In the second and concluding part to our guide to building brand trust loyalty, we look at how to DELIGHT our customers.
To build brand loyalty we need to develop TRUST in our brand. Here at Wesley Clover, we use a straightforward formula to focus our efforts on building brand trust and therefore loyalty.
The formula we use to build brand loyalty is
T=R+D
Trust = Reliability + Delight
This recipe develops loyalty through building brand TRUST.
In summary, part one identified that to build brand trust through establishing reliability we need to:
- Build it well, so it doesn’t have unexpected results
- Harvest testimonials and case studies and shout about them
- Aid advocates to scream and share their opinions about you
- Use relevant language that our target customer will understand
- Make it really easy to use and not be confusing
- Leverage content marketing to become experts in your field
- Enable word of mouth to become recommendations
People Buy From People We Trust
Building brand trust takes many forms. Trust has become the foundation of building brand loyalty. We base our buying habits on trust to cut through the similar features that products have.
In business, we may all feel we’re trustworthy; however, this is defined by perceptions. As more and more companies become SaaS-based, we no longer look for direct customer service but choose to research ourselves, see opinions and make our own minds up. When potential customers are online searching for an answer to their problems, when they come across your company they need to be convinced you can deliver what they need.
By delivering what your customer needs, in a location accessible to them, it helps build delight and therefore start the process of brand trust and loyalty.
How to Build Loyalty and Brand Trust Through Delight
1. Make it Look Awesome
Effective design is achieved through essential elements like balance. Balancing makes it easier to read and allows white space to flow. This enables focus and attention can be highlighted to a call to action or critical point. Grids visually align items which aid the eye down the page. These grids help users scan to find relevant information to them. Proper hierarchy of type also assists in scanning. Don’t use too many colours either whether they compliment each other or not. At Wesley Clover, we typically use two base colours and then either saturate or darken them throughout the page to dramatic effect. Images that you use need to be relevant. With photographs, we see so often that companies choose images without people in them. Showing people interacting and using your product with a smile on their face assumes other peoples delight. Effective design needs to be established through foundational brand guidelines. Read our guide on creating brand guidelines here >
2. Make Navigate and User Experience a Priority
The key to delight is through user experience. Make your interface simple and clear enough, so your user’s journey flows naturally. Creating a simple and effortless interface may sound obvious, but many entrepreneurs forget this simple point. Don’t put too much information or calls to action on a single screen. Where is the most critical data? Is it clear and distinct? Too much information means clutter. Clutter creates confusion. With confusion, users leave your product, confused. Our article here on navigation changes to improve UX shows you how to achieve this.
3. Incentivise Customers with Promotions
Promotions are intended to raise a customer’s interest and influence a purchase. Its goal is to make you stand out above your competitors. Promotional materials could be direct marketing or emails with incentives. Consider contests, especially during a conference or event to encourage participation and sign-ups. Product demos and trials also generate customer interest in your product. The goal of a promotional marketing campaign is to raise awareness about your company. To increase your appeal. Promotional marketing is valuable to both new and existing customers. It’s a reason for new customers to try the product, but importantly it builds brand loyalty with existing clients.
4. Make Customers Believe It’s Better Than What They Have Now
You can’t just tell people you’re better than the competition as this is difficult to prove. Customers are also unlikely to believe you. You need to focus on features and in particular your USP. This can be something unique that your competition doesn’t have. The best way to create a winning USP is with branding. This needn’t be costly, but by directing your features and marketing language, you will create an easy to understand positioning statement. What is different about your product that delivers a significant benefit? Is there a specific industry you can specialise in? Is there a way to brand your company or product uniquely and relevantly to your clients? Identify your USPs over your competition and when customers inevitably ask “Why should I buy from you?”, you have the answers to hand.
5. Make it Personal to Customers
Personalisation enhances the customer experience and builds brand loyalty. Knowing your customer and speaking ‘to’ them instead of ‘at’ them creates a great impression. With integrated Customer Relationship Management software (CRM) you can track and understand your customer. Platforms like Hubspot and Salesforce offer a great solution. Track individual preferences, website pages, patterns and interests to personalise emails to focus on what’s important to the client. By significantly enhancing the personalised experience your customers feel valued and appreciated.
6. Best Quality Throughout
To delight a customer it needs to be robust. The expected outcome of software or a solution needs to hit the mark. If software becomes confusing, then a customer can lose patience and therefore start to look at alternative products. Software bugs can be the most significant cause of frustration. Having efficient software testing procedures is essential. We have written an article on steps to undertake for software testing, and that can be found here >. A necessary part of delight is also your brand. This can be brand positioning, packaging, perception, UI as well as UX. Making a product look prestigious can help achieve a higher price as perceived quality is therefore elevated.
7. Keep Assuring Customers They’ve Made the Right Choice
This is one point that is often overlooked. Companies focus heavily on achieving new sales at the expense of marketing to existing customers. Research from the Harvard Business Review identified a 5-25 times increase in cost to acquire new customers over retaining existing customers. We can create customer lifetime value by building strategic content. This helps convince them they have made the right choice. That you’re experts in your field. Don’t give them any reason to churn. Instead, convince them they have made the right choice. The content you curate to achieve initial sales addresses why your solution should be purchased. After sales content should be focused on solving customers problems. You can also identify new features and showcase innovative ways other customers use your software.
Conclusion
Delighting our customers is essential in completing the equation T=R+D. Delight is so crucial and matched with reliability; we can build lifelong partnerships through trust. Through trust, we create brand loyalty.
It is relatively simple to make our product look awesome and have a functional interface, but we must ensure this is understood during an initial trial or introduction to our product. This then leads on to content marketing which can convince customers to make the initial purchase and then continue to convince them they have made the right choice.