19
Apr

Loyalty in An Inbound Marketing Strategy

Continue the customer journey after purchase

Whether you like it or not, interrupting the customer journey right after closing a sale leaves the person who just trusted you with an unpleasant aftertaste of being a pawn on a chessboard. To avoid this pitfall, be sure to continue serving your customers after receiving their payments.   

Retrieve customer feedback

Approximately one week after a customer receives the product/service, we cannot recommend sending a satisfaction survey.  

It is extremely important to collect feedback from your customers, if only through a «simple» e-mails. This will help you identify your strengths and areas for improvement. 

If necessary, you will also be able to help some clients take full advantage of the service you have previously sold to them.  

Let’s take a simple example: you just sold a state-of-the-art printer to a customer who, in responding to your feedback survey, complained about the complexity of certain operations, but you know that by installing the new version of an X software, this problem would be solved.  

Therefore, thanks to the feedback requested, you are able to bring real added value to your customer, and this is precisely the kind of «little plus» that we do not forget.  

In addition, the satisfaction survey may be an opportunity to ask your customers to leave a review of your product/service, whether on your website or on social networks. 

Continue to educate them through quality content

In addition to the above mentioned feedback, the continuation of the post-conclusion sales customer experience must also be done through the regular sending of quality content to your existing customers.  

Of course, an inbound marketing objective is to not especially «harass» anyone, this continuous «education» of customers is to be implemented in a non-intrusive way.  

In concrete terms, it is a matter of sending your customers, on a monthly basis, a newsletter containing not only news concerning your company and/or its sector of activity, but also articles whose topics will have a particular resonance for them. 

In this way, you will remain “visible” and, provided you produce truly qualitative content, you will continue to strengthen your image as a reference in your field of expertise – and this privileged position makes it possible to significantly increase sales over the medium-long term.  

The appearance of intelligent content

If you go back to your notes on “Inbound Marketing: Definition”, you will notice that content for prospects varies depending on their positioning within the sales funnel, with increasingly “sharp” articles.  

Well, you will also need to cover completely different topics for existing customers – this is called “smart content”. 

What is Smart Content?

As many articles as you will find on «inbound marketing definition», the notion of «intelligent content» can seem complex to understand.  

It is widely accepted that this content is rich and qualified from a semantic point of view. But what does this mean concretely?  

In reality, it is rather a matter of designing a categorized content, and precisely tagged, which is not intended for a particular medium, and which breaks down into fragments that can be used independently of each other.  

The aim is to integrate content into the inbound marketing scheme as the company’s “raw material”, and to use it as part of the customer loyalty strategy through its flexibility, ease of referencing and reuse/reformatting.   

Setting up intelligent content on your site/blog

Now that the importance of smart content among customer loyalty tools is clarified, let’s see how to implement it on your site and/or blog, starting with differentiation between loyal and new customers.  

In fact, the former do not need to hear more about the benefits of your products/services, but rather about the different ways to use them, as well as about upcoming updates and/or plans, not to mention some information about what is happening in “backstage” in your company.  

This implies specific SEO content in relation to new customers who still need more concrete data on the competitive positioning of your offer.