Using low-cost digital advertising is a thing of the past as social media marketing is taking off. To penetrate the market, you are no more required to use the same old paid SEO techniques.
Today, winning e-commerce brands have taken a step further, instead of focusing on customer acquisition alone. These brands have extended their approach by including retention marketing. Instead of building emotional relationships, these brands are creating brand communities to motivate customers to stay engaged over time.
Adoption of this strategy let the companies not to spend all of their precious time in finding new customers who only make one purchase. The approach requires them to focus on turning each new customer into a devoted, loyal community member that keeps coming back.
A loyalty software program, like Loyera, helps you shift your focus from the patterns of the past to the ways of the future. Let’s take a look at why the old ways of growing a business are unsustainable and simply do not work:
Mediocre advertisements no longer influence customers to purchase
When the e-commerce industry steps into the market, digital advertising on social media channels, like Facebook, Instagram, is the first phase of advertising.
Consequently, if you are putting efforts into social advertisements, it helps you make quite a load of money. That is how anybody can start their online business as it does not take a lot to get things right.
However, over time, this strategy does not work. Even customers do not fall for the products to be sold through these strategies, where the amount of advertisement space is overtaken by demand. Now, making advertisements has become more expensive than ever and has increased by 24% from the past year 2018.
Today, e-commerce brands are getting clicks by featuring more advertisements and are thus driving revenue. If you are trying to use the same methods of the year 2014, it will result in enormous acquisition costs that are bound to affect and overwhelm a customer’s value to your business.
Product engagement encourages customers to make more purchases
Online advertisements create transactional relationships with prospective customers, and that is one of the biggest problems. Simply put, these advertisements promote consumer’s buying habits surrounding promotions, deals, and prices that are different to how customers feel about your brand.
A clothing store brand, for instance, uses loyalty software for clothing stores to counter the negative mindset of the customers. The software builds a way to develop emotional relationships with your loyal customers. Along these lines, customers feel that they are part of this program and it motivates them to keep making additional purchases.
Therefore, just remember that instead of looking for new customers, engaging with your existing ones complement your products and services. Also, this customer engagement goes a long way to strengthen the relationship they have with your brand.
Online advertisements create transactional relationships with prospective customers, and that is one of the biggest problems. Simply put, these advertisements promote consumer’s buying habits surrounding promotions, deals, and prices that are different to how customers feel about your brand.
A clothing store brand, for instance, uses loyalty software for clothing stores to counter the negative mindset of the customers. The software builds a way to develop emotional relationships with your loyal customers. Along these lines, customers feel that they are part of this program and it motivates them to keep making additional purchases.
Therefore, just remember that instead of looking for new customers, engaging with your existing ones complement your products and services. Also, this customer engagement goes a long way to strengthen the relationship they have with your brand.
Rewards keep customers encouraged to invest in your brand
When incredible advertisements are not enough to sustain your brand, a loyalty software can serve as a community for all your customers. With this software, you can leverage your targeted customers who are already showing their interest. It even motivates them to join in. When they get engaged with your brand; you can ask them to share the community with all their friends.
For the complete brand experience, the loyalty program enables businesses to sustain their growth with the large base of engaging customers, repeat customers, and the customers who become advocates of your brand.
Let your customers invest in your products and services by offering rewards and discounts timely. These rewards and offers allow them to engage over and over again with your brand as they are experiencing success. Therefore, leave the intense ad competition behind and gain the power of loyal customers by implementing a loyalty program to your business.
Focusing on developing a world-class top-of-funnel is exhausting
Creating advertisements, good or bad, is not sufficient to sustain a brand. The top-of-funnel strategy is being used by winning brands who put their efforts into as many customer acquisition streams as possible. For instance, Showfields have created a space where dozens of traditional online brands can come together to offer engaging illustrated style retail experiences.
The strategy of developing a top-of-funnel is not uncommon now, where these brands can be seen on billboard ads in Times Square. With this strategy, brands can propel their customers directly to their brand and achieve high sales growth.
However, it does not really work. E-commerce brands are still fighting the same way as the ones who are running advertisements even after optimizing their entire top-of-funnel. Ultimately, optimizing your top-of-funnel is just a mask for the constant battle to get new customers through acquisition marketing. But, you will require more budget than ever to reach potential customers and convince them to give your brand a chance.
Value-added marketing easily makes your brand worthy of consideration
Focus on value-added marketing with content that helps you exceed customer expectations and delivers more value than what they asked for. Take the core-idea of value-added marketing forward through interesting, informative and relevant blog posts and videos that show the uniqueness of your industry and can draw the attention of potential new customers.
Therefore, creating content that is useful for your existing customers and keeps you at top-of-their mind, can help you in building a brand community easily. That way, customers can easily decide to return to the brand they are used to, to receive great value.
Marketing content is easy to create, but making it valuable for the entire funnel list will probably give you a headache. Also, if you are dedicating all your marketing strategies to find new customers, it will hurt your business as you are not getting brand loyalty in return.
Final thoughts
After a considerable thought, you can win at different levels with a brand community. A strong brand community is significant for building a successful brand, alongside tools like value-added marketing and reward programs. These are only a few critical strategies that are leveraged by successful brands to achieve brand community.
Investing a great amount of your revenue in mediocre ads, amazing ads, or even in incredible top-of-funnel strategy alone is not enough. Complementing the top-of-funnel strategy with the retention and relationship focused brand community is the only way to dominate your competitors and grow at a rapid, and sustainable pace. This is the strategy that you need to adopt for your brand to get success.