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All you need is 1,000 true fans to run a sustainable business. This is what Kevin Kelly, renowned author and cofounder of Wired magazine, wrote in an article titled 1,000 True Fans.
The premise is simple. You don’t need extensive capital or a wide audience base to make a decent living. In fact, if you think about it, all it takes is 1,000 true fans at 100 pounds profit each to make a net profit of 100,000 pounds per year. Not too shabby, right?
This, of course, is not something that comes easily. But if you run a business or are thinking of starting one, shifting your perspective slightly might influence the systems you set up and the way you approach your customers.
The key in 1,000 true fans is not the number of fans, or the fans themselves, but the word true. As a business owner or creator, you aim to build a loyal fanbase.
Why is customer loyalty important?
Loyal customers go the extra mile to cheer you on, support you, and do word-of-mouth marketing for you, in addition to buying your products or services.
When you have your first 10, 100, or 1,000 true fans, growing your business becomes easier, and the numbers will exponentially compound.
But how can you turn your potential clients into repeat customers and later into true fans?
In this article, we'll explore effective strategies to build and maintain customer loyalty, ensuring long-term success for your small business. Whether you are just starting or looking to improve your existing operations, these tips will help you create a loyal customer base.
To build a base of loyal customers, you first need to do two important things:
Both steps are essential to gain people’s trust and build credibility in the marketplace. Credibility and trust are crucial to doing business and building an audience who would later become loyal customers.
Even if you have the best hammers in town, if you’re selling hammers to fishermen, you may not be successful in building an audience. They might find the hammers fascinating, but you won’t be able to convert them into loyal customers.
This is why it’s important to identify a core audience that you want to target initially. They have to be potentially interested in what you’re creating and find the content you’re creating useful.
Before jumping into a content creation frenzy, take your time to think about what you can offer, research the market, and develop a content strategy that offers high-quality and high-value content.
The first two sections focused more on the internal and reflective aspects that you need to consider when building or running a business. From here onwards, I will be focusing more on strategies and tools you can use to strengthen the connection with your audience so that they can eventually become loyal customers.
To do that, I will refer to some studies and reports I found while researching customer loyalty practices and their impact on small businesses.
To build and maintain a strong relationship with your customers, understanding their needs and continuously engaging with them is crucial.
Of course, when you want to scale things up, the dynamics might change. But if you’re a solopreneur or a small business owner, focus on building a good relationship with your customers. This doesn’t mean wasting all your time, energy, and resources on providing more than you actually can.
It just means understanding that there’s another human on the other side of the business transaction.
Many small business owners value good customer support. This is, in fact, one of the main reasons business owners decide to change services.
That’s why it’s important to listen to your customers and provide them with good support to the extent that it is humanly possible.
How can you build a better connection with your audience?
By speaking directly with your audience, or if that proves difficult, you can use survey and feedback tools like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms.
Here’s an interesting anecdote before we move to the next section: A friend of mine was once having dinner with a potential client. Things didn’t go anywhere. Until a few years later, that very person contacted my friend again asking for some advice on a work-related issue.
The potential client asked my friend whether he still remembered him to which my friend replied: “Sure I do, and I also remember that you ordered this and that.” The potential client was sold.
Now I’m not saying you need to memorise all your customers' interests and preferences, but these small details surely deepen and strengthen relationships.
Surveys and Feedback Tools: Businesses that systematically collect feedback see substantial improvements in customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Customer Interviews: This qualitative feedback is invaluable in shaping customer-centric strategies, helping your business better serve your audience.
A customer-centric approach does not mean that you ought to do exactly everything customers ask. What it does mean is that at the core, you need to have your user base in mind for any service or product that you want to offer. In this case, you’re prioritising the customer and ensuring that they’re getting the most out of your content, products, or services.
For example, if you’re building your landing page, ask yourself this question: Is the content on your webpage clear, easy to understand, and speaks the language of your target audience?
If you’re developing an app, designing a website, offering online courses, or selling digital or physical products, it is important to consider the user experience and ensure that the communication between you and your customers is clear.
That is why feedback and listening to your audience is an important step to understand how you can offer personalised experiences or map your customer journey so that it’s easier for you to build customer loyalty.
Personalised Experiences: Tailor your services and communications to meet individual customer needs. Using Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems to track preferences and interactions can help significantly. Companies excelling in personalisation see significantly higher revenue from these activities.
Customer Journey Mapping: Customer journey mapping involves creating a visual representation of the customer's experience with your brand. By mapping out the entire customer journey, you can identify opportunities for improvement and personalisation. Understanding each touchpoint ensures every interaction adds value to the customer experience.
Transparent and clear communication is the cornerstone of any long-lasting relationship. Just like any relationship, the boundaries between business owners, businesses, and customers have dissipated.
Consider a relationship with your friends or partners. It is dynamic, with different exchanges, conversations, and messages shared all the time. When you’re building a relationship with your friends, partners, or colleagues, problems and misunderstandings are inevitable when the communication isn’t clear.
Traditionally, the way businesses communicated with their clients was almost unidirectional, sometimes bidirectional. The business would put an ad in the newspaper, radio, or TV, and the audience would just consume it.
Nowadays, we have entered a different, more dynamic stage, which a Harvard Business Review article calls the echoverse. Messages between businesses and customers are omnidirectional, and they are even encouraged to participate in generating content and interact with each other.
"Communication is omnidirectional. Messages flow in all directions, originating from any point and resonating through multiple interactions."
To foster this relationship further, you can’t just sit in your ivory tower and throw your messages at your audience. Communicating with them is important, interacting with them is essential, and establishing clear channels of communication is conducive to building more trust and loyalty.
How can you communicated with your customers more effectively? Good question.
Regular Updates: Email newsletters are a great way to keep customers informed about new products, services, and company news. Regular updates help maintain a connection and keep your brand top of mind.
Social Media Engagement: Actively engaging with customers on social media platforms is crucial. Responding to comments and messages promptly shows that you value their input. Sharing customer stories and testimonials builds a sense of community and trust. The increased importance of digital engagement is underscored by McKinsey on consumer sentiment during the pandemic.
Consistency Across Channels: Ensure consistent messaging across all channels. A connected experience across devices reinforces your brand message and builds a reliable image.
I was once telling my friend (not the one mentioned above) about how, where I’m based in Spain, waiters at the local café or pub I usually hang out at occasionally invite me for coffee or drinks. They only do that here when they like the customer and have a minimal level of trust. In a way, you can see that as a signal that they want you to keep coming back. Now we can think about the motives behind that.
My friend always insisted that this is because the cafés are working out of self-interest. Fair enough. That was until he moved from Austria to Malta, and lo and behold, a few months later, he’s baffled that the coffee shop owner invited him for a few cappuccinos.
What does that have to do with rewarding your loyal customers? Well, think about it this way: When you hang out with your friends, you end up buying them gifts or inviting them out for lunch or drinks.
Think about loyalty programs in a similar manner. Psychologically, it’s good to feel like a valued customer, especially if the customer is a repeat one. Whether we act out of self-interest or genuine altruistic motive, it doesn’t really matter—let the philosophers handle that conversation.
Rewards and occasional gifts can make all the difference in the world.
What are some things you can do in this case? Depending on your financial capabilities, it can be anywhere from a simple gesture to discounts to affiliate links.
According to research, here are some things you can take into consideration:
Point-Based Systems: Implement a system where customers earn points for purchases, which can be redeemed for discounts or freebies. Companies with robust loyalty programs often see faster revenue growth compared to their competitors.
Exclusive Offers: Providing exclusive offers and early access to new products for loyalty program members makes customers feel special and appreciated, significantly boosting retention and engagement.
Now you might be thinking, would a loyal customer really have complaints? We are humans after all. Unless you’re a Stoic, then chances are you get irritated and annoyed by things. The food is cold, the product is broken, the haircut wasn’t as good, the design needs tweaking, the ebook could have been better, the coffee was bland, the woodwork could’ve been nicer, the course was not very helpful, and so on.
Who said running a business was ever going to be easy? But based on my experience, sometimes the most important aspect of handling a complaint is listening to what the other person has to say.
This is probably the main reason why small business owners prefer companies with a dedicated customer support service. They want to be listened to and assured that:
So listening to your customers' complaints and acknowledging the complaint is important to move forward to resolution.
How can you do this more effectively?
Active Listening: Listen to complaints without interruption and show empathy for their concerns. Acknowledging their frustration and understanding their perspective can diffuse tension and demonstrate your commitment to their satisfaction.
Resolution and Follow-Up: Resolve issues quickly and follow up to ensure customer satisfaction. This proactive approach shows that you are dedicated to their happiness and willing to go the extra mile to make things right.
So you collected feedback, built communication channels with your customers, and offered loyalty programs. Now what?
It’s time to take all the feedback you collected, study it, and decide what your priority for improvement should be. Customer feedback is a treasure trove of information that can drive continuous improvement in your business.
That does not mean that you should just keep changing based on the feedback you get. Use feedback as an indicator to see the most common and recurrent patterns that your clients keep bringing up.
When one person complains about a service, and 100 others don’t, then the feedback in this case isn’t very informational. But if more than 10 people give you feedback about one particular thing that needs tweaking, it might be time to take some action.
Regular Review: Regularly reviewing feedback helps identify common themes and issues that need addressing. Consistent analysis of feedback enables you to spot trends and make necessary adjustments to improve your offerings. Ongoing feedback loops are vital for continuous improvement.
Actionable Insights: Implementing customer suggestions not only enhances your business but also shows customers that their opinions matter, reinforcing their loyalty.
This is a tough one, especially if you don’t have the time or resources to hire people to handle customer support. However, excellent customer support doesn’t have to mean leaving everything you’re doing to focus on one problem.
If you’re working alone or don’t have a big team, then the best way to provide excellent support is to be transparent about your customer support system.
People usually don’t like uncertainty. So the more obscure the communication, the more annoyed they will get. However, if you’re clear about what they need to expect, the processing times to address their questions, complaints, or issues they might be facing, then they would know what to expect and wouldn’t feel unheard or in limbo.
Alternatively, if you have a dedicated team that offers customer support, then ensuring that your service is excellent can be achieved with a couple of steps:
Training and Development: Invest in regular training for your customer service team to keep their skills sharp and up-to-date. Companies that invest in customer service training often see significant increases in satisfaction and loyalty.
Empowerment: Empower your team to make decisions and solve problems on the spot. Giving them the authority to handle issues without escalation leads to quicker resolutions and happier customers.
In this essay, I tried to blend a mix of anecdotes, personal reflections, and research to provide you with some strategies and tools that will help you consider the importance of building an audience. Having loyal customers, as Kevin Kelly suggests, is a better approach than casting a wide net and hoping that everyone becomes a customer. It establishes a stronger bond and channels of communication with your customers.
The next steps depend on where you currently are and where you want to go. So take a few moments to ask yourself what your story is, how you want to share it with the world, and think about a strategy to carry this out based on the tips and tools I shared throughout this article.
If you have any questions, or would like to discuss this further, don’t hesitate to reach out!
