Creating a loyal customer base is a goal all retail companies are striving for. In today’s age, you can’t just rely on having a good product or service to keep customers, the customer experience plays a huge part.

You have to actively make customers feel like they’re number one to your brand. By investing just a small amount of time and money, you’ll reap great rewards down the line.

Nurtured properly, loyal customers may even develop into all-out evangelist marketers who tell the world about your brand without you having to lift a finger.

There are killer, proven strategies you can use to turn ordinary shoppers into long-term, loyal customers. Here’s how:

1. Online Games for Free Products

People like free things. This is a scientifically proven fact in marketing. That’s why giving your customers the chance to get free products is a great approach to turning them into loyal customers for your brand.

GrubHub, an Internet food-ordering and delivery service, runs the Yummy Rummy sweepstakes, where customers can play a game for the opportunity to win free food and drink. The prizes are structured in various tiers: The top prize is free food for an entire year, but the lesser prizes of certain amounts off of customers’ GrubHub tabs are attractive as well.

GrubHub is working to provide value to their customers. Once a GrubHub customer has made three orders they qualify to play this game and have a 25% chance of winning.

By rewarding their loyalty, customers are happy and engaged, increasing the chances of them spending money with your brand again in the future.

2. Mind-Blowing Customer Service

One way to ensure customers who stay loyal to your brand is to offer them second-to-none customer service. According to Forbes, 71% of people who stopped purchasing from a brand did so because of bad customer service. It stands to reason that if you improve your customer service you will improve customer loyalty.

Zappos is a brand that prides itself on stunning customer service. In fact, its core values specifically revolve around delivering “WOW” through customer service.

This means the company does things differently from many other companies. Having customer service engrained into their culture defines their brand and shoppers know that they will receive top notch service. For example, it always makes returns ridiculously easy for its customers, offers round-the-clock customer service, and also provides free shipping.  All desirable things for online shoppers.

Shoppers expect great customer service, but many brands are failing to deliver. By offering extraordinary customer service you can make your brand stand out above the rest. For many companies, it is used as a unique value proposition because it is so hard to come by.

3. Lots of Online Help Materials

Sometimes, your customers can help themselves. They would prefer immediate answers compared to waiting on a response. Online help materials can take the shape and form of various things, such as self-help tutorials or an active community forum where moderators or company reps are frequently available to provide answers.

StudioPress, a seller of premium WordPress themes, empowers its customers to find the answers they need all on their own. This means customers feel less helpless and can get started in finding answers right away.

The company offers a lot of tutorials for their Genesis Framework, which allows customers to troubleshoot on any Genesis issues. The community forum also encourages self-empowerment this way. Customers can read previous forums to see if their answers have already been covered and can talk to other users to see if anyone has any useful suggestions.

Having all the relevant help materials together on a dedicated tutorials page is a best practice. This allows your customers to sort through and quickly find what specific help topic they need to read up on. If you’re going to include a community forum on your site, it will really help to have your support team actively monitor and frequently respond to queries and discussions.

4. Free Gifts With a Purchase

We’re back to the topic of giving away free stuff to produce loyal customers. While you don’t always need to give free things to increase customer loyalty, it is a nice touch to show you appreciate their business.

For this tactic customers would need to make a certain amount of purchases before giving them a discount or free item.

This phenomenon translates seamlessly to online retail. Surveys show that giving customers a free gift with a purchase boosts their brand loyalty. This reaction is almost universal, as a whopping 90% of online shoppers say this works for them.

Big retailers are aware of this promising data and have applied it to their e-commerce operations. This has proved popular with their customers and ensures that they continue to offer such promos. Nordstrom is a prominent example of such a retailer.

On your online store, adding threshold deals like this is increasing the perceived value from the customer.

5. A Rewarding Referral Program

Referral programs may not be the newest idea out there, but the reason they’ve stayed around is because they work. Shopify reports that referral programs are one of the better tactics for keeping customers around and improving conversions and sales, too. Not only is this powerful, word-of-mouth marketing, but, if you reward your customers for referring new shoppers to your store, then you’ve created a continuous loop of benefits that attracts return customers.

Harry’s is a new Internet shaving-equipment company. Before the company even launched its e-commerce site, it had a strategy in play to create loyal customers. It featured a special splash page that interested shoppers, who first had to sign up on an initial landing page, could refer their friends to. The shoppers would get bigger and better prizes as more friends would sign up for Harry’s service through their unique referral links.

Harry’s first obtained leads’ contact info by presenting people with a one-field web form that was no hassle at all to fill out. Once it had this info, it rewarded said leads with free products if they were able to refer new leads. This created a positive snowball effect since the leads were motivated to refer their friends and family in exchange for free products.

You can implement a rewarding referral program even if your site’s already been live for a while. Simply entice people to give you their contact info by making the sign-up process extremely simple with short forms. Then, ask them to refer their friends to receive a special discount or product.

6. Stellar Twitter Customer Interaction

Social media is a wonderful chance for brands to interact with their customers. Social Media Examiner reports that 51% of respondents in the 2014 State of MultiChannel Customer Service Report asserted that brands that replied to them on social media were viewed favorably by them. Social media is a brilliant opportunity for brands to build strong customer loyalty because it’s a real-time conversation.

Microsoft Xbox takes interacting with customers seriously on its Twitter stream. Microsoft claims that this stream has snagged Guinness’ distinction for being the most responsive brand on Twitter! It’s certainly doing several things right in dealing with customers.

The stream is solely dedicated to Xbox customer inquiries and troubleshooting issues, not to mention suggestions and ideas to get around problems. Microsoft ensures that this stream is constantly updated and curated by its team, so gamers are never left in the lurch. Finally, all conversations are characterized by personalized and attentive staff tweets to concerned gamers.

Your brand can also set up an effective Twitter stream geared specifically to engaging your customers. Since customers want brands to reply within 60 minutes on social media, always have your support team manning and monitoring your stream for any feedback.

Conclusion

While it’s a challenge to get leads to convert into actual customers, it can be an even bigger challenge to get your customers to keep coming back. For a loyal customer base you need to continuously nurture them.

The six tactics outlined above are some of the most efficient and proven methods of doing so. By treating your customers like they’re the most important people in the world, you can turn them into loyal customers.

Don’t be afraid to think outside the box when it comes to retaining customers. To recap the ideas we suggested:

• Running an online contest for free prizes

• Offering customer service like free shipping that will blow customers’ minds

• Providing self-help materials on your site

• Giving a free gift with an initial purchase

• Using a referral program to get more and more leads

• Interacting with your customers on social sites like Twitter

See the difference that making customers feel truly special makes to your conversion rate!