How Brand Recognition Helps You Improve Customer Retention

When you want to buy a printer, what is the first brand that comes to mind? Most people will say Xerox, which is the most well-known and desired brand. Or, when considering the purchase of an all-terrain vehicle, which brand do you consider first? Of course, Jeep springs to mind immediately. You get the point, right?

These are brands that are synonymous with their products. Their customers are loyal and purchase their products religiously. As a successful business, you should aim for that level of loyalty and recognition.

Without a loyal customer base, it’s impossible to build such a powerful and recognizable brand. That is why you should work towards retaining your current customers and building brand equity.

Without further ado, let’s discuss the benefits of brand recognition and how it can help improve your customer retention metrics.

Customer Acquisition and Customer Retention

One of the most common myths in business is that if you build it, they will come and stay. But, the reality is that if you don’t care about building your customer relationships, people will ditch you for another brand.

Ask yourself, are you doing enough to retain your customers? According to our CEO Mario Peshev, the following reasons are why brands fail to keep their customers:

• No Long-Term Plan: Since the moment you onboard a client, you must have a long-term vision about the relationship. The more you maximize the customer lifetime value, the more profitable the client will be to your business.
• Weak Targeting: Not every customer is a long-term client. Your best buyers are the ones that will require your product/service long-term.
• Poor Business Model: A weak and non-profitable business model will push potential clients away. Make people remember your brand by starting strong and keeping your pace consistent.
• Low Work Quality: When customers are not pleased with your service and product quality, they will most likely leave you for your competitors, it is as simple as that.
• Lack of Original Value Proposition: Having something original to offer to potential customers is a no-brainer.
• Operational Issues: Any miscommunication or product delay can lead your clients to cancel your service.

 

Sure, getting new clients is more than necessary. However, retaining your existing ones is crucial. Here’s why:

• Increased Conversion Rate: If customers trust your brand, they will continue to use your product.
• Lower Expenses: The less time and money you spend on acquiring new customers, the more profitable your strategies for customer retention will be. Let’s not forget that it takes six times more investment to acquire new customers than to retain the existing ones.
• More Potential: What’s better – to continually chase after leads or improve your customer experience? Where can you improve? Do you meet users’ expectations adequately? Ask for feedback and improve on what you offer.
• More Profit: 80% of your future revenue will be made up of 20% of your current customers. Retaining your customers is not only cheaper but also, it’s more profitable for your brand, with a 25-95% increase in profits as a result of 5% more retention.

The Benefits of Positive Brand Recognition

Since the competition is fierce, having a positive brand recognition strategy can benefit your company in the following ways:

Increased Revenue

People won’t opt for your product if they don’t know that you exist. That is why brand recognition is instrumental for your revenue stream. Once people are familiar with your brand and your product, the user journey is initiated.

According to a Clutch.co article, good branding leads to:

• 31% greater shareholder return.
• 3x faster growth than rival companies.
• 31% greater revenue growth over three years.

Greater Market Share

By improving your brand recognition, you are improving your company’s market share as well. When customers recognize you, your competitive position in the marketplace is better, your rivals must follow suit.

Better Net Promoter Score

The demands of the marketplaces evolve constantly, and users’ perceptions follow suit. That is why you should continuously develop your branding strategy. Therefore, assessing and improving the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is something that should become a routine in your approach.

By surveying your customers regularly, monitoring the NPS score will be much easier. If the score improves, it means that your branding works!

Building Stronger Relationships

Like with every other relationship in life, customer relationships ask for commitment and attention to detail. Not everything is over when you’ve “closed the sale”.

In fact, branding is all about establishing serious and emotional connections between your company and customers, in which both sides need to be happy:

• Customers: They’re facing a problem, are grateful for the benefits that you provide and the customer experience, refer you to other prospects, and regularly pay for your product/solution.
• Brand: You must deliver extraordinary solutions to your customers’ problems. As a brand, you need to also communicate transparently, and be 100% focused on your client’s needs.

How Powerful Brands Build Strong Connections

The most powerful brands online take their relationships with their customers seriously. They focus on their customers’ needs and have the highest market share in their niche in the process.

Here’s how Nike, one of the most potent brands, establishes connections with their customers:

As one of the greatest sports apparel brands in the world, Nike knows how to form an emotional bond with people from the start. By deploying well-conceived marketing campaigns, Nike has become the athlete’s hero!

It’s all about motivating consumers to “Just do It”, and eradicate the tiny voice in their heads that says that something is impossible.

This emotional bond between the brand and its customers does not always promote workout apparel straight away. Instead, Nike’s branding revolves around the athlete’s narrative and way of life. Nike encourages them, and consequently, athletes connect their aim for perfection with the apparel.

Consequently, the predicted growth of $30 billion this year alone is a good indicator that the brand values a long-term relationship with the customers.

Improving Customer Engagement

Engagement is crucial when building your brand’s recognition and retaining your customers. The days when a highway billboard and few ads here and there to remind customers that you exist are over. Today, you need to spark interaction and continuously invest in it.

When you invest in engagement, you give your word to your customers that you will always provide value, which helps you plant the seeds of customer loyalty and retention. The more the customers interact with your brand, the chances of them staying with your product/service are higher.

Here are some proven ways to achieve this:

Define Your Brand Identity

When you have a defined brand identity, engaging with your target customers is much more comfortable. People should feel like they are interacting with a person that is behind the brand, as opposed to a corporate machine that just wants their money. More importantly, your customers should share the same brand voice, and in some way, become friends with your brand.

Your brand’s identity and voice should exist in everything that you do, in terms of content, and customer experience. Take ASOS, the online cosmetics and fashion retailer, as an example.

The brand’s youthfulness and chic identity ooze from every page, piece of content and the clothes that are associated with them. Each word that they use is relevant to their identity as well.

Personalize the Communication

Personalization is important for every customer retention strategy. And when it comes to engaging with customers, there’s not a better strategy than the personalized approach. Personalized interaction increases the chances for customer engagement.

For example, Starbucks keeps the engagement going through its mobile app. The brand has an excellent rewards system and allows customers to customize their orders through the app.

Additionally, the company utilizes their customers’ information, namely purchasing history and user location, to personalize their communication as much as possible.

Tells Successful Stories

When your customers see a successful story, they know that they’re part of a brand and a community that’s more than just sales messaging and profits. People engage more when they see user-generated content, and it boosts their trust in the brand.

For example, BMW continually shares photos of the respective vehicle owners.

Or, ASOS pinpoints personalization and user-generated content by posting pictures of shoppers wearing their clothes.

Boosting Customers’ Trust in the Brand

Trust is everything in a business. According to Edelman, people trust companies more than they believe governments. The more they believe in you, the higher their commitment to your product, and the more they will recommend your products to other potential buyers.

If you want to promote the trust in your brand and retain your most valuable customers, here’s what you should do:

Have a Transparent Value Proposition

The value proposition makes or breaks the trust that your customers have in your business. It’s a promise that you make to your customers, and you need to keep that promise. When forming your UVP, be realistic, and more importantly, transparent to your customers. Think about what your product represents, who it is for, and why it is useful.

Take a look at Stripe, an online payment company’s UVP on their site:

It’s clear who the target market is, the benefits are expressed concisely, and the transitions on the homepage are smooth.

Focus on the Quality of Your Content

Creating quality content as you build your brand recognition and increase your customers’ trust is a no-brainer. When your business is firmly established as a leader in your industry and your content helps customers solve their problems, that trust can be solidified further.

Here are some tips to help you achieve that level of trust with your content:

• Don’t Jargonize: In your industry, there are tons of buzzwords and acronyms that most customers are not familiar with. If you notice that those terms don’t work with your audience, remove them from your content.
• Write Case Studies: When created and appropriately promoted, case studies can be an excellent way to verify the quality of the content that you’re delivering.
• Have Consistent Messages: Inconsistencies in how you promote your product and how you create your content, can negatively affect your customers’ perception of your brand. Try to maintain a unified brand message.
• Keep Your Promises: Most importantly, keep your promises, and you will retain your customers as a result.

Provide Excellent Customer Experience

Customer experience is pivotal for every brand, and it is something that sets businesses apart. Your customers deserve a personalized customer experience that shows them how much they mean to your brand.

To learn more about the importance of customer experience and useful tips on how to execute it correctly, read our guide here.

Humanizing Your Brand

Businesses are created and run by humans, right? Well, at least until the machines take over.

Jokes aside, we are all people, and your customers want to feel like they are buying from people. As people, they want to see you, understand you, hear you, and feel your brand identity. So, if you want to retain customers, consider the following:

Present the People Behind Your Brand

As we’ve mentioned before, people love to interact with people. That is why to increase engagement and retain customers, you need to show them that you can resolve their problems.

For example, on our website, we have the Our Team page where everyone can read about our employees and their team roles.

You can also share employee stories on social media with your target audience. They’re both appealing to customers and potential employees too.

Engage as Humanly as Possible

Listen to your customers and interact with them regularly. There’s hardly a more human thing to do than that. Motivate them to tell you their stories and their experiences with your brand. Ask them if there’s anything else that they would love to see. Make your customers an integral part of your company.

When interacting on social media, keep in mind the following:

• Engage respectfully, as you would to with a friend.
• Own your mistakes and be humble in your interactions.
• Respond to comments and messages immediately. Be urgent, attentive, and, most of all, helpful on social media.
• Keep listening. Only then will you be able to respond adequately.

Gradually Improve Customer Loyalty

Loyal customers are long-term customers. Having people that come back for more is essential to the success of your brand. They will help you grow your brand and your profits in the process.

However, retaining your best customers is not a walk in the park. It’s a gradual process that does not happen overnight.

The brands with the most loyalty are the ones that believe the lifetime value of a customer begins from the moment they become aware of the brand.

People don’t just opt for a product or a service anymore. They want an individualized and comfortable brand experience from the start.

Here are some methods that can be effective in retaining brand loyalty:

Anticipate Churns

You know how they say, prevention is the best medicine. Before a customer decides to leave, there are often warning signals that you need to pay attention to, such as inconsistent behavior patterns, insufficient product usage, and frequent customer service inquiries.

For example, if you own an eCommerce store with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, you will be able to anticipate churn much faster. You can track each customer’s purchasing patterns, and know if someone hasn’t bought. If customers are not consistent in their purchasing, they might be considering your competitors.

Include Loyalty Deals

Perhaps the best way to improve loyalty is to reward your most valuable customers. After all, over 70% of men and women say that they’d stay with a brand if offered a good loyalty deal. When your customers feel valued, they will always choose your brand.

Remind Your Customers

People nowadays sign up for all sorts of products, and quite often, they forget they’ve registered for a service or a subscription. That is why it is a good idea to reach out to them via email message or notification with an offer that they can’t resist.

Wrapping Up

The best thing you can do to improve your brand recognition and customer retention at the same time is to deliver quality service and be honest with your customers. When they trust you, your company will grow too, and your brand will stand out in the process.

Keep in mind that retaining customers is a time-consuming process. But, it’s a rewarding one – you can even ask the best brands out there. When you know your business goals, and you’re focused on them together with your customers, the chances of greater brand awareness and customer loyalty are much higher.