negative comments into positive ones if any.
- Design your calendar as per the analytics of your social media handles and build a solid community over there.
This is truly the best answer for how to retain your customers online.
4. Robust Feedback System
In this dynamic market, those who are ready to accept and change as per the needs and importance of the business and their customers are the ones who succeed in the long run. So, a genuine feedback system is very important to better understand what you are doing and where you are lacking. Such feedback helps you narrow down the areas of improvement and widen your client base.
Here’s how you build a solid feedback system: .
- Always ask for reviews and feedback from your customers on social media and also through e-mail and SMS.
- You can generate a system where a customer can give his/her review online on the dish they ordered.
- Make sure you reply to your reviews, especially the bad ones. This will help you to improve while making necessary changes and succeed in retaining more customers in the long run.
A Happy Customer is a Loyal Customer.
Getting your customer’s confidence is one of the most arduous tasks for any business. The key to maintaining trust is by offering your customers the best services and making thoughtful gestures to delight them.
So, serve quality food, ensure you offer quick and timely delivery, and provide great service every time to win your customers. Try to please every single customer without leaving any scope for a mistake. The best way to retain your customer is by making them happy in every possible way.
Conclusion
In this competitive world; companies need to build trust and a good connection with their customers for higher returns and better customer retention. So, it’s high time you shift to online methods of customer retention as they are easy and time-saving. The above-mentioned ways to retain your customers online will surely help in the long run of your business if executed properly and promptly. We understand that pleasing the customer is tough. That’s why we’ve created inresto’s feedback solutions to assist you to win and retain your customers.
