Research reveals that 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience. And what better way to improve this experience than getting to know what they want directly from them?

Here’s how you can use interviews to learn directly from your customers and improve their experience with your brand.

What Are Customer Interviews?

Customer interviews simply mean talking to your customers and asking them a few questions to better understand their perceptions about your brand and if you are meeting their needs properly.

Such interviews are conducted mostly in a one-to-one setting and follow a casual structure. The point of customer interviews is not to intimidate your customers or get serious information out of them.

They are very informal and provide you with an opportunity to look at your business from a candid and unbiased point of view.

Most customer interviews include questions related to their needs and wants, and if the business is able to fulfil them properly.

You can collect quantitative responses by asking them to rate certain aspects of your product or service, or simply rely on qualitative information.

Besides, you could also get some information on your competitors and how they are perceived relative to you. The point again is to understand where you stand and where to go next.

Conducting customer interviews can be a hectic process in terms of the time and effort you need to invest to get the right information. However, they can be way more helpful than mere surveys and questionnaires. 

You can use such interviews to make crucial business decisions such as transforming a product or service you offer or building a launch strategy for something that is in the pipeline.

Besides, you may also get a thorough perspective of the market from the eyes of your customers and use that information to predict future trends and plan accordingly.

The list of benefits customer interviews have is endless but all it comes down to is that you interview the right people at the right time.

Also, getting into a habit of interviewing customers regularly can be very helpful since you get up to date insights and understand the situation how it really is.

Types of Customer Interviews

Customer interviews can be very extensive and often take a lot of unintended directions if not structured properly.

Therefore, it is important that you understand the broad categories they can be put into so that you plan properly and get exactly what you need.

Here are some basic types of customer interviews organizations usually conduct.

Exploratory Customer Interviews

Exploratory interviews are useful in understanding the basic needs and wants of the customers and putting everything in a set structure to construct buyer personas.

These personas later help in market segmentation as you are clear on what the pain points look like for different types of customers and how they can be targeted better.

It is extremely important not to ask any leading questions here since the customers themselves are often unsure about their opinions and doing so may introduce bias.

Also, you may or may not mention your exact product or service depending upon what kind of information you want to collect. If it is limited to establishing customer pain points, don’t mention any product or company at all so that the customer can reveal his true needs.

Targeted Customer Interviews

These interviews are a little more focused as compared to exploratory interviews and include more specific questions. The goal is mostly to test your theories and perceptions of the market and see if they hold any value.

Targeted interviews are helpful when you need to develop a new product or launch new initiatives whether they are in terms of marketing, advertising, branding, or anything else of that sort.

The idea here is to focus on a specific problem your target audience faces and present your solution to see if it makes sense for the customer or not. 

The only thing you are gauging here is how the customer reacts to your solutions which may be in the form of a product or a service.

It is adequate to mention your exact product here or even use a few of your competitors’ just as a reference point.

Again, since you are gauging genuine customer reactions, do not ask any leading questions so that the response you get is one hundred percent authentic.

Business Efficiency Interviews

These interviews really zoom in on the needs and wants side and try to figure out if there are any inefficiencies with the solutions you are providing for their problems.

In the tech industry, this could also resemble one-on-one usability testing of apps where potential customers provide their honest opinion on how the app performs.

These interviews are helpful when your business is stalling and you really need to update your current market offering to better meet the needs of your customers.

Without doing such interviews regularly, you could run the risk of not being able to keep up with changing customer needs. And as a result, your competitors might run over you and throw you out of business.

You can conduct business efficiency interviews to identify room for improvement in your products or services and then fill in the gaps to always stay relevant.

Customer Satisfaction Interviews

Customer satisfaction interviews help find out the gaps between what you are delivering and what the customers expect.

You may ask questions about the usefulness of the products or services you offer and see how they fit in with the day-to-day workflow of your customers.

These interviews help minimize dissonance and give you insights that you can use to tweak your market offering accordingly.

You may get both positive and negative reviews about your business here so make sure you are ready to listen to whatever your customers have to say. 

If the reviews are positive, you may try to dig deeper to further identify room for improvement. Outright negative reviews may be taken with a grain of salt but make sure you learn from them and use this criticism constructively.

7 Steps to Conducting Great Customer Interviews 

1. Set clear goals

Conducting these interviews with a long list of customers is going to take up a lot of your time, and to use this time productively, you need to be clear on your goals. Be very clear on why you are talking to them and what you expect to get out of the conversation.

The goals don’t need to be very complex or data-driven. It could be as simple as getting feedback on your products or discussing solutions to a certain problem customers face.

Just pen down your basic thoughts regarding the goals and then you can build off of that idea to get relevant responses.

If you are confused, you can go over the different types of customer interviews we discussed above to get an idea of what goals can you set.  

2. Do your homework

The interviews do consume a lot of your time but more than your own time, you should value the time of the interviewees. At the end of the day, these are your customers and if you waste their time on useless discussions, it could negatively affect your brand.

Do thorough research on how the market is like and what the general perception of your business is.

Try to get as much information you can get without the interviews and then use the interviews to only build on that discussion. Do not waste time on getting answers that you already know or are outright irrelevant. 

This is also the point where you should decide if you need a team or an additional notetaker or you can handle everything yourself.

Either way, be fully prepared so that you can get straight to the point when you finally interact with the customer.

3. Structure everything

Take some time to structure your thoughts and make solid notes on everything you have till now. Also, don’t forget to list the questions down so that the interview doesn’t go off-track.

This does not mean that the interview needs to be very structured and there shouldn’t be any off-topic conversations.

These conversations are also essential as they help the customer get into their comfort zone and answer everything in a relaxed manner. 

Let the conversation flow naturally and improvise on the way. These questions will only be a reference point to fall back on in case you lose track or miss out on something.

4. Make the call

It’s time you finally meet the customer. Be confident in your interactions and make sure the customer feels relaxed as well.

You can start with greetings, introductions, and open-ended questions such as “tell me about yourself”. This will allow them to describe exactly who they are and what their career, ambitions, and hobbies are.

Before you delve into the bigger questions, you will need to go over the framework for the interview so that the person being interviewed knows what they are in for.

You may mention how long the interview will last, what your goals are, and that you want their honest feedback on everything.

5. Dig in deeper

This is the main part where all the exciting discoveries happen. At this point, you can start using the list of questions you jotted down during the initial phase. 

An important thing to note is that you want the customer to be as candid as they can be during the whole interview. Let them tell stories that are personal and real and avoid leading questions.

Use open-ended questions so that they give you a complete context of why they say what they say instead of giving a simple yes or no. You will get the most out of your customer when you ask them more ‘why’ questions.

You could also keep digging in with multiple layers of whys just to get to the thought behind it.

Most importantly, talk less and listen more. It can be tempting to cut in and complete their answers for them but avoid this as much as you can. Give your customer the time and space they need to answer a question fully before you move on to the next one.

Also, don’t forget to take notes or record (with consent obviously) their responses so that you can later document and report easily.

6. Express gratitude

When you are satisfied that you have received good responses to all the questions you had, thank the customer for taking out time and say goodbye. Let them know that you value their time and feedback and you are genuinely grateful that they took time out for this. 

Some organizations even go a step ahead and give incentives to customers who take time out for feedback interviews. This incentive could be free goodies, discount codes, vouchers, etc.

Incentivizing customer interviews is highly recommended if you have the budget for it. You can read more on how to encourage customers for such interviews with non-monetary incentives here.

7. Take buffer time

Take at least 10 to 15 minutes after each interview to process everything that was discussed and try to structure the hasty notes that you took during the interview. 

This practice is particularly helpful when you are conducting multiple interviews in a row.

If you don’t take these 10 minutes for yourself, all the information you collect will start getting jumbled up; After 2 or 3 interviews, you won’t be able to recall anything correctly.

Dos and Don’ts of Customer Interviews

Now that we know exactly how to conduct these interviews, here is a quick recap of all the dos and don’ts of a customer interview.

• Do: List down all the questions you need to ask in advance.
• Don’t: Include leading questions or questions that get a simple yes or no as a response.

• Do: Improvise during the interview and let the conversation flow naturally.
• Don’t: Interrupt the customer and try to change the course of the conversation forcefully.

• Do: Take notes and record the interview but with consent.
• Don’t: Rely on your memory or delay taking notes till the end of the interview.

• Do: Ask open ended questions and get stories out of them.
• Don’t: Confuse them with very broad questions that they find difficult to answer.

• Do: Express gratitude at the end and let them know they are valued.
• Don’t: Extend the interview above the time you initially told the customer.

• Do: Take time to process everything before the next interview.
• Don’t: Take interviews in a row without short breaks in between.

Conclusion

Taking good interviews is a skill, and like any other skill, it will take some time to master. Making customer interviews a regular part of your marketing or sales strategy can do wonders and you will only get good at it if you keep doing it.

You can also use customer feedback software to automate the process to some extent but interviews will always have their place.

So put yourself out there, plan your interviews, and start meeting your customers!

References & Sources 

1. Product Coalition: The Four Kinds of Customer Interviews
2. User Interviews: The Ultimate Guide to Doing Kickass Customer Interviews
3. AMS: Customer Interviews: Do’s and Don’ts
4. Atlassian: Customer Interviews
5. The Daily Egg: How To Do Customer Interviews That Reveal Priceless Insights
6. Strategyzer: The One Biggest Error in Customer Interviews
7. JoomConnect: Customer Satisfaction Levels
8. Marketoonist
9. SuperOffice: Customer Experience Statistics
10. OutboundEngine: Take notes

The post Customer Interviews: The Easy Guide To Gathering Awesome Business Insights [2024] appeared first on P2P marketing.

Consumer Profiling has helped hundreds of brands across the globe segment their clients and reach out to them in a more effective manner.

Read on to find out what customer profiling is, and how can it help achieve your business goals. You will also see some examples, and explore the process of building actionable customer profiles. 

What is a Customer Profile?

All businesses want to grow and develop. All businesses want to build a community of loyal customers who are satisfied, promote their brand, and always come back for more. But such a relationship can’t come out of the blue. 

First, you need to understand the people you sell something to. This understanding will allow you to prevent negative experiences, provoke positive emotions, identify the most effective marketing channels, and more. 

So, what is a customer profile?

Customer or consumer profiles (or buyer personas) help you understand who your current and/or ideal customers are. Based on the actual data, they represent customers who act and think similarly.

Thus you can segment all your clients into several groups and approach them differently. Without profiling, customer targeting turns into shots in the dark. 

Customer Profiling vs. Segmentation

Customer segmentation is a grouping of customers based on common characteristics like age, marital status, location, channels, etc. It comes in handy when you want to run a targeted campaign, which is sometimes enough. As today customer personality has become a major focus, general segmentation seems too narrow and a bit old-fashioned. That’s when consumer profiling takes the stage.

Consumer profiling is about the consumer’s experience and its improvement. This approach uses segmentation characteristics but pays more attention to the customer’s habits, previous experiences, pain points, touchpoints, etc. In the first place, it aims to understand customers, offer a better experience, service, or product. Of course, at the end of the day, it makes them buy more, recommend you to friends, and write positive reviews. 

So, basically, the key difference between segmentation and profiling is customer personality. Segmentation is like an empty shell, while profiling gives it a soul you can relate to. But look at the methods as partners in marketing crime, not as sworn enemies, and use both to create the fullest profile that will allow you to target the right people and get to know them at the same time.

The Benefits of Customer Profiling

As we mentioned above, customer profiling is the key to truly understanding your audience. Not only to learn their age, sex, location, or hobby but identify their buying patterns. 

For instanсe, a profile for a male of 25 years who lives in New York and loves music can include such important details as what kind of music it is, how frequently he buys new tracks, what channels he uses, what troubles he has with it, how he searches for new music, what payment method he considers the best, and so on. 

Such information provides more relevance to business strategies and decisions. It enables you to improve your product or service as well as communication with customers. And that’s not all. 

Other customer profiling benefits include: 

• Finding new leads. When you know which direction to look at, it’s not that hard to attract the right people.
• Objective decision-making. Research and statistics are always more powerful than assumptions. For instance, you might think that you have too few leads because of not appealing photos in your online store’s profile, but the truth is you don’t indicate the prices and people have to request them while it’s hardly convenient for them. 
• Coming up with new ideas about your product or service. Do people order your product or service for someone else? Provide an opportunity to add a gift card or special packaging.  
• Having a shared vision of your target customers. The way the marketers imagine your buyers can be different from how the salespeople see and approach them. 
• Enhancing marketing activities. When you know your customer, you can measure your goals more accurately and improve account-based marketing.
• Increasing retention and loyalty of your customers. Profiling can make your service or product more personalized and empathetic. When you know your audience, you provide more relevant content, product, and services. 

Customer Profiling Methods

There are different ways to do consumer profiling. Each refers to a certain segmentation: psychographics, buying traits, buying motivations, social statuses, and so on. 

For instance, one offers you to focus on what drives a customer to buy this or that product, another explores the lifestyle and hobbies of the consumers, and the third is more about sex, income, and occupation. 

There can be different criteria for grouping customers, and demographics and behavior are the two most common ones. The former works like a charm when it comes to targeted advertising on social media, the latter does you a good turn when you want to get valuable insights into how to improve buyers’ experience and your product or service in general. 

Steps to Creating Customer Profiles

What is a customer profile? Let’s put our researcher’s shoes on and take 5 steps, minding what information we need to gather: 

1.Conduct Research.

Use quantitative (e.g., measuring, calculating) and qualitative (e.g., interviews, observations) methods. You don’t need to get the answer from all of your customers or users, but you have to gather enough feedback to identify patterns and prove their credibility. 

Here are some ways to gather the information:

• Talking to customer-facing employees;
• Using web analytics;
• Offering customers to fill-in feedback forms;
• Checking out customer support logs;
• Analyzing social media;
• Conducting interviews;
• Reading industry-related reports. 

2.Identify Behavioral Attributes.

This step is about analyzing the data you gathered during research. You need to see what people with the same role (an accountant, for example) have in common. These things show what affects them when they try to solve their problems, fulfill their goals, solve problems, or interact with your product.

3.Create Behavior Scales.

Here you have to take the attributes, decide what values they can have, and turn those into the scales. Try to come up with at least 3 attributes per scale, but don’t push yourself to create as many attributes as possible (3-7 is the optimal variant). 

Hints to use as attributes for your scales:

• Experience (e.g., How does the person solve problems now? How did the person achieve goals in the past? What experience do they have with your product?).
• Human factors (e.g., How old is a person? Where do they live? What kind of schooling did they have? What physiological characteristics do they have?).
• Problems (e.g., What does the person try to avoid? What keeps the person from achieving their goals? What problems does the person want to solve?).
• Needs (e.g., What needs does the person want to satisfy? What does the person want to achieve?).
• Expectations (e.g., What does the person expect from your product?).
• Knowledge (e.g., What professional knowledge does the person have? What does the person know about your product?).
• Tasks (e.g., What does the person do? What tasks does the person perform? What are the typical scenarios?).
• Triggers (e.g., What prompts the person to start performing a task? What prompts the person to pause or stop?).
• Execution time (e.g., How much time does the person spend on the task? What determines the execution time? How does the lack of time influence the person’s behavior?).
• Environment (e.g., When and where does the interaction take place? What channels are used? How does this person impact the context?).
• Relationships (e.g., Who else is involved in the process? Who is a decision-maker? What influence does this person have on others?).

4.Put All Research Participants on Each Scale.

Add all the research participants to your scales, based on their answers. You will get something like this:

5.Identify Patterns.

If you see the same respondents at the same positions at least 5 times, it’s a sign that you’ve got client profiling material here. Keep looking for the matching data to find other repeating patterns that are the ground to build your customer profiles upon. Mind that any unique pattern can be transformed into yet another consumer profile and matters for your business. 

So, now you have grouped your customers, and it’s time to turn them into profiles.

Visualizing Customer Profiles

There are different tools to digitize customer data and transform it into profiles that are always at hand. Some even have generators that select the most suitable name and picture that fit your persona’s criteria. Here, we’ll use the UXPressia platform to build a customer profile template online.

3 Steps to Fill In a Customer Profile

1. A marketing customer profile template should be informative and action-provoking. So it’s important to add such data that brings out empathy in you and your colleagues. Start with a name, photo, and maybe a few facts about a person you describe. 

2. Now add more flesh to the profile: expectations, challenges, background, goals, frustrations, motivations, etc. 

• Background is personal information about your customer that relates to your product or service. It’s a story that tells about your persona’s journey, which brought them to you. Selling coffee, put your customer’s routine, their lifestyle description, coffee preferences, etc. 
• Expectations are what your customers anticipate from you by default or based on their previous experience with similar products or services. Sometimes the expectations are very low, especially after the bad experience in the past, and it’s your chance to win the customer over. 
• Goals are what your customers want to achieve by using your product or service. E.g., someone comes to your coffee shop to cheer up a bit while someone comes for the atmosphere or even Wi-Fi. Therefore, each group of customers will value different things in your shop. 
• Challenges are about problems or barriers your customers face trying to reach their goals. For example, a person would love to bring your muffins to work, but you don’t have a proper package. 
• Frustrations are existing or possible pain points. Think of what can discourage your customers from purchase, what can spoil their experience and scares them off. It’s always better to prevent customer’s displeasure than making amends afterward.
• Motivations are the reasons the customer comes to you. This section provides insights into increasing the consumer’s satisfaction. 

There are more sections to use inside the UXPressia CJM tool. It’s up to you whether to describe your customer’s previous experience, their current environment, or a scenario to put them in. Each section is customizable, so feel free to create a unique information block that makes sense in your particular case. 

3. Spice the profile with additional yet optional information like your customer’s favorite brands, skills, or personality type. This data will help to approach your customers or users from new angles, to open new dimensions, and deepen your understanding. This information is also good for targeted marketing, just like the data from step #1.

When the customer profile template is ready, you can always broaden or optimize it. Don’t forget to update the created profile with time to capture the up-to-date situation. Share the result with your colleagues and invite them to cooperate.

Tips & Tricks to Build the Most Accurate Customer Profile

1. To get a holistic view of your audience, use both quantitative and qualitative approaches to customer research. 
2. Avoid creating idealized profiles. Those should be as real as possible. If you don’t have some information, continue research instead of making it up. 
3. Personas must be and feel real. Get creative with scenarios you put them in (e.g., you can speculate on how your customer will act in a certain situation or how you want them to perceive your product or service), but any sensation must be designed for someone who does exist. 
4. Do not use pictures and names of famous people. It’s confusing and not very ethical.
5. Effective customer profiles are based on the research of your real customers and users. Do not try to assume this or that information. Made-up facts won’t do any good to your future strategies.
6. Take your time. Creating a consumer profile is not an easy task. Make sure everyone in the team working with you understands that too.
7. Gather and engage a team. Identify the key stakeholders, involve people from various departments (marketers, customer success agents, salesmen, etc.). Run internal workshops.
8. Mind the setting. If you design for an online buyer persona, focus on the online channels. 
9. You should update your profiles regularly, especially when your business goes through changes that could affect your personas (e.g., a new product release, new prices, etc.).
10. Use more behavioral patterns, fewer demographics. It’s not a target advertising campaign, you are trying to understand your customer and improve their experience.

Conclusion

So, now you know how to build an actionable consumer profile, what approaches are best to use and why, and how to combine different methods. It will not only help you run successful marketing campaigns but create relevant content and develop your product or service in the right direction. 

For more inspiration material, check out UXPressia’s ready-to-use templates. Happy mapping!

References & Sources

1. Commence: What Are the 3 Methods of Customer Profiling?
2. Referral Candy: How To Make A Buyer Persona
3. Hubspot: 8 Easy Steps to Creating a Customer Profile
4. SuperOffice: Customer Profiles
5. UXPressia: Сustomer journey map and personas templates

The post Customer Profiling: The Ultimate Guide for 2024 [Updated] appeared first on P2P marketing.

Want to improve your conversion rates, lead generation, and customer retention?

Choose any of these customer feedback management platforms!

Customer feedback is becoming the secret ingredient to improved personalization, understanding consumers better, making customers feel important, and identifying market trends. Microsoft informs that 77% of consumers would choose brands that encourage and respond to customer feedback. 

With such a large portion of customers desiring feedback and with so many customer feedback benefits, it would be an expensive mistake not to consider the best customer feedback tools.

Let’s look at what these tools offer, the importance of customer feedback, and how to choose the best customer feedback software for your brand. 

The Importance of Customer Feedback 

Businesses can Make Their Customers Feel Important 

When customers have a negative experience with a business, they don’t always feel like they have a voice. How could one customer take on a large organization? But with customer feedback, you can prove to your consumers that your business wants and values their opinion.

According to Khoros, 83% of consumers feel more loyal to brands that respond and resolves their issues. From this report, it’s safe to say that responding to your consumers not only ramps up customer appreciation but also solidifies loyal consumers. Using free customer feedback tools or paid ones can help you increase customer loyalty. 

It’s Easier to Understand What Your Consumers Like and Don’t Like

Preferences among customers are constantly changing, and thanks to customer feedback software, you can understand what your consumers prefer. If your business offers products that consumers want, they are more likely to return to your business. 

However, if you fail to offer your customers what they want, they will quickly find a business that does. Through feedback tools like surveys, polls, and forms, you can get a clear understanding of what your consumers are looking for. Doing this will eliminate the costs of using products that don’t sell or deploying marketing tactics that don’t engage your consumers. 

Brands Have a Better Insight into Market Trends

Let’s say you’re selling technology software, but after a few years, the software is outdated. In this case, you need to find out what your competitors are selling and how consumers respond to the new product. There’s no easier way to do this than using customer feedback software.

SingleGrain states that artificial intelligence is one of the top market trends today. This is because 84% of businesses believe that AI gives them a competitive advantage. Through customer feedback tools, you can stay ahead of this information and determine how well certain market trends work for your business and customers. 

Feedback Allows Businesses to Deliver Better Customer Experience and Products 

A study by TreasureData and Forbes confirms that 74% of customers are willing to support a brand based on the customer experience alone. This means that if your business delivers an excellent customer experience, there are already 74% of customers who would consider buying your products.

But how do you create a customer experience that wows your audience? You use customer feedback software! The best customer feedback tools can help you find insights into where your customer experience needs improvement. You can also use the available data and analytics to create a brand experience personalized to your consumers. 

How To Evaluate A Customer Feedback Tool

1. Clear user interface: Your customer feedback tool must have a clear user interface that’s easy to navigate. This is essential because you want to be able to access your information quickly and clearly. Having a clunky user interface makes each task take longer. It will also require more effort to train employees on the customer feedback tool. 
2. The number of available integrations: While tonnes of integrations might not be necessary for all businesses, choose a tool that offers the integrations you need. Without doing this, you might have to change the platforms you use or complicate your sales funnels. 
3. The quality of customer support: Ideally, the customer support of your software should respond quickly and offer helpful services. If anything goes wrong, or you find difficulty using the tool, a responsive customer support team makes all the difference. 
4. How many customization options exist: You want to add as much personal branding to your feedback as possible. By choosing a tool that allows you to customize the styles, colors, font, and so forth, you can successfully create a customer-centric strategy for feedback.
5. The tracking and analytics functions: The depth of tracking and analytics functions are crucial for any tool. You want your customer feedback tool to deliver a wide range of valuable data while making it easy to interpret. 

The Best 19 Customer Feedback Tools 

5 Best Voice of the Customer (VoC) Software

Usersnap

Usersnap allows businesses to add feedback buttons to their websites, take screenshots and video recordings and build surveys. You can also create customizable forms, sort feedback with labels, and view all customer feedback from a one-view inbox. There are security features too, and you can pause projects and add custom branding to feedback. 

Pricing:

• The Basic plan is $19 p/m
• The Startup plan is $79 p/m
• The Company plan is $149 p/m

Pros:

• The screenshot and video recording functions are helpful and unique.
• With custom tags, prioritizing and sorting feedback is easy.
• Customers don’t need to be tech-savvy to submit feedback. 
• The project management features are robust. 

Cons:

• Uploading screenshots and video recordings take a while.
• The dashboard interface needs improvement. 

Capterra Score: 4.7/5 stars (43 reviews) 

G2 score: 4.4/5 stars (37 reviews)

Website: https://usersnap.com/

Qualtrics

Qualtrics offers features to enhance customer, brand, product, employee, and design experience. You can capture real-time feedback, identify trends to drive brand loyalty, segment consumers, and identify at-risk consumers. It’s also possible to set targets, build surveys, test ad campaigns and perform in-depth market and product research. 

This software combines over 100 data sources and predictive analytics to help you understand how consumers feel about your brand. Qualtrics also has functions to measure employee satisfaction, and this software offer suggestions to improve workplace morale. 

Pricing:

• Pricing is available upon request. 

Pros:

• The tracking and analytics functions are in-depth and easy to access.
• Building a survey requires no technical knowledge.
• You have ample customization options for forms and surveys.
• This software is easy to configure and requires minimal training. 

Cons:

• The vast range of options can become overwhelming.
• The customer support could be more helpful. 
• The functions for data cleaning are limited. 

Capterra score: 4.8/5 stars (354 reviews) 

G2 score: 4.4/5 stars (2313 reviews)

Website: https://www.qualtrics.com/uk/

Medallia

Using Medallia, you can create interactive surveys, integrate multi-channel feedback, uncover detailed insights and collect real-time feedback across numerous channels. This software also allows you to use a speech-to-text engine, identify knowledge gaps, and maintain your online reputation on several social media platforms. 

Medallia offers various functions for tracking data like text analytics, cross-channel buyer journey analytics, and customer experience data. The AI-powered actions notify you of at-risk consumers and potential detractors. 

Pricing:

• Pricing is available upon request.

Pros:

• The surveys are highly customizable.
• There are sufficient features and functions for call centers.
• Learning how to use this software is simple.
• You can view how other teams from different companies in your area perform, provided they also use Medallia. 

Cons:

• Users report that this software is expensive to run.
• The data and analytics functions could use improvement. 

Capterra score: 4.4/5 stars (25 reviews) 

G2 score: 4.5/5 stars (85 reviews)

Website: https://www.medallia.com/

Clarabridge

Clarabridge gives brands all they need for optimal digital customer experience. Some of their features include surveys, text analytics, and omnichannel feedback via SMS, social media, email, forums, reviews, ratings, calls, and chats. You can also access insights for department performance, product performance, and marketing campaigns.

This VoC tool is also an employee feedback software. Consequently, you can keep your team happy while promoting customer feedback. Clarabridge supports real-time conversions too, and you can manage all your communications from a one-view inbox. 

Pricing:

• Pricing is available upon request. 

Pros:

• Users report quick and helpful customer service.
• The voice-to-text feature is accurate.
• There is an alert system for trending topics to keep your business updated.
• It’s simple to tune the natural language processor. 

Cons:

• The user interface needs improvement.

Capterra score: N/A

G2 score: 4.5/5 stars (85 reviews)

Website: https://www.clarabridge.com/

InMoment

InMoment is one of the most popular customer feedback management platforms around, and that’s for a good reason. This software offers omnichannel feedback in real-time, a survey builder, and an active listening studio. InMoment also gives you suggestions to resolve consumer cases and coaching tools for maximum customer experience. 

To keep your employees satisfied, you can collect employee feedback at several touchpoints and use predictive analytics to reveal unhappy employees. You can also unlock detailed industry insights and consumer analytics from an intuitive dashboard. 

Pricing: 

• Pricing is available upon request.

Pros:

• The reports are highly detailed.
• The coaching tools are intuitive and valuable to teach employees about customer service.
• You can view all the relevant information from one dashboard.
• The real-time suggestions make case management quick and effective. 

Cons:

• The support time can take a while to respond.
• This software lacks customization. 

Capterra score: N/A

G2 score: 4.7/5 stars (267 reviews)

Website: https://inmoment.com/

Feedier

Specializing in customer feedback, Feedier offers tools to create interactive surveys, collect feedback at several touchpoints, and run an SMS and email campaign. You can capture feedback in websites and apps and use business intelligence tools to get context from customer feedback.

Businesses can organize clusters, surveys, and data according to the teams that need them. There is also an action workflow that triggers live alerts to the relevant teams, and robust case management functions. 

Pricing:

• Pricing is available upon request. 

Pros:

• The customer engagement features are not intrusive.
• Configuring this software is simple.
• The survey templates are attractive.
• Businesses can offer rewards to consumers who complete surveys. 

Cons:

• The vast amount of functions can be overwhelming.
• Limited customization for surveys. 

Capterra score: 4.7/5 stars (117 reviews)

G2 score: 4.5/5 stars (23 reviews)

Website: https://feedier.com/

3 Best Visual Feedback Tool

Userback

With Userback, employees and consumers can give you visual feedback from any webpage. Consumers can review your brand through videos, images, and PDF docs. Users can add comments to feedback, create multiple feedback projects, and use custom branding to provide branded feedback to your consumers.

Pricing:

• 14-day Free trial 
• The Basic plan is $9 p/m
• The Standard plan is $39 p/m
• The Growth plan starts from $79 p/m 
• Contact Userback for a quote on the Premium plan. 

Pros:

• The automation tools are powerful and easy to use.
• Non-technical clients won’t find trouble submitting feedback.
• There are ample customization options.
• This software is quick and easy to configure. 

Cons:

• Clients must create an account to submit feedback.
• The design of feedback is quite clunky. 

Capterra Score: 4.9/5 stars (50 reviews) 

G2 Score: 4.8/5 stars (109 reviews)

Website: https://www.userback.io/

BugHerd 

BugHerd provides several tools for visual feedback while offering intuitive bug tracking capabilities too. You can collect website feedback, use automated screenshots and pin them to website feedback, and leverage real-time comments too. This software also you to create unlimited projects and invite unlimited clients and stakeholders to those projects. 

Pricing:

• The Standard plan is $39 p/m 
• The Studio plan is $59 p/m 
• The Premium plan is $109 p/m 
• Contact BugHerd for a quote on the Enterprise plan. 

Pros:

• The user interface is simple to use and powerful.
• Tracking feedback is straightforward.
• Dealing with bugs for website applications requires no coding knowledge.
• The automatic screenshots feature is helpful. 

Cons:

• Sometimes users don’t get promptly notified about bugs.
• There is no integrated screen recording feature. 

Capterra Score: 4.7/5 stars (54 reviews) 

G2 score: 4.4/5 stars (16 reviews)

Website: https://bugherd.com/

4 Best Customer Satisfaction/NPS Software

HubSpot Customer Feedback Software

This NPS software is part of HubSpot’s “Service Hub”. With this customer feedback software, you can create and share NPS and loyalty surveys and access various templates for your surveys. HubSpot also recommends templates based on customer satisfaction. You can view, analyze and compare all your data from an intuitive dashboard too. 

Pricing:

• Starter plan is $45 p/m.
• Professional plan is $360 p/m. 
• Enterprise plan is $1200 p/m. 

Pros:

• This software is super easy to use.
• The analytics provide enough tracking information.
• The template suggestions are useful and tailored to your consumers. 

Cons:

• Businesses might not want the other tools from the Service Hub. 

Capterra Score: N/A 

G2 score: 4.4/5 stars (629 reviews)

Website: https://www.hubspot.com/

Zonka Feedback

Zonka Feedback allows you to build customer loyalty through multilingual surveys, email surveys, and SMS surveys. Businesses can collect feedback through websites, track devices when they’re offline, and receive feedback alerts. You can also access essential customer metrics and real-time analytics. 

Pricing:

• The Professional plan is $99 p/m 
• The Growth plan is $199 p/m 
• The Enterprise plan is $499 p/m 
• Contact Zonka Feedback for a quote on the Custom plan. 

Pros:

• The functions and tools are versatile.
• You can swiftly create surveys by using their templates.
• The NPS surveys are attractive.
• The tool for offline surveys is and unique. 

Cons:

• The reports for surveys are not detailed.
• The features accommodate mobile more than desktop. 

Capterra Score: 4.8/5 stars (36 reviews) 

G2 score: 4.8/5 stars (39 reviews)

Website: https://www.zonkafeedback.com/

Simplesat

With Simplesat, you can create customizable surveys that work perfectly on every device, and you can use branding. This software focuses on surveys through email, so you can upload contacts via CSV and choose your sending frequency. Plus, Simplesat allows you to apply rich formatting to your emails and set automated reminders. 

Pricing:

• 14-day Free trial
• The Standard plan is $99 p/m
• The Pro plan is $249 p/m 

Pros:

• This software is intuitive and easy to use. 
• The customer support team is speedy and helpful.
• There are countless email templates available.
• You can create multi-question surveys. 

Cons:

• The reporting features are limited.
• The dashboard needs improvement. 

Capterra Score: 4.8/5 stars (59 reviews) 

G2 score: 4.9/5 stars (56 reviews)

Website: https://www.simplesat.io/

Startquestion 

This NPS software provides offers 50 survey templates. You can add images. Frames, buttons, and messages to your surveys, and add your logo and headlines. You can also set limits for answers and questions and use rules for survey transitions. Businesses don’t have to add Startquestion’s name on the footer of websites either. 

Pricing:

• The Start plan is $49 p/m
• The Business plan is $99 p/m 
• The Team plan is $199 p/m 
• Contact Startquestion for a quote on the Enterprise plan. 

Pros:

• The designs are up-to-date.
• This software requires minimal training.
• Startquestion often releases new updates.
• You can create automation for reports and workflows. 

Cons:

• Limited online resources for this software.
• The features are overwhelming. 

Capterra Score: 4.9/5 stars (69 reviews) 

G2 score: 4.8/5 stars (19 reviews)

Website: https://www.startquestion.com/

4 Best User Experience Testing Software

UserTesting

UserTesting specializes in providing insights for marketing, products, and consumers. You can create custom tests from scratch, perform A/B testing and mobile validation, create marketing campaigns and track consumers’ journeys online and offline. There is also a prototype testing function and a powerful research platform for product research.  

Pricing:

• Pricing is available upon request. 

Pros:

• The functionality is smooth and easy to learn.
• The customer support team is fast and helpful.
• The payment for taking tests is quick.

Cons:

• Users don’t always receive notifications when tests are available.
• Sometimes users upload prototypes that don’t work.

Capettera Score: 4.5/5 stars (88 reviews) 

G2 score: 4.4/5 stars (528 reviews)

Website: https://www.usertesting.com/

Hotjar

Hotjar offers heatmaps that identity where user attention starts and drops and enables you to perform A/B testing. You can create surveys to measure your NPS and prevent churn. There are also features for capturing real-time feedback, setting benchmarks, and targeting visitors. Hotjar supports all devices. 

Pricing:

• The Business plan is from $99 p/m
• The Scale plan is from $389 p/m 

Pros:

• The tools are comprehensive and easy to use.
• The data and analytics is detailed and pulls valuable insights.
• The heatmapping functions offer in-depth behavioral analysis.
• Configuring this tool is quick and easy. 

Cons:

• The pricing is expensive for small businesses
• There are no cross-domain tracking functions. 

Capettera Score: 4.7/5 stars (394 reviews) 

G2 score: 4.3/5 stars (203 reviews)

Website: https://www.hotjar.com/

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg provides heatmapping functions, campaign segmentation, behavior tracking, visitor tracking, and you customize the reports. You can also perform A/B testing, create surveys, set goals, and target profitable consumers. There are customizable templates for surveys, and you can get real-time notifications too. 

Pricing:

• 30-day Free trial
• Pricing is available upon request 

Pros:

• The insights and tracking functions are insanely informative.
• The heatmapping features are robust.
• This software is easy to use.
• The customer support is quick and helpful. 

Cons:

• Installing this software requires a learning curve.
• The video recording tool needs improvement. 

Capettera Score: 4.5/5 stars (71 reviews) 

G2 score: 4.2/5 stars (96 reviews)

Website: https://www.crazyegg.com/

Inspectlet

Offering dynamic heatmaps, A/B testing functions, and feedback surveys, Inspectlet is a simple customer feedback software. You can collect form analytics, record sessions, tag users, and access user behavior insights. There are also powerful filtering features.

Pricing:

• The Free plan is available.
• The Micro plan is $39 p/m
• The Startup plan is $79 p/m
• The Growth plan is $149 p/m
• The Accelerate plan is $299 p/m
• The Enterprise plan is $499 p/m

Pros:

• A/B testing and heatmaps features are robust.
• This software is easy to use and learn.
• There are many pricing plans to accommodate different businesses.
• Users can track web visitors’ IP addresses. 

Cons:

• Users report that the customer service is not quick or helpful.
• The admin features are clunky. 

Capettera Score: 4/5 stars (27 reviews) 

G2 score: 4.2/5 stars (24 reviews)

Website: https://www.inspectlet.com

3 Best Customer Survey Software

Typeform

Typeform is all about creating high-converting quizzes, surveys, polls, and similar forms. You can collect customer feedback through an intuitive dashboard with analytics and built-in media. Businesses can conduct market research by creating mobile-optimized forms and using easy-to-share reports. There are also features for lead generation and form templates. 

Pricing:

• The Basic plan is $29 p/m
• The Plus plan is $59 p/m
• The Business plan is $99 p/m

Pros:

• Users can build professional, attractive surveys.
• The user interface is clean.
• Extracting data is easy and convenient.
• There is a good deal of integration options. 

Cons:

• The pricing is expensive for small businesses.
• Some functions in the user interface don’t work.
• The data visualizations are basic. 

Capterra Score: 4.7/5 stars (441 reviews) 

G2 score: 4.5/5 stars (438 reviews)

Website: https://www.typeform.com/

SurveyMonkey

This customer feedback software offers features to engage your audience, improve customer experience and collect consumer feedback. You can conduct market research, build interactive surveys, track management, use dedicated phone support, and train employees on products. 

Pricing:

Personal plans:

• The Standard monthly plan is $37.50 p/m
• The Advantage annual plan is $400 annually 
• The Premier annual plan is $975 annually 

Business plans:

• The Team advantage plan is $27 p/m
• The Team premier plan is $61 p/m
• The Contact SurveyMonkey for a quote on the Enterprise plan 

Pros:

• There are ample customization options.
• Building and replicating a survey is quick and easy.
• The data visualizations are simple to interpret.

Cons:

• The templates for poll surveys are very limiting.
• The pricing is expensive for some businesses.

Capterra Score: 4.6/5 stars (8326 reviews)

G2 score: 4.4/5 stars (17,027)

Website: https://www.surveymonkey.com/

SurveySparrow

SurveySparrow supports omnichannel marketing by offering features like a survey builder, data and analytics, and marketing automation. You can use survey themes, craft attractive surveys, build conversation forms, develop automated workflows, and use real-time data. There are also features to manage your audience and extend your reach. 

Pricing:

Personal plans:

• The Free plan is available.
• The Basic plan from $39 p/m
• The Premium plan from $59 p/m

Business plans:

• The Business plan is $149 p/m.
• The Enterprise plan is $549 p/m.
• Contact SurveySparrow for a quote on the Elite plan.

Pros:

• Creating and sharing surveys takes minimal time and effort.
• The support team is quick and helpful.
• There are countless templates to get you started.
• The reporting tools are in-depth. 

Cons:

• There is a lack of email marketing functions.
• Some features are buggy.
• There are limited customization options available. 

Capterra Score: 4.4/5 stars (51 reviews) 

G2 score: 4.5/5 stars (674 reviews)

Website: https://surveysparrow.com/

Conclusions And Our Picks

If you want to offer your customers what they want, make your consumers feel heard while keeping ahead of market trends, opt for customer feedback software. There are so many brands, experiences, and product feedback software available. Your business can use this guide to choose which customer feedback software suits you best.

To making choose your ideal customer feedback tool, easy, we have our top picks for small and large businesses. Clarabridge is our top choice for small businesses. This customer feedback software can help you build surveys, collect real-time data, and omnichannel feedback. 

Small businesses can also use Clarabrige’s features as employee feedback software to improve workplace conditions. For large businesses, our top pick is Medallia. Large enterprises can track product, employee, brand, and customer feedback all from one tool. You can also build interactive surveys and access real-time analytics.

Medallia allows large businesses to use omnichannel feedback too, access AI functions and customer insights, all available from the dashboard. 

References and Sources:

1. Microsoft: State of Global Customer Service Report
2. Khoros: Must-know customer service statistics
3. SingleGrain: 42 Digital Marketing Trends You Can’t Ignore
4. Treasure Data: New Study Finds Data Key to Unlocking Superior Customer Experience
5. Qualtrics
6. Medallia
7. Clarabridge
8. InMoment
9. Feedier
10. Userback
11. Usersnap
12. BugHerd
13. HubSpot Customer Feedback Software
14. Zonka Feedback
15. Simplesat
16. Startquestion
17. UserTesting
18. Hotjar
19. Crazy Egg
20. Inspectlet
21. Typeform
22. SurveyMonkey
23. SurveySparrow

The post Customer Feedback Software: The top 19 For Customer-Centric Brands [Review] appeared first on P2P marketing.

When businesses engage with their customers through web chat, those consumers are likely to spend 60% more for every purchase! Webchat also has a customer satisfaction rate of an incredible, 85%!

These statistics are through the roof and your business can get in on this action too. I’m sure you’re wondering, “How can I do this and when can I start?”.

The answer is simple: pick a customer engagement platform for your business, and you can start right after this article!

Let’s check out the best customer engagement platforms in 2024, what customer engagement platforms are and why they are pivotal to your business.

Quick Comparison: Best Customer Engagement Platforms

Here is a quick review of the pricing, G2/Capterra ratings and our P2P ratings for the best customer engagement platforms in 2024. We have a detailed review further below! 

What are Customer Engagement Platforms

Customer engagement platforms are marketing platforms that specialize in increasing customer engagement through numerous methods. Many platforms emphasize live chat functions to ensure customers engage with your business at every touchpoint without requiring additional resources and time.

Live chat functionality has become the art of these platforms.

Some customer engagement also use other techniques and communication channels to optimize and maintain customer engagement.

Take a look at this video by LYFE Marketing:

Customer Engagement Platform Benefits

Boosts Brand-to-Consumer Experience

Customer engagement platforms allow brands to provide customer feedback, inform consumers, and extract data on consumers. These capabilities all contribute to increasing brand-to-consumer experience. 

By providing customer feedback, your consumers will believe you care about them and their experience with your brand. To prove this, 96% of consumers mention that customer support determines their brand loyalty.

Having access to detailed consumer data allows businesses to create personalized marketing efforts that appeal to their audience. Thanks to customer engagement platforms, this is possible. 

Amplifies Sales Funnel Velocity

The more you engage your consumers, the quicker they will move through your sales funnel. For example, you can use personalized push notifications to re-engage users who are losing interest or use chatbots to answer customer questions efficiently. 

As fully engaged customers lead to a 23% higher profitability, it’s easy to see how customer engagement has encouraged consumers down businesses’ sales funnels. For the risk of losing prospective consumers or loyal consumers, a customer engagement platform will have what you need to correct this and convert those consumers. 

Improves Customer Loyalty

Earlier, we briefly mentioned how customer support increases customer loyalty. Think about this in your own life. If a business has super-fast, helpful customer support and sends you personalized marketing material, you’re most likely going to stick with that business.

Customers want to know that you have their best interest in mind. And there’s no better way to prove this than using customer engagement platforms for timely interactions tailored to their preferences. 

Increases Retention Rate 

If your customer was about to churn, how would you know, and what would you do? Fortunately, many customer engagement platforms provide alerts for potential churns, and some also offer real-time suggestions to prevent this. 

Besides this feature, these platforms also offer popups, multi-device marketing, and detailed analytics to retain consumers.

How to Evaluate Customer Engagement Platforms

1. Can consumers opt for self-service?: As over 60% of users prefer self-service, the customer engagement platform you choose should accommodate this. If you have ample customization options for the self-service portal, even better. 
2. Can you implement a knowledge base?: We’ve already established that customers want to get things done themselves, so help them out with a knowledge base. A knowledge base will have tutorials, articles, and similar resources to inform and train consumers about your product. Opt for a customer engagement platform that allows you to build an intuitive knowledge base for your consumers. 
3. Does the platform offer chatbots?: With chatbots being the fastest growing form of communication, this is a train you don’t wanna miss. Chatbots can save your business loads of time while helping consumers and pushing them further down your sales funnel. It’s always great to have customization options for your chatbots.
4. Does the platform have live chat functions?: Some consumers may be skulking around on your website without finding the information they need. Instead of abandoning your site like most other consumers or making the effort of contacting customer support, web visitors can use live chat. Live chat is a quick and simple way to engage prospective consumers, and that’s why your customer engagement platform needs to offer this feature. 
5. What marketing channels can you use?: Although you might not want to use 101 marketing channels, choosing a customer engagement platform that offers more rather than less is a safe choice. Doing this allows you to explore which marketing channels get the best results, and you can segment your consumers accordingly. Without plentiful marketing channels, you could limit yourself to channels that your audience doesn’t respond to. 

14 Best Customer Engagement Platforms

1.EngageBay

EngageBay is an all-in-one solution for brand-to-customer engagement. You can build high-converting landing pages, create ad campaigns, use live chat, popups, forums, and access a 360-degree customer view. EngageBay also enables brands to practice multi-channel engagement, manage deals and tasks and send broadcast messages.

You use email marketing on EngageBay too, and access lead scores based on customer interaction. For customer support, businesses can use canned responses and service automation. EngageBay also offers SMS marketing functions, push notifications, and email templates. 

Pricing:

• Free plan is available
• Basic plan is $14.99 per user, p/m 
• Growth plan is $49.99 per user, p/m
• Pro plan is $79.99 per user, p/m

Pros:

• There is a free plan available.
• The paid plans are affordable for small businesses.
• EngageBay offers everything businesses need to optimize customer engagement.
• You can leverage SMS and email marketing with one tool.
• This platform is beginner-friendly and provides ample training material. 

Cons:

• The dashboard needs more customization.
• The landing pages aren’t automatically mobile-optimized. 

Capterra Score: 4.6/5 stars (73 reviews) 

G2 Score: 4.6/5 stars (103 reviews) 

Website: https://www.engagebay.com/

2.Redpoint

Using Redpoint, brands can enjoy omnichannel personalizations and real-time interactions. To help your brand achieve a fantastic online reputation, this platform offers user-friendly machine learning and detailed analytics. You can also match consumer profiles, extract as much data as you need, and access consumer profiles in real-time.

Redpoint allows businesses to segment consumers, create support teams, and build a firm security infrastructure. It’s also simple to create ad campaigns, personalize your website, and use targeted ads. 

Pricing: Pricing is available upon request 

Pros:

• Redpoint has rich consumer engagement features to help businesses onboard, maintain and retain customers.
• The data and analytics functions are highly advanced and detailed.
• Businesses have access to tonnes of data to enhance customer journeys. 
• Narrowing down your ideal buyer is now seamless.
• There are security and privacy features available. 

Cons:

• Pricing is not readily available.
• Features might be too advanced or unnecessary for small businesses. 

Capterra Score: N/A

G2 Score: N/A

Website: https://www.redpointglobal.com/

3.Nuance Digital Engagement Platform

This customer engagement platform is all about helping your brand achieve the best consumer experience possible. You can create automated, multi-channel pipelines, use a virtual assistant to help your consumers, and perform A/B testing. Additionally, the Nuance Prediction Service reveals why consumers engage before reaching you. 

Businesses will also have access to real-time analytics, automated conversations based on user demographics and behavior, and multi-device marketing. There are numerous security solutions too, like fraud prevention, authentication, and public security. 

Pricing: Pricing is available upon request 

Pros:

• Businesses have access to a wide range of consumer data.
• Enforcing security protocols for consumer data is possible and easy.
• The virtual assistant is intuitive and responsive.

This customer engagement platform offers mobile-responsive features.

• Segmenting consumers and identifying your ideal buyer is easy through the available analytics. 

Cons:

• The pricing is not readily available.
• Data analytics is inconsistent. 

Capterra Score: N/A

G2 Score: 4/5 stars (1 review) 

Website: https://www.nuance.com/

4.Eudata 

Eudata helps brands create automated sales and customer services while using chatbots too. With this customer engagement platform, you can automate up to 70% of the customer care process, allow users to contact you via WhatsApp, and provide unified experiences to your consumers.

Businesses can use Eudata for Amazon Connect too, which can address all forms of customer service. You can track all stages of a consumer journey with this tool and access advanced customer insights. 

Pricing: Pricing is available on request 

Pros:

• Eudata is the ideal customer engagement platform for online stores.
• You can create an almost fully automated solution for customer onboarding and care. 
• Speaking to web visitors over WhatsApp is easy.
• Eudata offers multiple features and capabilities for Amazon Connect. 

Cons:

• The pricing is not readily available.
• Eudata does not offer the essential consumer-engagement features that small businesses need to start.

Capterra Score: N/A

G2 Score: N/A

Website: https://eudata.com/

5.Genesys DX

Before launching this powerful customer engagement platform, Genesys DX went by Bold360. Genesys DX went on to acquire Bold360 to integrate it within their platform. This solution allows businesses to communicate with their audience to show customer appreciation with minimum friction.

The features you can expect from Genesys DX include live chat, AI-powered chatbots, omnichannel engagement, consumer profiles, and conversation histories. You can also use their obsessive security and AI self-service features.

This customer engagement platform offers a customer acquisition engine for optimal consumer onboarding and detailed insights. The tracking and analytics give you complete access to consumer data, predictive analytics, and customer journey analytics. 

Pricing:

• Genesys Cloud CX 1 plan is $75 p/m
• Genesys Cloud CX 2 plan is $110 p/m
• Genesys Cloud CX 3 plan is $140 p/m

Pros:

• Genesys DX has many security features to keep your consumers’ data safe.
• There are tonnes of automation features and AI-powered functions, leaving you with more time.
• The data and analytics functions are in-depth, and you can access insights for almost every consumer interaction.
• There are integration options available.
• You can choose to be billed hourly instead of monthly, which can save small businesses money. 

Cons:

• The monthly pricing can be expensive for small businesses. 
• Users report slow feedback from customer support.
• Users mention the interface needs improvement. 

Capterra Score: 4.3/5 stars (26 reviews)

G2 Score: 3.4/5 stars (27 reviews) 

Website: https://www.genesys.com/

6.Intercom

Intercom specializes in customer support, customer engagement, and multi-channel marketing. Businesses can access features like live chat, chatbots, real-time messaging, self-service options, and consumer segmentation. 

You can also create automated workflows, access consumer management tools, and use one inbox to house all your conversations. Businesses can unite their consumers’ data too, and they can access behavioral data.

Pricing:

• Start plan is $59 p/m 
• Grow plan is $119 p/m 

Pros:

• The tracking and analytics features are in-depth.
• You can integrate Intercom with over 250 apps.
• Intercom offers brands solutions based on their growth stage.
• Businesses can execute multiple forms of consumer engagement with one tool.
• There are ample personalization options available.

Cons:

• The pricing can be expensive for small businesses.
• Users report slow feedback from the customer support team.

Capterra Score: 4.5/5 stars (769 stars)

G2 Score: 4.4/5 stars (1593)

Website: https://www.intercom.com/

7.LiveChat

LiveChat provides a vast range of chat tools, customer engagement functions, security features, and reporting capabilities. You can use targeted messaging, access chat history, and add chat buttons to your website. It’s also possible to archive chats, use canned responses, and collect chat ratings from your customers.

There is a lot of customization freedom for chat widgets too. For security purposes, LiveChat offers encryption, access restriction, data storage, visitor banning, and credit card masking. The reports and analytics solution offers customer reports, ticket reports, chat reports, agent reports, and a filter function to help you find what you need within seconds.

Pricing: 

• Starter plan is $16 p/m 
• Team plan is $33 p/m
• Business plan is $50 p/m 
• Contact LiveChat for a quote on the Enterprise plan

Pros:

• The data and analytics functions are highly in-depth.
• The pricing is affordable for small businesses.
• LiveChat offers rich security features.
• Businesses aren’t limited to customize the chat features.
•  The chatbots are intuitive and function smoothly.

Cons:

• Businesses can’t use automated messages.
• Configuring this tool can take some time and requires some training.

Capterra Score: 4.6/5 stars (1123 reviews)

G2 Score: 4.5/5 stars (691 reviews)

Website: https://www.livechat.com/

8.Pega

Pega merges customer engagement, automation, and AI capabilities to give brands an all-in-one customer engagement solution. You can detect potential churns, access real-time decisions based on customer signals, and use real-time AI to provide customer support.

You can also use Pega’s intelligent chatbots, virtual assistants, and automated patterns to optimize your workflows. Pega gives you all the tools you need to provide a top-notch user experience. 

Pricing: Pricing is available upon request

Pros:

• Pega has advanced automation and AI functions.
• Being able to detect churn rates and predict sales gives your business a better direction.
• There are detailed customer behavior and demographic insights.
• There are tonnes of training material for Pega available.
• Businesses can enjoy flexibility for personalization and automation. 

Cons:

• The user interface is not lightweight.
• The customization for mobile apps is very limited. 
• The pricing is not readily available. 

Capterra Score: N/A

G2 Score: 4.2/5 stars (216 reviews) 

Website: https://www.pega.com/

9.Engati

Engati provides an automated solution for consumer engagement. This customer engagement platform offers a simple code-free method to create bots and host bot training. There is also a personalized NLP engine for all the touchpoints of your consumers’ journey. You can engage with your audience on WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger, Web chat, and much more.

Via Engati’s one-view dashboard, you can check insights based on engagement, performance, and trends among your consumers. You can also set your chatbots to multiple languages and access a one-view inbox, storing all your communications. 

Pricing: 

• Free plan is available
• Professional plan is $79 p/m
• Business plan is $249 p/m 
• Contact Engati for a quote on the Enterprise plan 

Pros:

• You don’t need coding experience to create advanced chatbots.
• There are ample personalization capabilities available.
• Businesses can leverage many communication channels to engage customers.
• There is a free plan available.
• You can easily access all the essential information from the dashboard.

Cons:

• The free plan is highly limiting.
• Small businesses might find the paid plans are too expensive.
• The chatbots could be more customizable. 

Capterra Score: 4.3/5 stars (19 reviews) 

G2 Score: 5/5 stars (9 reviews) 

Website: https://www.engati.com/

10.SmartKarrot

To help your brand engage its customers, SmartKarrot offers engagement scores, various rules for different customer journeys, and customer segmentation. You can also access potential churn alerts, growth opportunity alerts, real-time updates, and in-depth tracking that you can easily filter.

SmartKarrot supports multi-channel campaigns too, such as email, popup, push notifications, and ad campaigns. You can also build comprehensive surveys for your audience and use advanced automation for emails, texts, and notifications. 

Pricing:

• Free 14-day trial is available
• Pricing is available upon request 

Pros:

• A free trial is available and gives businesses sufficient time to test this platform.
• The data and analytics are highly in-depth, and you can easily find the data you need through filters.
• SmartKarrot allows businesses to personalize customer journeys better.
• You can use this customer engagement platform for various marketing channels.
• Businesses have ample customization options. 

Cons:

• The pricing is not readily available.
• This platform requires a steep learning curve.
• The integration options are limited. 

Capterra Score: 4.5/5 stars (8 reviews) 

G2 Score: 4.7/5 stars (10 reviews) 

Website: https://www.smartkarrot.com/

11.LivePerson

LivePerson is an AI-powered conversational cloud that offers an array of customer engagement solutions. This platform pinpoints social media users who are likely to convert, offers a landing page builder, and can implement ad campaigns. Your website visitors can also easily contact you via WhatsApp, SMS, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, or Apple Business Chat.

To ensure your audience receives speedy customer service, you can convert audio calls into messages instead of having clients stay on hold. Businesses can unify customer care operations too, and they can prioritize social media conversations based on high-value customers.

Pricing:

• Pricing is available upon request.

Pros:

• This software requires minimal training.
• The customer care solutions are robust and intuitive.
• Businesses can use various channels to communicate with their customers.
• The data analytics are easily accessible and in-depth.

Cons:

• Pricing is not readily available.
• There is a lack of customization options for features.

Capterra Score: 4.4/5 stars (39 reviews) 

G2 Score: 3.6/5 stars (59 reviews) 

Website: https://www.liveperson.com

12.UserLike 

Choosing UserLike, you can use subtle support functions and set operator skills to match clients with their ideal sales rep. The sticky chat feature connects operators with customers they’ve spoken to before. UserLike automatically builds customer profiles based on public information and offers post and pre-chat surveys.

It’s also seamless to gather chat ratings with UserLike, define proactive chat timers, and use intelligent chat behavior based on your consumer’s information. UserLike offers audio calls too, and you can use canned responses and access detailed chat analytics. 

Pricing:

• Free plan is available
• Team plan is $100 p/m
• Corporate plan is $320 p/m
• Business plan is $800 p/m

Pros:

• The consumer profiles make it easier to create personalized marketing material.
• A free plan is available.
• Businesses can use audio calls, which is a unique feature for these platforms.
• The customer support features enable a more tailored customer experience.
• You can leverage multiple communication channels simultaneously.
• The user interface is intuitive and customizable. 

Cons:

• The pricing is expensive for small businesses.
• The free plan does not offer enough services for customer engagement.
• UserLike does not offer many mobile-optimized features. 

Capterra Score: 4.6/5 stars (633 reviews) 

G2 Score: 4.4/5 stars (384 reviews) 

Website: https://www.userlike.com/

13.Froged

Froged specializes in solutions for onboarding and keeping your consumers while providing world-class customer support. You can create triggered messages based on user behavior, send behavioral emails triggered by events, and use live chat to interact with consumers. 

Businesses can also create documents for self-support functions, customize support widgets, add tags and notes, save conversations, and quote messages. There are qualification forms available too. You can view all the data and behavior of consumers as you interact with them. 

Pricing:

• Free plan is available
• Grow plan is €57.50 p/m (approx. $68,46)
• Scale plan is €207.50 p/m (approx. $247,05)
• Contact Froged for a quote on the Enterprise plan 

Pros:

• A free plan is available.
• Businesses can find onboarding, retaining, and engagement features from just one platform.
• The data and analytics are in-depth.
• The user interface is clean and easy to navigate.
• The customization options are endless.
• Froged’s features are mobile-adaptive. 

Cons:

• The live chat features need improvement.
• There are few integration options available. 

Capterra Score: 4.7/5 stars (38 reviews) 

G2 Score: 4.8/5 stars (4 reviews) 

Website: https://www.froged.com/

14.Notificare

Notifcare offers SMS marketing, email marketing, push notifications, and personalized content to boost your consumer engagement. You can use location marketing through geo-targeting, geo-fencing, and iBeacons. The location marketing doesn’t drain your consumers’ battery while activated and complies with security protocols.

Businesses can also use Notificare to create triggered messages, build consumer profiles, and access detailed analytics. Notificare provides data visualizations and graphs to measure your campaign’s performance and extract actionable insights. 

Pricing: 

• Startup plan from €19 p/m (approx. $22,65 p/m)
• Online plan from €149 p/m (approx. $177,63 p/m)
• Enterprise plan is €759 p/m (approx. $904,82 p/m)

Pros:

• The Startup plan is affordable for small businesses.
• This platform is beginner-friendly and has ample training resources.
• Businesses can customize most features.
• You can find detailed data and analytics.
• Users report speedy customer support.

Cons:

• Retrieving in-depth data about individual consumers is difficult.
• The high-end plans are too expensive for many small businesses. 

Capterra Score: 4.8/5 stars (18 reviews)

G2 Score: N/A

Website: https://notificare.com/

Final Thoughts and Our Top Picks

For optimal brand-to-consumer engagement, every business should opt for customer engagement platforms. These platforms will help you keep your consumers interested, increase your retention rates and provide the best brand experience. Customer engagement platforms also help develop loyal customers. 

However, which of these platforms are best for you?

If you own a small business, choose EngageBay. This customer engagement platform is affordable and offers so many features for customer engagement. You can build landing pages, popups, forums, ad campaigns, and you can use broadcast messages. EngageBay also supports multi-channel marketing.

The best customer engagement platform for large businesses is UserLike. Choosing UserLike, businesses can access a vast range of customer data and have tools to deliver a personalized experience. The only drawback with UserLike for large businesses is that it lacks mobile-friendly features. However, all the other features and functions are perfect for large companies. 

References and Sources

Drift: 2020 State of Conversational Marketing [Free Report]

Gallup: Turning Customers Into True Believers

Microsoft: Global State Customer Service

Zendesk: Self-service: do customers want to help themselves?

Zendesk: Zendesk research: customer satisfaction

The post 14 Best Customer Engagement Platforms To Keep Consumers Captivated in 2024 [Review] appeared first on P2P marketing.

The problem is, how do you identify them, and how should you treat them to ensure they’re with you for life?

In this guide, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about VIP customers – who they are and why they’re so important, how to identify them, and how to treat them to drive retention, satisfaction, and profits for your business.

We’ll also cover some ideas for the incentives and rewards through loyalty programs to offer your VIP customers and how to communicate with them. 

Let’s dive right in:

What Defines a VIP Customer?

In simple terms, VIP customers are those who bring you the most value. Depending on your specific business and niche, your most valuable and profitable, customers may be:

• Frequent, loyal buyers who don’t necessarily spend a lot on each purchase but their repeat purchases add up over time to a high customer lifetime value (CLV).
• Big spenders who make infrequent but high-value purchases.
• Advocates who send new business your way or create valuable social proof for your brand.
• Satisfied customers who require little after-sales support and cost you less to retain.
• High profile customers whose patronage is a valuable endorsement for your business.

On the other end of the spectrum, your very unsatisfied customers, who are a liability in that they’re likely to take to social media and damage your brand reputation, should also be given VIP treatment as preventative damage control.  

Your VIP customers may be any one or a combination of the above. When you’re considering who to give VIP treatment to, ask yourself who brings you the most value? Who would you miss the most if they left?

Those are the customers you should work hardest to retain and who should get the best perks and exclusive, VIP treatment.

Why VIP Customers are So Important and Why You Should Treat Them Like Royalty

Your VIP customers are your most valuable customers. They generate a high percentage of your profits and often drive new leads to your business, reducing customer acquisition costs.

These are the relationships you want to nurture, strengthen, and retain the most.

A formalized VIP customer program or strategy is a great way to build those relationships, retain those customers and motivate other customers to achieve that VIP status.

The benefits of identifying who your VIP customers are and giving them special treatment include:

• Ability to provide them with precisely targeted and personalized communication
• Tracking their customer journey to find others like them and to move others to VIP status
• Improved customer satisfaction and engagement
• Reduced customer churn rates for premium customers
• Higher customer lifetime value
• Greater advocacy, social proof, and referrals
• Increased sales and revenue when customers buy more to achieve VIP status
• Improved customer relationships and better overall customer experience
• Increased customer loyalty and long-term customer retention

Identifying your VIP customers gives you insight into where they came from, how they came to be your best customers, and where to find new customers like them.

It also allows you to identify which customers have the potential to be your next VIP customers and how to personalize their experience to push them towards becoming VIP customers.

Rewarding and celebrating your VIP customers makes them feel special and appreciated. It motivates them to stay with your business and share their positive experiences with others, driving higher profits and increased sales for your business.

How to Identify Your VIP Customers

So, how exactly do you identify which customers in your database are the most valuable and the right ones to extend VIP treatment to?

This question comes down to accurately segmenting your existing customers to see which ones are generating the most profits for your business.

There are several metrics to track when you’re assessing the value of each customer (more on that below), but the main aim is to define the customers who:

• Are currently active and engaged
• Spend frequently
• Spend a lot
• Generate value in ways other than direct purchases, such as social proof or referrals
• Are currently inactive but have high potential if they can be retargeted effectively
• Customers who fall just short of VIP status but have the potential to get there

Providing VIP treatment to your customers can cost you more than your average customer is worth.

Accurately identifying the right customers for your VIP customer program is essential for your bottom line and the success of your program.

When you’re assessing metrics and segmenting your customers, you need to make sure that you’re assessing activity within a finite period, which is usually the past 12 months.

This allows you to weed out customers who are no longer active but still include those who have been active recently enough for retargeting.

You should also decide what your thresholds should be for someone to be eligible for your VIP program and if this should be a fixed or dynamic threshold.

A fixed threshold can be something like “customers who have spent over $1000 (or customers in the top X% of spenders) in the last 12 months” and will this will be reassessed in 10 months (or any fixed term from the date of assessment). A dynamic threshold is frequently reassessed and VIP eligibility is frequently adjusted, on a weekly or monthly basis.

There are pros and cons to using fixed or dynamic thresholds and the one you use will depend on how your business operates and how fine-grained and flexible your assessment of VIP customer eligibility needs to be.  

Check out this video by Optimove on YouTube for a detailed explanation of VIP customer segmentation and the parameters to use (you can find a transcript of the video here):

Right, let’s look at the specific attributes and metrics you can track to segment and identify your VIP customers:

Which Metrics Use When Identifying Your VIP Customers

To find exactly what defines your highest-value customers and, by extension, which customers are worth including in your VIP program, you can track and measure the following metrics.

Look for which customers stand out above the average and how many or what percentage of your customers stand out.

Sometimes, you will find a clearly defined group that far exceeds others for a particular metric and sometimes, you will find more than one group that stands out, by varying degrees.

If you have more than one group, you should consider a tiered VIP program designed to push those on the lower tiers up to make the most of their potential and your potential profits.

With the above in mind, here are seven metrics to assess:

1. Number of Purchases

The number of purchases over a set period and the intervals between purchases will give you insight into which customers are buying from you most.

These customers might have a high purchase value every time they buy but their cumulative spend and lifetime value is likely to be higher than average.

These customers are also your loyal customers, who are usually your best advocates and add value to your business by referring others and leaving positive reviews or other social proof for your brand.

It is also useful to compare long-term customers with new customers when you’re looking at this metric so assess the overall trend in purchase frequency – if someone has a steady rate over 12 months that higher than average for the 12 months, that steady rate might not be higher than average for the last 6 or 3 months, which is useful to know.

2. Average Order Value

The average order value (AOV) looks at the amount a customer spends on each purchase. Look for the customers who spend a lot each time they buy, even if they don’t buy very often.

These customers are more valuable than the ones who buy frequently but spend small on each purchase.

It is also important to note if they’re buying at full price or marked down items. Customers who buy full-price items contribute more to your profits than those who spend a lot on items where your margin is lower due to a sale or discount (more on this below).  

3. High Profit Purchases

Every business has customers who only buy when there is a promotional discount. These customers may buy frequently and even have a high customer lifetime value (CLV), but they’re not the most valuable to your business in terms of the profit they generate for you.

Look for customers who have a history of buying from your most profitable lines and those who regularly buy items at their full price rather than only when they’re marked down.

This kind of data will help you identify your most valuable customers in terms of their average contribution to your profits (rather than sales) and it will help market your products more effectively to them.

Don’t offer someone a discount if the price doesn’t really matter to them and they might find something that costs you less more appealing!

4. Customer Lifetime Value

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is one of the most reliable metrics to use when defining your VIP customers.

Customers with a higher-than-average CLV are those who will contribute the most to your bottom line if they’re effectively retained.

Including these customers in your VIP customer program will strengthen that relationship, increase retention and secure the long-term profits they have the potential to provide.  

5. Type of Products Purchased

Customers who buy from your most profitable lines should be considered high-value customers.

This data needs to be correlated to purchase frequency and average order value to be meaningful enough to warrant VIP customer status but it is a very useful metric to measure.

6. Indirect Customer Costs – Support and Returns

Sometimes, customers who buy frequently or spend a lot can seem like high-value customers but when you take into account their after-purchase behavior they’re not so valuable.

Customers who frequently return items or require a very high level of assistance and support cost you more than those who don’t. This impacts how valuable they are to you, in real terms.

They’re also the customers at the highest risk of becoming frustrated with your company, which will either lead to churn or negative social feedback.

Investing in these customers may make them happier and less likely to give you bad press or it can mean wasting resources on a customer that’s “just not worth it”.

How you see this will depend on the customer and the ratio between what they spend and what they cost to retain.

7. Referrals, User Generated Content, and Social Proof

Customers provide value to your business in a variety of ways. Beyond purchase values and frequencies, they may be providing considerable value in the form of referrals, testimonials, product reviews, and great user-generated content. In the age of social media and online shopping, this should not be overlooked!

These customers don’t need to buy a lot from you to be incredibly valuable to your business – the impact of their non-purchase activity has a huge impact on your brand’s visibility, credibility, and trustworthiness in the eyes of all your potential customers.

Customers who really stand out here should definitely be considered VIP customers.

So, now that you have segmented your customers and defined the group/s that make up your VIP customers, what do you do next? How do you use the data you have gathered to your best advantage?  

Broadly, defining your VIP customers allows you to do two things:

1. Target New Potential VIP Customers

Once you have a clearly defined group of customers that are the most valuable to your business, you can use that data to learn more about them.

Finding out who they are, what characteristics they share, which channels lead them to your business, and where they came from is highly valuable information. It will allow you to find and target more customers like them.

It will also allow you to find more customers like them, who have VIP customer potential, in your database. You can hone in on these customers and nudge them towards being your next VIP customers.

2. Target Existing VIP Customers and Provide a VIP Experience

Now that you know exactly who they are, you can work on your VIP customer program to retain them and keep them active, engaged, and happy.

As your most valuable customers, these are the ones you should work hardest at retaining.

Providing incentives, special treatment, and hyper-personalized communication through your VIP program is key to building and maintaining these relationships.

In addition to finding ways to make them feel special and valued, your program will also allow you to personalize your communication and marketing efforts with them for increased sales and profits.

How to Treat Your VIP Customers – Creating That VIP Experience

There are numerous ways to incentivize and reward your VIP customers but it is the experience that matters most. Whatever you’re offering, offer it in a way that makes them feel like a real VIP!

Make sure they’re aware of how exclusive and special what you’re offering is, and why they’re being included in this small and elite group.

All communication with them should be focused on making sure that they know how valued and appreciated they are.

This includes next-level personalization so they know that you know who they are personally and that you know their preferences and values.

Tailor your communication as much as you can for each customer and aim to build a personal relationship with them.

Studies have shown that when customers have an emotional connection to a brand, the average customer lifetime value (CLV) goes up by 306% – Now imagine that applied specifically to your most profitable customers!

Hiring Dedicated VIP Customer Support Staff from Fiverr

Dealing with VIP customers and retaining them with 100% satisfaction is an art. And if you don’t have the artists to pull this off in-house, you can always hire external resources to help you out.

Fiverr is an online marketplace for freelance services for both businesses and consumers.

VIP customer support staff on Fiverr are incredibly talented and offer a wide range of services from taking live calls to processing client queries and updating their information directly in your CRM.

The biggest benefit of hiring from Fiverr is that you don’t need to train the particular resource in-house.

They can come in, offer what they are skilled at, and leave without any strings attached. Plus, you get to choose from a wide range of prices.

The starting rate is $5 and it goes as high as a few thousand dollars for a project.

When you’re paying the bare minimum, expecting high-quality work is a little unrealistic so you will need to hire medium-tier freelancers to get a decent quality of VIP customer support work done at a reasonable price.

Acknowledgment, recognition, and appreciation is the real gift you’re giving them; and that is the basket in which you deliver your rewards and incentives.  

VIP Customer Incentive and Reward Ideas

Your VIP customers are the ones for whom you go the extra mile. They’re the ones who get special things that the rest of your customers do not have access to.

To provide this exclusive experience, you need to create some incentives and rewards to offer only to your VIP customers.

The best rewards and incentives are appropriate for your business type and contextually relevant and valuable to your customers.

To do this, you can get as creative as you want, but here are some ideas you can use to begin with:

• VIP-only promotions – Sales or promotional offers that only your VIPs have access to
• Exclusive early access – Give your VIP customers early access to your existing promotional events like sales and new product launches
• Points based incentives (loyalty programs) – give extra points or perks to your VIP tier
• Surprise gifts – give your VIPs a little something extra with a gift or gift certificate
• Celebrate with them – send them cards and goodies on birthdays and major holidays
• Free access to add-on services – for example, if you offer tailoring or alterations, give it to your VIP customers for free
• Personalized thank you cards and gifts
• Charitable donations to causes they care about
• Surprise discounts or upgrades – give them a voucher for a discount on their current or next purchase, upgrade their subscription for free or give them priority shipping at no extra cost
• Exclusive access to services/benefits – if you offer services, you can give your VIPs preferential treatment when it comes to bookings, allow them to access VIP-only spaces or skip the line to enter. These kinds of benefits make them feel like a VIP and cost you very little to provide.  

There are many other ways to incentivize and reward your VIP customers and you can use any that make sense for your business.

However, it is important to consider what your customers will value most. Know your customers! Remember the customers who don’t wait for sales to purchase?

They’re probably not going to be as pleased with a discount voucher as the ones who only shop when things are marked down.

Personalize your incentives and rewards as much as possible to make sure that they’re relevant to and valued by the specific customers you’re offering them to.

That is the key to providing them with the most while costing you the least, and avoiding any misdirected profit cuts.

Leveraging Your VIP Customer Experience to Create More VIP Customers

A VIP customer experience is not only there to anchor your existing VIP customers and drive retention and satisfaction. It is also there to attract new VIP customers and incentivize existing customers to strive for VIP status.

To leverage this, make sure that your VIP benefits are easy to find and clearly set out. Everyone should know what they’re missing out on and how to achieve it!

Studies into the effectiveness of exclusivity rewards in customer loyalty programs show that 56.8% of customers will be motivated to participate if there are exclusive rewards on offer.

This is especially important for the customers who fall just short of the VIP threshold – consider sending those customers a message to let them know how close they are to achieving VIP status, and what they need to do to get it.

You should also personalize your communication and marketing to these customers, to nudge them towards the behaviors that define your most valuable, and profitable, customers.  

Final Thoughts

To wrap up and recap, we have covered:

• What VIP customers are and why they’re so important
• How to identify your VIP customers, and which metrics to assess
• The benefits of identifying them and what to do with that data
• How to treat them and the incentives and rewards you can offer them
• How to leverage VIP customer status to drive customers towards achieving it and find new VIP customers

Undoubtedly, assessing your customer database to define your most valuable VIP customers is a hugely beneficial exercise.

It allows you to target new customers better and work to increase sales, retention, and customer satisfaction within the group of customers who generate the most profit.

It also allows you to attract new customers and incentivize your high-potential customers to strive a little harder and reach that coveted VIP status.

References

Claro: Keeping Your VIP Customers Happy

CSM: Make Your Customer Feel Like a VIP

Optimove: VIP Segmentation: Methodologies to Define Your Most Valuable Customers

P2P Marketing: Customer Appreciation: 13 Easy Things to Do Today (Guide)

P2P Marketing: Loyalty Marketing – The Definitive Guide for 2024 and Beyond

The post VIP Customers: How to Identify Them & How to Treat Them (2024 Guide) appeared first on P2P marketing.

This makes acquiring the correct information to launch a successful B2B loyalty program and finding constructive examples very difficult.

But we’re here to give you everything you need to know about B2B loyalty programs including, the best practices for B2B customer loyalty programs. And three fantastic B2B loyalty program examples.

B2B customer loyalty is essential to maintain repeat customers and expand your customer base. But how do you create a B2B customer loyalty program that works?

Let’s get into that!

The Difference Between B2C and B2B Loyalty Programs:

Loyalty programs are a practice of customer marketing that incentivizes clients to do consistent business with your company.

As the name reveals, loyalty programs develop stronger customer relations and engagement in your business to achieve brand loyalty. 

As Fundera proves, 43% of customers are more likely to spend more money at businesses they’re loyal to. This figure proves how crucial it is for your B2B company to adopt a loyalty program. 

Don’t exhaust your marketing efforts on gaining new customers solely. Focus on making your existing customers more satisfied through a loyalty program.

You have a 60%-70% chance of selling to an existing customer. Whereas for a new customer, your chances range between 5%-20%.

Although the aim of a B2C and B2B customer loyalty program can be the same, many factors set these two reward programs apart, including:

• The participants. B2B customer loyalty programs are usually more restrictive regarding who they allow to participate in their loyalty program. This includes customers who are not eligible to receive the reward or take part at all, such as government agencies.  customers.B2C loyalty programs rarely have these restrictions and are open to all
• Primary focus. B2C loyalty programs focus on the needs and pain points of individuals to develop loyalty. These companies also need to show individuals they share the same values. However, B2B companies direct their loyalty programs to solve the pain points of organizations and their decision-makers. This makes B2B customer loyalty programs more complex, as that customer information is difficult to gather.
• Personalization. Because B2C companies have a larger consumer base, they don’t have to personalize their loyalty program tactics as much as B2B companies do. For example, think about the millions of customers Starbucks has compared to the few a B2B company would have. The B2B business would have a smaller consumer base that requires more personalization to deliver the best customer experience.
• Purchasing decisions. B2B customers make rational purchasing decisions based on how products can elevate their businesses, which must be accounted for in B2B incentive programs. On the other hand, B2C customers make emotional purchasing decisions based on desire, prestige, and style.

B2B Loyalty Programs: Challenges and Opportunities

As we’ve discussed, there are staggering differences between B2C and B2B customer loyalty programs.

But even though those differences exist, both businesses share challenges and opportunities for their loyalty programs.

Let’s examine what those challenges and opportunities are:

B2B Loyalty Program Challenges

1.Documenting All The Details 

When a business neglects to document the smallest to the biggest details, this can cause confusion and inconsistency within the loyalty program.

When I say “details”, I’m referring to minor aspects of the loyalty program that businesses need to document to keep all their team members on the same page.

A few of the details you should document include are:

• How do you define inactive accounts?
• What happens to a member’s points if their account is inactive?
• For figures like “$7.33” would you round up or down?
• How do you handle expiration dates?
• How do you handle reward expiration dates?

The Solution

Companies should document all the details that cover the terms and conditions, the method of operation, relevant legal information, and other important information to the business.

Both B2C and B2B businesses should create material for team members on how to approach customers and any friction with the loyalty program. To stay consistent, businesses need to update these details regularly.

2.Control Over Customer Experience

According to Blue Corona, 80% of B2B buying decisions are based on the buyer’s customer experience. Only 20% of buyers go on the price or product/service. 

This emphasizes how essential customer experience is, but both B2C and B2B businesses have limited control over it in loyalty programs.

Sales representatives don’t have the time or opportunity to share valuable knowledge about the product/service and what makes them novel and beneficial to the buyer. 

Also, without using third-party integrations and advanced loyalty program software, it is difficult for companies to analyze and use their customer interactions properly. 

The Solution

Companies should incorporate more feedback from their sales and marketing teams to improve the customer experience they deliver.

Additionally, brands need to use in-depth tools and refined sales techniques to provide their buyers with an informative, engaging, and consistent customer experience.

3.Managing Loyalty Program Data

Many businesses forget how crucial managing accurate data on their loyalty programs is. Brands fail to integrate reliable software to collect data at different points of the loyalty program.

Some businesses don’t know how to separate different data pools and what data is vital to track. This is an issue as businesses might not have accurate, detailed information and results to work with.

11% of businesses don’t calculate their Return on Investment (ROI) from loyalty programs. A further 17% of businesses calculate their ROI but don’t use the correct metrics.

The Solution

Businesses must put an effective system in place to track the essential data of their B2B incentive programs.

Companies need to integrate the required software to accurately collect data on customer satisfaction, ROI, and overall progress.

But while doing this, companies must try to keep their method of data collection as organic as possible.

B2B Loyalty Program Opportunities

1.Lead Generation 

Every business would like to optimize its lead generation, and customer loyalty programs make this possible.

Companies can design their referral program, so consumers must exchange their contact details before accessing the incentive. For example, “Subscribe to our newsletter and get $5 off your first purchase.”

Businesses can use loyalty programs to leverage contacts for their lead-generation strategy.

So, brands can still market to them even if a customer hasn’t bought anything yet. 

2.Customer Analysis 

Brands must get the full picture of who their customers are.

This helps them tailor their products and marketing techniques to appeal to their customers.

A customer loyalty program can help businesses find out more about their audience. Companies can do this by making a form part of their loyalty program.

Businesses can use the information captured through the form to deliver personalized user experiences and marketing campaigns that solve their clients’ pain points, and provide them with what they need.

3.Save Money 

Gaining new customers is much more expensive than retaining old ones. And loyalty programs can help brands retain their existing customers.

This will not only help businesses save money but retaining 5% of customers could lead to an increase of 25%-95% in profits.

In other words, B2C and B2B loyalty programs help companies save money by retaining their customers. And these companies have the opportunity to make more money.

If possible, find out the reason for your buyers leaving your business. Try to find a way you can solve that through your loyalty program. This approach is sure to increase retention rates!

The 3 Best B2B Loyalty Program Examples

Here are some successful B2B loyalty program examples that you can learn a lot from:

1.Lenovo

Being one of the world’s largest and most favorable electronics manufacturers, Lenovo shows us what one of the best B2B incentive programs looks like.

Back in 2014, Lenovo bought IBM’s X86 server division. However, IBM’s former business partners weren’t sure how to go about selling the same servers.

But Lenovo was determined not to lose those business partners. So, this tech company developed a staggering loyalty program with support from Motivforce Marketing & Incentives.

This is what Lenovo did using Lenovo Expert Achievers Programme (LEAP)

• Learn and earn. Business partners would receive points for completing two educational modules on servers. 
• Earn and sell. Business partners could track their sales performance. Their sales were converted into points.

The Takeaway’s

• Lenovo used education as an incentive and helped businesses learn how to make more money through servers. 
• An ingenious tactic to take away from this loyalty program is how Lenovo focused on their existing customers and not acquiring new ones. 

The Results

• Lenovo’s aim was for 500 firms to join, and over 700 joined.
• The loyalty program participants sold 7x more products than the year before.
• Lenovo’s target was $170 million, and they breezed over their target by 40%.

2.Celebrity Cruises 

When it comes to B2B loyalty programs examples, Celebrity Cruises is a great example of how a business can motivate third parties like booking agents into their programs.

Desperate to stand out from their competitors, Celebrity Cruises designed a highly effective loyalty program.

Most of this companies sales stem from travel agents. So, Celebrity Cruises decided to incentivize the best agents for their loyalty.

This is what Celebrity Cruises did:

• Agents can claim their booking sales and view their points in a user-friendly portal.
• Agents can receive higher points from upselling to customers.
• Celebrity Moments. This was a campaign that ran for three months. Agents could earn £500 in points by besting the leaderboard of booking points.

The Takeaways:

• Celebrity Cruises offered valuable incentives that users could access easily.
• Gamification was used to make the loyalty program more engaging.

The Results:

• Over 12 000 agents joined the loyalty program.
• The loyalty program increased their revenue by 13%.

3.TRW Aftermarket

TRW is one of the best companies in the automotive aftermarket and also designed provides one of the best B2B loyalty programs examples: Automotive Diamonds.

Because of the high volume of competitors in TRW’s industry, the problem businesses were facing is that they could not directly communicate with their aftermarket. TRW created a loyalty program to solve these challenges.

This is what TRW did:

• They connected workshops throughout Europe using a loyalty program.
• Workshops sign-up and earn points for purchasing members’ products.
• Workshops can redeem their points for a reward of their choice.

The Takeaways:

• Created easy communication and evaluation amongst different workshops. 
• TWR used the data stored in different workshops to customize the loyalty program to their needs.
• Allowing workshops to choose their rewards makes the loyalty program more engaging and the incentive more valuable.

The 7 Best Practices for B2B Loyalty Programs 

1. Create a buyer persona. To provide your customers with a fantastic customer experience that is tailored to them, you need to create a buyer persona.
2. Measure the crucial metrics: Wondering what these metrics are? Your Repeat Customer Rate (RCR) measures how many repeat customers you have. Your CLV measures how much a customer spends on your business. And your Net Promoter Score (NPS) is how likely customers are to refer you. 
3. Be loyal to your customers: Don’t treat your customers unfairly. Or make it difficult to solve their problems. Make doing business with your company seamless and reliable for your clients.
4. Tailor your content to existing customers: Remember earlier we spoke about how valuable existing customers are? Therefore tailor your marketing and sales content to keep and captivate your current consumers. 
5. Don’t sound too “salesy”: You want to give clients a reason to do business with your B2B brand. Sound sincere and not like you’re trying to sell loyalty to them. Approach your clients like they are a friend and use relatable content to connect to them. Your clients need to get the impression that you want to help better thier business.
6. Be clear about your objectives: “Loyal” is a broad statement. What defines loyalty to you? Customers buying your products frequently? Customers referring more customers? Choose one way you would like your loyalty program to determine what your customers do. This will make measuring and increasing customer loyalty easier.
7. Make getting help easy: Would you want to be loyal to a brand that is difficult to contact? Be sure to add your company’s contact information in a visible area so clients can effortlessly reach out to you.

The 10 Best B2B Loyalty Program Rewards That Work

1. Tiered Incentives: Create tiered awards as TWR did. Tiered rewards will motivate your loyalty program participants to gain more points for more premium rewards.
2. Referral rewards: Incentivize your clients for referring new clients to your business. The more referrals a client brings in, the better the reward.
3. Educational content: Like Lenovo, offer courses, guides, or any form of educational content. Educational content will help your clients while giving them a reason to be loyal to your B2B company.
4. Co-marketing campaigns: Partner up with your clients and create activities and programs for your target audiences. This is a great way to leverage more clients while increasing your reputation.
5. Discounts for large orders: Reward your clients for bulk orders by offering them a discount on their next bulk order. Ensure the discount is only valid within a specific timeframe to add urgency around ordering from your business again.
6. Freebies: If you have a surplus of stock, you can give away freebies to your most high-value clients. This will be sure to keep them coming back!
7. Exclusive services: If clients have to pay more for any of your services, such as delivery, offer those services for free.
8. Points per $ spent: This is a traditional incentive but still works like a charm. Offer a certain number of points per x number of dollars spent. For example, 10 points per $1000 spent. Be sure to make it realistic for your clients to gain enough points to redeem a reward.
9. Anniversary incentives: If a client has been with you for x amount of time, surprise them by incentivizing them. Before you know it, word will spread, and everyone will flock to your company! 
10. VIP experiences: Offer access to exclusive industry-related events, talks, and shows to give your customers a reason to be loyal to your business. 

References and Sources

Fundera: Keep Your Customers Coming Back: 13 Brand Loyalty Statistics You Need to Know

Invesp: Customer Acquisition Vs.Retention Costs – Statistics And Trends

Blue Corona: 75+ B2B Marketing Statistics to Know

Harvard Business Review: The Value of Keeping the Right Customers

The post B2B Loyalty Programs: 3 Examples, Best Practices & What Works in 2024 appeared first on P2P marketing.

Consumers seek more than just good products and great service in a world where we can have just about any product or service in minutes.

They’re looking for brands that share their values, and they’re looking for an emotional connection with the brands they choose.  

Customer appreciation is how you, as a business, form and nurture those connections, and how you strengthen those client relationships over time.

Today, we’re going to show you how to develop a good customer appreciation strategy to help you boost customer satisfaction, gain valuable referrals, and earn longterm customer loyalty.

Let’s dive right in!

What is Customer Appreciation?

Customer appreciation is the practice of actively communicating your gratitude to your customers for their support and patronage.  

How this works in practice varies from company to company, depending on the nature of the business and the size of the company.

For small, customer-facing, businesses it is often expressed in person and does not necessarily involve tangible rewards or gifts.

When you’re seeing the majority of your customers in person and fairly often, it is much easier to foster a warm, human connection and express your gratitude informally.

However, for larger companies and online businesses, it is much more difficult to let each customer know that they’re seen and valued by you, as an individual. Fostering an emotional connection and a lasting relationship is much more difficult.

Even small businesses can struggle with this and a good appreciation strategy can make all the difference!

There are many great ways to thank your customers and make them feel appreciated.

Common customer appreciation ideas or practices include sending thank you messages, gifts, discount codes/coupons, branded swag or offering other free tokens of appreciation.

Practicing customer or client appreciation, in an intentional and structured way, allows you to bridge the gap and form a more meaningful connection with your customers.

Check out this short video by Derek Van Schaik Biz on YouTube for a quick snapshot of four useful thinks to know about showing customers your appreciation:

Why is Customer Appreciation So Important?

In the digital age, the competition is fierce. No matter what you do or how well you do it, every customer has a plethora of options to meet their needs.

Standing out and grabbing attention is difficult but keeping a customer’s attention and earning their continued support and loyalty is even harder.

Customers expect a great product and easy, efficient, and attentive service. However, having the best product and the best service doesn’t automatically translate into happy, loyal customers.

In an ever more online and impersonal world, forming human connections and relationships with your customers is essential.

Client appreciation is one of the best ways to make your customers feel seen, heard, and appreciated.

When you take the time to thank them and let them know that their purchase was important to you, you’re telling them that they’re more than just an order number to you.

When your customers feel seen and valued, they’re more likely to keep using your company and to buy more from you each time. They’re also more likely to recommend you to their friends and family.

According to G2, when customers have an emotional connection to a brand, the average customer lifetime value (CLV) goes up by 306%. And, the rate at which customers will recommend you goes up from 45% to 71%!

Ensuring that your customers know just how much care about them is key to retaining customers.

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, 68% of customers will stop doing business with a company if they believe it does not care for them, while only 14% stop doing business with a company based on product dissatisfaction.

Clearly, making sure your customers know you care about them is very important, so lets take a look at some great customer appreciation ideas to get you started!

13 Easy Ways to Show Your Customers That You Appreciate Them

Demonstrating your appreciation to your customers doesn’t have to be overly complicated or expensive.

Here are some easy and inexpensive customer appreciation ideas to show your customers just how much they mean to you:

1. Send a Personal Thank You Message

One of the easiest ways to express your gratitude is to send a simple customer appreciation message thanking your client for their support. You can send an email, a written letter, or a thank you card.

Make your customer appreciation letter as personal and sincere as possible. Use their name and include some details that distinguish them from other clients, such as a brief mention of the item they bought or a personal interaction you had with them.

 It is important not to include any promotional material or sales pitches here. Keep it about them and your gratitude to them.

Segueing into a sales pitch will come off as though you’re only thanking them to sell them something else and will defeat the object entirely.   

However, you can include a gift certificate or coupon or discount code to use on their next purchase with you or at another company you would like to support or you feel they would value.

Just make sure that your customer appreciation message is sincere and genuine, and make it about saying thank you – no strings attached.

2. Spotlights, Features, and Shout-outs on Social Media

Featuring your customers or their businesses on your company social channels can be a great way to say thank you to them for using your products or services. 

You can ask customers to send you photos and their information to include in a customer appreciation post and include links to their social channels or websites.

This generates some free marketing for them and gives you great content at the same time.

This works especially well if your businesses are aligned in some way or if there are common values you can highlight.

On the other hand, if you’re a fast-food chain and they’re all about clean eating and fitness, it might not be the best idea!  

The Branded Beauty Bar does a customer appreciation post of the “BBB Client of the Week”, in which they spotlight loyal customers on their Instagram account.

3. Send Them a Personalized Gift

Personalized gifts are a great way to show your appreciation. If you have a customer’s purchase history and some basic information about them, you can choose something from your collection that they would like.

You can also purchase gifts from another company and send those if your company if you’re a service-based business.  

It doesn’t have to be expensive. As long as the gift is relevant and useful or valuable to your customer, it will be appreciated.

The important part is to include a personalized customer appreciation letter or note that is written just for them (no generic customer appreciation quotes). Make it clear that the gift has been selected for them, as an individual.  

Chewy.com, a pet food retailer from Florida is great example of a company that uses personalized gifts.

They keep an eye on their customer’s social media pages and surprise them with unexpected gifts that are completely unique – painted portraits of their pets!

4. Send a Gift Card, Coupon, or Discount Code

You can reward your customers with a discount or special offer as a token of your appreciation for their support and a way of ‘giving something back’.

A percentage off the next purchase, an exclusive buy-one-get-one-free offer, or a gift / complimentary service are some ways to do this.

You can also give gift certificates to other businesses, such as coffee shops or restaurants.

It is important to make sure that it is contextually relevant and valuable to your customer.

Think about who they are and what they need, what they like, and where they are located.

Sending a Starbucks gift certificate to people where there is no local Starbucks or sending men a coupon for a female beauty treatment won’t work well at all!   

5. Offer a Free Upgrade

If you’re running a business that does subscriptions or different SaaS packages you can offer customers a free upgrade to the next tier.

You can also do this if you have a tiered rewards program, like a loyalty or referral program.

This is a great way to thank them and show them that you value their patronage.

It gives them access to greater value from your product or service and shows them that you’re invested in keeping them around.

Another example of free upgrades is when airlines or hotels upgrade a client to first class or a better room for free. Those kinds of surprises are universally loved!

6. Gift Them Free Swag

People love swag! Free t-shirts, water bottles, caps, and key chains with your branding on them are an ever-popular way of thanking customers.

These work especially well if your customer base is a young and casual demographic.

Combine your swag with a thoughtful, personalized customer appreciation message to make it meaningful to the customer as an individual.

Make sure you explicitly thank them, individually. Let them know that you have given this swag as a token of appreciation, rather than part of a generic promo.  

Energy bar makers Verb Energy, made swag packs for the holidays and posted them to social media with a thank you message and instructions for customers to enter the giveaway.

This, combined with a traditional giveaway is a fun way to engage with customers.

7. Host an Event or Throw a Party for Your Customers

A dedicated event, just for your customers, is a great way to connect with them and strengthen your relationship.

If the event can double as a valuable networking event for them, that is great too. Try to include guests or speakers who are relevant to your customer base and will add value to their lives.

It doesn’t have to be anything overly lavish or complicated. The important thing to make it a celebration of your customers, with them and their needs front and center.

It should be about providing a great experience for them, rather than a great promotional opportunity for you.

David Serpa, a real estate agent in Temecula, CA, organized a country music festival for their customers – it brought his community and customer base together in a truly memorable way!

8. Invite Them to Join Your Customer Loyalty or Referral Program

Referral programs, loyalty programs and showing your customers that you appreciate them are a great combination!

Loyalty and referral programs are not aimed at selling to customers but rather at rewarding them for staying with you and for sending their friends to you.

These programs make rewarding customers easy and straightforward, which can tie into your appreciation efforts well. 

Your invitation should be personalized and make it clear that you’re inviting them to join because you appreciate them.

It should also set out clearly the program can benefit them, without asking them to buy anything. The invitation can include a discount or gift if you would like to give one.

You can also tie an appreciation-focused promotion into your loyalty program and offer your most loyal customers additional rewards or discounts.

An example of this is how Habitat for Humanity ran a discount sale for their Customer Appreciation Week with additional discounts for rewards card holders.

9. Give Them Exclusive Early Access

For your most valuable or loyal customers, you can give them special or early access to sale events, access to invite-only product launches, or allow them the first choice for new sought-after items in your inventory.

This is one of the cheapest and most effective rewards you can offer. All you’re doing is allowing the buyers who buy the most from you, to get the VIP treatment they deserve.

Quirky fashion and accessories store Skinnydip uses “exclusive access” for loyal customers as an act of appreciation. They offer early access to sales and promotions for customers who spend more than £500 a year and are member of their tiered rewards program.

10. Give to the Causes That Matter to Your Customers  

Your ideal customers have similar values to your business and vice versa.

People want to know that they’re supporting a business that shares their values and supports their ideals.

A great way to demonstrate this is to make donations to charities that matter to them.

A small donation, made in their name, to a cause that is close to their heart is a great way to show your appreciation.

You can send them a personalized ‘certificate’ verifying the donation. Add a sincere customer appreciation letter thanking them for their patronage and for helping you to support a worthy cause.

A great example of charitable giving on a customers behalf is Uncommon Goods, who donate $1 for every purchase made to a charity of the customers choice. Since they began the program in 2001, they have donated over $1,000,000!

11. Bend the Rules or Go the Extra Mile for Them  

In customer-facing businesses, there will be many, many opportunities to make a small exception for a loyal customer.

Letting them in when they arrive 2 minutes after closing time or moving tables around to accommodate them when they didn’t book ahead can make all the difference.

It says that you know them and you appreciate them as a special customer, someone who isn’t just another face in the crowd. It says that they matter to you.

The best part about this kind of appreciation demonstration is that it’s free! It might cost you a little effort and a few minutes of your time, but the benefits in the long term are so worth it!  

12. Help Them Out in Difficult Times

The global Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the businesses that went out of their way to help their customers and communities during the pandemic.

There have been many great examples of businesses that put their customers first during this time.

From large software companies that made their solutions freely accessible to schools and learners for distance learning to smaller companies that allowed payment flexibility or waved interest in late payments when people faced lockdowns and loss of income.  

Video recording and sharing service Loom made Loom Pro free for teachers and students at K-12 schools, universities, and educational institutions.

They also cut the price for Loom Pro by 50% to help businesses and brands across the board.

The companies that went out of their way to help their customers will have those customers for years to come.

Especially those who also took the time to connect with their customers on a personal level at a time when people were so isolated and being forced to do most of their business online.  

13. Recognize and Acknowledge When Your Customers Go Out of Their Way for You

Occasionally, you will have a customer who works with you to solve their problem by giving you information to make your job easier or being extra patient while you work it out.

These customers are usually the ones who already have a connection with your business and will cut you some slack when you need it. It is very important to acknowledge these efforts and show your appreciation.

It doesn’t always have to be a full customer appreciation letter; it can be just a short message or a quick call to say thank you.

Expressing how much that interaction meant to you is a great way to nurture that relationship. The more your customers feel like you see them as people and appreciate them as individuals, the better!   

5 Quick Tips to Make the Most of Your Customer Appreciation Strategy

To make the most of your efforts, here are some quick tips to keep in mind:

#1: Personalize your communication

Use their first name and include specific details that let them know you know who they are and what they bought from you.

Appreciation that feels generic won’t get the same response as genuine appreciation that is specific to them as an individual, so skip the customer appreciation quotes you saw online and write something yourself.

#2: Segment and tailor your offerings

Consider demographics, interests, and location when you’re choosing what you will gift to your customers. The more relevant it is to the customer, the more they will value and appreciate it.

Many options may seem universal but can actually be completely useless and even frustrating to the wrong demographic or location.

#3: Make it about them

Appreciation is about recognizing and acknowledging your customers and how much you value them.

It is not about squeezing in a sales pitch or asking them for something. Talking about yourself here will detract from the core message.

#4: Be genuine and humanize your appreciation message

When it comes to saying thank you, you want to be sincere and as human as you can be. You’re making a connection with an individual.

A more casual tone and humble attitude will come across as a sincere expression of gratitude. When you say ‘thank you’ for a customer’s patronage, you acknowledge that you need them and their support is valuable.

#5: Make it share-worthy

In the age of social media, anything and everything we say or do is bound to end up on social media. A happy client is likely to snap a photo or screenshot and post it for their friends to see.

Keep this in mind and make it attractive! After all, it’s going to be out there and associated with your company name.

A beautiful card or email image and nice packaging are more likely to be shared than plain text and bubble wrap.

The same goes for events – create a gorgeous backdrop (with your branding on it) for photos so people can take their selfies and share them!   

Wrapping Up

In this guide, we defined customer appreciation and discussed why it is important. We went over some easy ways to show your customers that you appreciate them and ended off with five tips to make the most of your client appreciation strategies.

You now have the tools to start today!

References and Useful Resources

All Business: With Appreciation, You Have the Advantage

Belly: Why Is Customer Appreciation So Important?

Acquire: Why Gratitude Should Power Your Client Appreciation Strategy

Super Office: What Is A Customer Appreciation Strategy, And Why Do I Need One?

The post Customer Appreciation: 13 Easy Things to Do Today (2024 Guide) appeared first on P2P marketing.

The post 8 Best Customer Loyalty Program Software and Apps to Increase Customer Retention in 2024 [Full Review] appeared first on P2P marketing.

Satisfied customers are NOT always loyal.

In the words of customer service expert, Shep Hyken:

“There’s a big difference between a satisfied customer & a loyal customer. Never settle for satisfied.”

Your business needs loyal customers, especially if you sell products or services that thrive on repeat purchases. So if you:

• Sell apparel
• Run a café or deli
• Manage a restaurant
• Own a consultancy
• Have a computer, home or office maintenance business

Or any other small to mid-size business, you could benefit from a loyalty program.

Running a loyalty program may have been difficult in the past, but not anymore. Digitization has made things so much easier and managing your loyalty program is as easy as eating cake these days!

In this article, you’ll learn about the loyalty program statistics and benefits that show you just how powerful customer retention can be. 

If you’re trying to make the case for adopting a loyalty program at your organization, or have been on the fence about it yourself, this should make the decision much easier. 

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Here are the Customer Loyalty Statistics you need to know:

20 Loyalty Program Usage Statistics

1. Over 90% of companies have some type of loyalty program 
2. 3.3 billion loyalty memberships are present in the United States alone.
3. Of consumers in America, 52% will join the loyalty program of a brand they purchase from often. Source  
4. The majority of consumers, 66%, will change their buying behavior to get the most out of loyalty benefits. 
5. Only 44% of people who signed up for loyalty programs expressed satisfaction with them. 
6. On average, a consumer belongs to 14.8 loyalty programs but they actively engage in 6.7 of them. Source(+image credit)

   

7. This statistic is a bit misleading because 49% of consumers only belong to 3 loyalty programs which means the other 51% can be considered power users. Source 
8. A much smaller percentage, of customers, only 18% are active in all the loyalty programs they join. 
9. Conversely, 65% of consumers engage with fewer than half of the loyalty programs they join.
10. Daily usage is growing with 15% of members interacting with their programs daily which is up from 10% of members in 2015. Source
11. Out of the consumers surveyed, only 8% say rewards aren’t at all important to their purchase decision. Source
12. 57% of loyalty program members in the U.S. have abandoned a program because it took too long to meet the requirements for a reward. Source
13. 70% of Millennials, 71% of Generation X, and 63% of Baby Boomers admitted a loyalty program influences the brands they choose to buy from. 
14. The Silent Generation has second-highest participation in loyalty programs at 62%
15. Surprisingly Generation Z only had a 59% participation rate in loyalty programs in 2019 (down from 68% in 2018) Source
16. 59% of men and 68% of women were members in at least one loyalty program. Source
17. When done properly, personalization can increase loyalty program member satisfaction by up to 6.4 x. Source
18. Collecting personal information will make it less likely for 71% of Americans to join a loyalty program. Source
19. 43% of people participate in loyalty programs for discounts or offers and 27% participate to earn free offers. Source 
20. Only 5% of customers sign up for a loyalty program to stay connected to a brand. Source

These loyalty program statistics paint an interesting picture. The overall membership in loyalty programs is increasing but people are only active in less than half.

It’s not enough to get people to register, you also have to engage them. 

Incentives are a big part of getting people engaged with 92% of people saying that it matters to them.

Staying connected to a brand isn’t important to loyalty program members with 95% saying it doesn’t matter. 

That may be because there are so many channels to do that already.

There are many tools that allow you to keep up a conversation on social media, email marketing has long been a strong communication channel, and push notifications are becoming popular. 

Older generations seem to be the most engaged with loyalty programs with the participation of Gen Z falling by almost 10% in a single year.

It may be a sign that brands aren’t meeting their needs and don’t deserve their loyalty or a result of youthfulness. Only time will tell. 

Collecting personal information will reduce the likelihood of people signing up for your program but personalizing your loyalty program can increase satisfaction by up to 6.4 x.

It’s a fine line to walk because collecting more information makes it easier to personalize. 

Instead of collecting everything upfront, consider waiting until your new members are comfortable with your brand then ask for more information gradually.

Alternatively, if you are looking to try something on a larger scale, you could contemplate using machine learning to learn more about your customers. 

In the end, though more people than ever are registered with a loyalty program, less than half are satisfied so there’s a lot of room for improvement!

The 11 Stats Behind the Impact of Consumer Loyalty

1. 80% of a brand’s future revenue comes from just 20% of its current customers. .
2. Those who’ve bought from you at least twice in the past are 9 times more likely to buy from you again with a new potential customer.
3. Those who’ve bought from you at least once are 5 times as likely to buy from you again as a new potential customer. Source
4. Customers who have characterized their relationship with a brand as emotional have a lifetime value that’s 306% higher than average consumers. 
5. 67.8% of shoppers define brand loyalty as repeat purchases. Source
6. 41% of consumers are more likely to do their holiday shopping with a brand they’ve already purchased from. 
7. 59% of loyal consumers are more willing to refer a brand to their friends and family. source
8. 75% of consumers said receiving an incentive increases the likelihood of making another purchase. Source (+image credit)
9. After a positive experience with receiving a reward for loyalty, 70% of consumers visit the brand’s retail locations, more than 40% follow the brand on social media, and a little over 30% subscribe to the brand’s newsletter. Source
10. An increase in loyalty of just 7% can increase the lifetime profits (when spread out amongst customers) by up to 85%. Source
11. After having a great experience, 71% of customers recommend a service or product. Source

The data is clear. When you have loyal customers, they’re more valuable to you. Not just because they spend more but because they tell their network about you. 

No matter how small the network, it’s an added benefit because you acquire new customers without spending directly on advertising.

The challenge is understanding what your customers want and knowing if you’re doing a good job providing it. 

Test out using customer satisfaction surveys to find areas where you’re dropping the ball or need to improve.

Another option is to regularly communicate with leads and customers through thoughtful email marketing campaigns. At the very least, you’ll be top of mind more often. 

When it’s time to make a purchase, your brand will be the first one they think of. 

10 Stats About the Cost of a Failing to Generate Customer Loyalty

1. It’s estimated that $1.6 trillion is lost to poor customer service which has a direct correlation with customer loyalty. Source
2. If the purchase process is too difficult, 74% of consumers are likely to switch brands. source
3. $98 billion in potential revenue is lost by companies who are unable to create simple experiences that encourage customer loyalty Source
4. 78% of baby boomers have gotten so frustrated with having to restart conversations with brands on a different channel that they question why they do business with them in the first place. source
5. When customers have a frustrating shopping experience, they are 3 times as likely as satisfied customers to not buy from the same brand again. Source
6. 69% of shoppers claimed that they wouldn’t shop with the same online store every again is the experience is poor. source
7. A whopping 84% of shoppers will refuse to buy from a brand again if they have a poor returns experience. source
8. Compared to average brands, the leaders in loyalty programs grow revenue about 2.5 times faster. source
9. E-commerce brands without a loyalty program are missing out on increased average-order-value by up to 319%. Source
10. 39% of customers who consider themselves loyal have less price sensitivity and are willing to spend more on a brand’s product even if there are cheaper alternatives. Source

The data doesn’t lie. There’s real money on the line when you’re not able to instill loyalty in customers. Even when you have a bit of loyalty, it can be lost if you drop the ball. 

Something like a poor returns experience turns off almost every single shopper and $98 billion in potential revenue is lost by failing to create simple experiences. 

The 10 Most Important Benefits of a Loyalty Program

Out of the 41 statistics mentioned above, the following ones are the most important for you to know before you launch a loyalty program.

1. Boosts Customer Spend

In a joint study published by Manta and BIA/Kelsey, 61 percent of SMBs say that repeat customers drive more than 50 percent of their sales. Meanwhile, only 34 percent of these small businesses have a loyalty program in place.

The study also found out that repeat customers spend 67% more than new ones. But the Manta study isn’t alone in this finding.

Although Amazon isn’t a small business, buyer psychology is often the same across platforms they trust. While Amazon Prime users spend an average of $1,500 a year on Amazon, non-Prime users spend only $625 a year.

In other words, Prime customers spend 140% more!

It helps that customers love loyalty programs. According to a Visa sponsored Loyalty Report study, 81% of customers say that loyalty programs encourage them to keep buying from a brand.

More than 39% of customers in a loyalty program would spend more on your product even if they have cheaper alternatives.

2. Boosts Customer Spend Frequency

Top marketing consultants believe that customers who use loyalty programs are five times more likely to commit to buying from only one brand.

But it doesn’t stop there, those customers’ frequency of buying is 90% higher than others.

When customers attach their purchase to winning a reward, they tend to buy more to earn that reward.

The Journal of Marketing Research says that the closer a customer is to a bonus, the more they buy.

3. Encourages Word of Mouth Marketing

Loyalty program customers often feel good about the rewards they receive from a business. So they end up telling their friends and family about the brand.

In the Loyalty Report study that we cited earlier, 73% of customers on your loyalty rewards program are more likely to recommend your brand.

As you probably know, customer-to-customer recommendations have many benefits on their own. HubSpot says that 81% of customers trust recommendations from their friends and family.

McKinsey reports that 20% to 50% of all buying decisions come from word of mouth. Here are some benefits of word of mouth marketing:

• It’s free promotion for your business
• People trust it more
• Customers acquired via word of mouth spend more
• It has 50 times more chance to lead to a purchase
• Customers gained by word of mouth are more likely to recommend you to others

A different study by Bain & Company supports these McKinsey findings. Customers who’ve shopped ten or more times refer 50% more people than one-time buyers.

4. Loyalty Programs Lower Customer Acquisition Costs

It is easier to convince an existing customer to buy more than it is to ask a new customer to buy more. Customer acquisition costs six to seven times more than customer retention.

Businesses spend a lot of money on marketing and customer acquisition is a big part of that spending. But stores that focus on customer retention notice significant profit boosts.

A mere 2% increase in customer retention would have the same effect as cutting costs by 10%.

In another report, a 5% boost in customer retention rate translates into a 25% increase in profit.

Here’s the exciting part:

Depending on your industry, increasing your customer retention by 5% could earn you a 125% boost in profits.

Meanwhile, acquiring new customers instead of building a customer loyalty program costs 5 to 25 times more.

So the more loyal customers you have, the lower your cost per customer you acquire.

5. Stores with Loyalty Programs Attract More Customers

In a study by Technology Advice, more than 82% of shoppers say they’ll opt for a business with a loyalty program over a store that doesn’t have one.

But a loyalty program only works if your users are engaging with your program. So you want to know your users’ motivations and habits.

The Technology Advice study points out three core motivations for why users favor SMBs that have loyalty programs. These drivers include:

1. Saving money
2. Receiving rewards
3. Earning rewards

You might think that earning rewards is the same as receiving them. But the two experiences are quite different.

According to the Loyalty Report I cited earlier,

“the redemption experience—the anticipation of reward, as well as ease of redemption—is more important than the actual reward.”

Another report, from 2019, echoed this and found that the build up to the reward was more important than the reward itself and states that “Brands must evolve their programs by focusing on the redemption experience, not just on the reward”. 

6. Customers on Loyalty Programs Have a High Lifetime Value

Businesses with high customer acquisition costs may need to rely on a good customer lifetime value to turn in profits.

According to Bain & Company, e-Commerce customer acquisition cost is high. So most retailers must get shoppers to visit multiple times to make a profit.

To get customers to visit multiple times, retailers rely on loyalty programs.

In the example below, you can see the customer lifetime value over time.

It helps that a customer who joins your loyalty program is worth ten times the value of their first purchase.

7. Customer Loyalty is Easier than Acquisition

About 63% of businesses think that customer acquisition is their most important advertising goal.

But over the years, more businesses have come to agree that keeping their customers loyal is easier to execute than acquiring new ones.

The number of businesses that consider customer retention easier moved from 70% to 80% in one year.

So apart from being very profitable, customer loyalty is also easier to execute than customer acquisition.

8. Loyal Customers Help Businesses Beat Recession

One of the most powerful attributes of a customer loyalty program is that it’s recession-proof.

According to Adobe Digital Index, “Repeat purchasers also deliver more during economic difficulties”. The study showed that the revenue share from repeat buyers in Europe increased by 3%, and fell only by 1% in the US.

9. Seasonal Sales Do Better with Repeat Buyers

The Adobe study also showed that loyalty program customers bought 25% more per purchase during holidays and other seasonal sales. Meanwhile, first-time buyers only bought 4% to 17% more per purchase.

10. Loyalty Program Customers Convert Better

If your business or brand ever introduces a new product who do you tell first?

Loyal customers!

They convert better and faster than new or repeat customers who have bought from you only twice.

In the Adobe Digital Index report, loyal customers could convert at 24% where new customers only convert at 6%.

In terms of revenue per visitor (RPV), one returning customer equals five first-time shoppers in value. Whereas, one loyal buyer equals nine first-time shoppers.

Wrapping Up

The truth of the matter is that customer loyalty – and customer retention – should be one of your top priorities. 

You improve it by implementing a strong loyalty program but more importantly, you do it by creating a great experience for your customers.

Even a loyalty program can’t make up for a poorly trained customer service rep or trying to get people to do more work than is necessary to a purchase. 

These loyalty program stats are here to give you a clear picture of the impact customer loyalty has on your business and what improves it. 

Trillions of dollars are lost every year by various brands because they’re unable to meet the expectations of consumers. 

Even though loyalty program membership is on the rise, few people are active in all the programs they’re registered with.

This presents an opportunity and a challenge: You can get people to register for your program but it takes added effort and an exceptional experience to satisfy them.

 

Author Bio: Daniel Ndukwu is the founder of KyLeads. There, he helps small businesses and publishers understand their audience and grow their email lists using smart popups and quizzes. 

The post 41 Customer Loyalty Statistics & 10 Benefits for SMEs [2024 Update] appeared first on P2P marketing.

A bold statement, eh?

But, clearly when there are so many competitors offering competitive prices what’s to stop customers from swaying? Who’s to stop them from choosing a brand with steeper discounts?

That’s why developing brand loyalty is crucial for lasting success.

The Difference Between Brand Loyalty and Customer Loyalty

Customer loyalty is when you get a customer spending with you because of the incentives you provide to loyal customers [extrinsic motivation].

Brand loyalty on the other hand revolves around the perception a brand can create. Customers stick around because they like and respect the brand and not because of prices or rewards [intrinsic motivation].

You can get customer loyalty by lowering prices and giving rewards. But as soon as you lose the price advantage you also lose loyalty from these customers.

That’s not how you build a sustainable business.

Brand loyalty remains steadfast, no matter what your competitors do. Even though every brand wants customers to be loyal to them it isn’t that easy to achieve.

Here’s how to build brand loyalty:

1. Send Personalized Emails to Customers

Be it anyone – people like and appreciate it when they feel valued.

Here are several ideas.

Make your customers feel valued by sending them happy birthday emails. Or an email reminding them of a refill for the last item they bought. These emails show that you care about them.

Also, it’s easy to trigger these emails on autopilot with email automation tools.

If there’s a new CEO on board, send customers a personalized email announcing the change.

Another way to personalize your relationship with customers is by sending customized handwritten notes. Personalization isn’t just about including the first name of the recipient in the email

There are several other ways in which you can personalize emails and help manage loyalty:

1.1. Relevance

The average inbox has turned into an increasingly crowded place. Not to mention the onslaught of spam and stray emails that find their way to people’s inboxes day in and day out.

First name personalization is the easiest technique to win attention. But is that enough to sustain the attention you won?

What’s more important than a name is going further along with personalization by targeting customers with the right content.

Content that holds the potential to impact readers. That means sending content that’s tailored to their interests, and offers they might find to be useful.

1.2. Timeliness

Personalized emails are timely in that they arrive with content that knows which stage of the buyer’s journey a customer is in. Timely emails can also be about changing business practices.

Customers feel valued when you are being transparent about business practices. If shipments are being delayed – tell them! And as Amazon does, give customers an option to cancel.

1.3. Have a ‘From Person’

People are more likely to trust and relate to an email that comes from a real person and not a business. To do this, use a person’s name and email id in the “from” and “sender” fields. Use a face instead of a logo.

For example, the emails and promos I get from Serpstat are from Stacy@serpstat.com and not marketing@serpstat.com

2. Customize Loyalty Programs with Rewards that Customers Appreciate

You can add any number of bells and whistles to loyalty programs but what underpins their quality are how valuable they are to the customer. The lynchpin of a loyalty program are its rewards.

Think of it this way: if you apply for a new credit card or home loan, moving loan, your credit history determines your interest rates.

That’s to say your financial prudence sets you up for the interest rates you get in the future. If the credit and loan industry can do this, why can’t you?

But growth in revenue, or increase in size or complexity of a company doesn’t always translate to a better knowledge of the pulse of the customers. That means often rewards a brand offers are in mismatch to what customers want.

An effective loyalty marketing program requires you to understand that all customers are not created equal. To maximize loyalty you must treat each individual differently, giving the best value to them. Customers who create more value should benefit from that value.

Here’s an example:

Sephora’s loyalty program called the Beauty Insider has over 17 million members and is easily one of the most successful loyalty programs ever created.

The biggest hurdle before Sephora’s customers are the high prices of its products. However, Beauty Insider members can cash out reward points for gift cards or discounts that help them purchase the product for a lot less.

These discounts can also be used against limited edition products. Sephora gives flexibility to their members to choose the offers and products they want and make it easy for them to offset the high price.

Sephora’s success is in understanding what their customers are there for and the best way to make their dreams possible.

3. Use Tiered Loyalty Programs 

Tiered loyalty programs are another way to boost brand loyalty. Here’s how they work:

Suppose there are two customers, A and B. Customer A who spends $2000 a year can get $40 in gift cards. This is a reward rate of 2%. A customer spending $5000 should get $200 or a reward rate 4%.

The obvious benefit? Such programs encourage people to progressively spend more.

Tiered loyalty programs that motivate higher spending consequently result in higher profits.

Customers earn points with purchases and they can exchange it for gift cards or gifts.

Whatever you do, ideally, you need the loyalty program to be a way for customers to keep coming back to you. 

At the same time, reward points shouldn’t take way too long to accrue to something valuable. This voids the entire odds of people staying loyal. To offset this, clearly explain how many points are needed to get to each tier.

Here’s an example:

The rewards table is from Marriott. First off, it’s a great example of data visualization. Marriot’s reward points are valued at $10.85 for $100 in spending.

The reward tiers are laid out in full detail on the site for anyone to see (both members and non-members) and the desirable rewards in higher tiers push people to spend more and become eligible for the higher tiers.

There are other benefits like last checkout, accelerated points and upgrades as well.

4. Create Memorable Customer Experiences

Customer reviews can make or break a business. Good reviews drive people to a business and bad reviews drive them away. But good reviews don’t tend to drop from the sky.

If you want good reviews you need satisfied customers and that’s only possible with great service.

Pay attention to customers’ needs and work through snags. Social media channels and other customer interaction zones are all great  places for you to sort out issues.

Customer service could easily be the most important cog in your company and something that people swear by you for!

Here are few examples:

Trader Joe’s

Trader Joe’s prioritizes customer service above everything else. There are several good customer service stories around them.

Here’s one: An 89 year old man was snowed in at his home in Pennsylvania. He was unable to leave his home for anything. His daughter called a bunch of stores to see if anyone did home deliveries.

Trader Joe’s  broke their policy of no home deliveries and delivered the items that catered to his low sodium diet for free. The entire process took less than 30 minutes.

With this, Trader Joe’s lived up to their tagline that says “Your Neighborhood Store”.

Ritz Carlton

Once, a family staying at Ritz Carlton brought in special eggs and milk for their son with special dietary needs. But as soon as they arrived they found all eggs to be broken and that the milk had gone bad.

The manager and staff scoured the town to source the correct items. However, they couldn’t find them.

The executive chef remembered a store in Singapore that sold these particular types of milk and eggs. And he had a relative buy and fly these to Bali where the family were staying. The story found its way to Bloomberg and was shared by hundreds of thousands.

In each of these cases, you can see that employees had a prerogative for acting according to the customer’s best interests.

This is only possible because of the control and trust levied on them. Such experiences generate a strong impression. Customers will remember it for life. These are great content marketing examples.

Now, here’s how to do this for your brand:

Change Customer Service Policies

After I had placed the order for a book on Amazon I woke up the next day to find that the book was being sold for a 10% discount now.

I hit up customer service to notify them of the difference. Next, I asked them to give me a refund on the difference and they promptly did.

If Amazon didn’t match the rate, then customer service agents could do nothing but apologize. The result? A pissed off customer.

Bad support policies can leave a bitter taste in the mouth, even for companies with great support systems in place. You can avoid these problems by giving customer support agents a voice when drafting customer service policies.

These agents are in front of customers every single day, listening to their complaints and problems. They best know what customers expect from customer service. People higher up have a bigger disconnect with the ground reality.

Hire Problem Solvers 

In many of these examples, we saw customer service agents thinking on their feet. You need problem solvers in your company, not just yes-men. The best team members have high emotional intelligence.

This allows them to find the best approach to solve the problem.

Customers remember when they are treated well. They remember it more when they are treated poorly.

51% customers end relationships with businesses because of poor customer service. When encountering a bad experience, customers are more likely to share the bad experience they had with others.

Whether you want more patrons or lost business is entirely up to you. Customer service, when done properly, can generate massive positive word-of-mouth and rise in revenue.

5. Provide Extra Perks for your Most Loyal Customers

You can couple this by providing additional benefits to the most loyal customers. You can build this feature into your loyalty program and also market it.

What does the extra perk mean? The extra perk can be simple as some customers being allowed to skip the line or some goodies. This might seem too complicated to code on your own to your site. But loyalty marketing software can make this happen.

This helps them stick around and also incentivize other customers to stick around and reach the same level.

When launching a new product, invite the best customers you have for a preview evening. This lets them see the product, try it and have a chance to purchase it before anyone else does. This is more common than you think but in less subtle ways. For instance, Amazon Prime members get exclusive deals and access to offers before anyone else who’s an Amazon customer.

This gives these offers an exclusive feel. You can extend it with a preview evening.

For loyal customers or those who spend more you can provide them with a special level of service.

This means giving them free shipping, faster delivery or offering a service out of normal hours. Ultimately you can offer products at a discount. A lot of people are members of loyalty programs to save money.

Conclusion: Give Customers a Reason to be Loyal

Ultimately customers want to be loyal to a company and they do many things to prove that. Apple’s launch events are nothing less than evangelical meetings.

Customers who are brand loyal carry the brand everywhere they go. They might even get into arguments with others supporting their favorite brands. Brand loyalty exists. All you need to do is give them a good reason.

Author bio: George is a freelance writer and blogger who’s been creating content online for the past 9 years. He blogs at Kamayobloggers.com

References:

Email Etiquette: 7 Things you Must do Next Time you Send an Email: https://betterproposals.io/blog/email-etiquette-7-things-you-must-do-next-time-you-send-an-email/

What is Data Visualization: https://venngage.com/blog/data-visualization/

This Trader Joe’s Customer Service Story will Make your Day: https://www.helpscout.com/10-customer-service-stories/

How Ritz Maintains its Mystique: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2007-02-13/how-ritz-carlton-maintains-its-mystiquebusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice

Angry Customers Cost Companies $5.9 trillion: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-10-22/angry-customers-cost-companies-5-dot-9-trillion

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