As rocketing gas prices and food costs increase, consumer spending is down. If people aren’t spending as much on your products or services as they used to, you can’t rely on sales or discounts to bring them in – the hit to your bottom line might not make up for the brief period of increased customer activity.Instead, you need to rely on customer loyalty.
The Pareto Principle says that 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers. To keep these customers coming back, you need to help them remain loyal to you. That’s right; you can take steps to build customer loyalty. Here are a few ideas to do that:Get to know your customers.To create a loyalty program or to know what products your customers want (and keep stocking them), you need to get to know your customers. First you need to identify what type of customer you want to remain loyal to you and figure out which products or services they value the most. Having this information will allow you to create an appealing rewards program targeted right to this customer base.In order to do this, you need to use a combination of customer satisfaction surveys, market research and customer feedback. According to an article by Thomas O. Jones and W. Earl Sasser, Jr. in the Harvard Business Review, these three tools will help businesses understand their customers better than anything else will.