Climbing the Marketing Pyramid: Strategies for Effective Customer Engagement and Loyalty
Have you ever used the marketing pyramid to guide your customer retention strategy?
If not, you could be missing out on a helpful framework that allows you to map out strategies that not only acquire customers but keep them around for a long time.
The marketing pyramid shows how you can move from simple ways to build awareness to more advanced strategies that build deeper connections with customers. This is often through personalized experiences, social media engagement, loyalty programs, and more.
Join us as we go over these strategies in more detail, along with examples that illustrate how you can implement them into your own marketing plan.
What is the Marketing Pyramid?
The marketing pyramid is a framework that starts with a plan (bottom of the pyramid) and ends with the desired goal (bottom of the pyramid). In between, there are different strategies that help you get to the top.
Here’s how it works:
- Goal: Using the below strategies, you can meet your desired goals, whether that’s to increase sales or build brand awareness.
- Outbound: Any outbound marketing strategy that requires you to reach out to customers. This might include direct mail, web content, print advertising, digital advertising, and social media advertising.
- Inbound: Inbound marketing refers to strategies that bring the customer to you. This could be SEO, landing pages, online listings, or videos.
- Branding: Your branding is what your company is all about and how it stands out from the rest. The different elements of branding are brand messaging, brand story, brand voice, tagline, visual branding (i.e., logo, colors, fonts, photography), and mission statement.
- Strategy: Your marketing strategy is how you plan to reach your desired goal. Before jumping into action, you must define things like your target audience, buyer personas, sales goals, budget, and positioning.
Why You Need Strategies for Customer Engagement and Loyalty
Customer engagement is part of the marketing pyramid. Even though you’ve won over customers, you still must follow a marketing strategy that creates positive experiences and makes them never want to leave.
For example, 69% of customers are likely to become loyal to a brand if they receive rewards. So, including reward offers in your marketing pyramid could play a big role in creating a loyal customer base.
80% of a company’s revenue will come from just 20% of its existing customers. Plus, as a brand, you have a great chance (about 60%-70%) of making a sale to an existing customer. This number drops to 20% when it comes to new customers.
And not to mention, it can cost five to six times more money to attract new customers than it does to retain existing ones.
We say all this to say that customer retention marketing can help you achieve a higher ROI because you’re putting resources into strategies that nurture customers who have already purchased from your brand.
Of course, this isn’t to say don’t put money towards acquiring new customers. Rather, focus more of your marketing efforts on current customers because (1) it’s less expensive and (2) they’re more likely to engage with your brand again and again.
That means a higher customer lifetime value, which is the total amount of money customers will spend with your business over time.
8 Strategies to Boost Customer Engagement and Loyalty
So, how do you boost customer engagement and loyalty? It’s all about providing a memorable customer experience that differentiates you from other brands.
Follow these strategies to keep customers so engaged that they won’t even think about switching to a competitor.
Be Transparent With Your Values
People love brands that are transparent with them. Being transparent with customers about your values creates a sense of authenticity and builds trust.
As an example of how you can achieve this, consider TOMS. Its founder created the “One for One” model. For every purchase a customer makes, TOMS donates a pair of shoes to people in need.
This timeline shows some of TOMS’ highlights over the years.
Focus on Exceptional Customer Experience (CX)
The customer experience is so crucial when it comes to boosting engagement and loyalty.
Just think about it. If you had a good experience with something, whether it’s amazing food at a restaurant or a relaxing spa day, you’re highly likely to go back and do it again, right?
That’s how your customers think, too.
Ritz-Carlton understood this quite well when a boy left his favorite stuffed animal, a toy giraffe named Joshie, at the hotel after a family vacation.
When the family got home, the child realized that his toy wasn’t with him and became upset. His father, American author, and entrepreneur Chris Hurn, reassured him that Joshie was taking an “extra long vacation at the hotel.”
The same night, a member of Ritz-Carlton’s management team called stating that they found Joshie in the laundry. Hurn shared his white lie with the staff and asked them to help him make it more convincing by sharing a photo of Joshie relaxing by the pool so that he could show his son.
Ritz-Carlton accepted the request and took things a step further. A few days later, hotel management returned Joshie in a box, which included several free gifts plus a photo album of Joshie’s extended vacation.
Ritz-Carlton turned a small inconvenience into an opportunity to create a phenomenal customer experience — the kind that makes customers want to rave about the brand, as Hurn did in a HuffPost article later on.
Another way to develop loyalty and provide your customers with exceptional service is to prioritize their values, such as security. In this digital age, maintaining cybersecurity is becoming more challenging, but encryption, passkeys, and multi-factor authentication (MFA) can all help keep customer data safe.
Implementing magic links offers another subtle yet powerful touchpoint that aligns with the convenience and security modern consumers demand. These passwordless authentication tools streamline access to personalized content and services and enhance the sense of trust and ease in the customer-brand relationship.
Leverage Personalization
71% of customers want businesses to provide personalized experiences.
Tailoring content, offers, and recommendations to unique customer preferences and interests shows customers that you care about their needs because you took the time to understand them.
They’re also more likely to engage with your brand for future purchases or interactions when you’re offering something that aligns with their needs.
Let’s look at an example. Say that you’re providing a customer with a cloud security assessment. You can personalize your approach by offering customized scoping.
This involves beginning your assessment with a scoping phase where you identify the organization’s unique requirements, compliance standards, industry regulations, and risk tolerance.
From there, you can provide tailored guidance that helps them address their unique security challenges.
Lean Into Social Media
Creating authentic social media content is a great way to engage customers. What makes it such a great marketing channel is the creative freedom it offers.
Here are some memorable ways to connect with your audience and drive loyalty:
- Create branded hashtags that customers can use when creating user-generated content (UGC).
- Tell interactive stories through a series of posts or videos.
- Surprise customers with flash sales or exclusive offers.
- Share behind-the-scenes sneak peeks.
- Create interactive polls and quizzes.
- Host contests and challenges.
- Host live Q&A sessions.
Another way to go above and beyond is to have your staff engage with your customers. Your staff knows a lot about your brand and the industry, so it’s a great idea to have them answer common questions customers have or simply give advice.
Katie from Fusion Med Staff can give good advice to all those who are working as travel nurses, travel PTs, OTs, and more, not only because of her work at the agency but also as a nurse herself.
Develop a Customer Loyalty Program
83% of customers say that being part of a loyalty program influences their decision to buy again from the brand.
This can lead to:
- Higher customer lifetime value
- Brand loyalty and advocacy
- Customer retention
- Increased revenue
To create an effective customer loyalty program, get to know your customers’ preferences and needs.
Then, design a program that offers valuable rewards, incentives, and personalized experiences to encourage repeat purchases and long-term customer loyalty.
Fine Tune With Customer Feedback
Getting feedback directly from customers will tell you what you’re doing well and what you can do to improve.
Customer surveys offer an easy way to gather this feedback. Consider offering incentives to get customers to participate, like how Wingstop does in this survey.
By completing the survey, customers can get free fries on their next order.
Screenshot provided by the author
Wingstop benefits from hearing about customers’ experiences with their orders. Whether positive or negative feedback, Wingstop can use it to improve the quality of its food, customer service, and more.
Another way to get customer feedback is to use contact center solutions, which give you insights into customer preferences, behavior patterns, and sentiment trends. With this data, you can tailor your engagement strategies to meet the changing needs and expectations of your target audience.
Display Your Reviews With Pride
Reviews open the door for new customers to feel comfortable with your brand. They also allow existing customers to talk about your brand. They’ll feel heard and part of your journey as you share their opinions.
Let’s take a look at what Form Health does. Form Health is a telehealth nutrition program that offers weight loss medications through online prescriptions.
One of the medications they prescribe is Wegovy, which is an injectable semaglutide that’s been used for many years to treat patients with Type 2 diabetes and can also be used to treat obesity.
Due to the good results, many patients have shared their reviews about Wegovy, and they’re now displayed on a dedicated page:
Track Customer-Centric Metrics
Tracking the right metrics will help you stay on top of customer engagement.
Here are some of the best ones to track:
- Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)
- Customer lifetime value (CLV)
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Customer retention rate
- Social media sentiment
- Churn rate
As you make adjustments based on these metrics, implement your changes gradually and track results.
Experiment with different iterations, measure their impact on relevant metrics, and iterate further based on the outcomes.
How Will You Engage With Your Customers?
Your customers are the engine that keeps your business humming. These customer engagement strategies are like the oil that lubricates and sustains that engine.
By delivering authentic and memorable customer experiences and creating strong emotional connections with customers, you can drive loyalty and engagement.
Just like regular oil changes maintain a healthy engine, regularly refining and improving your customer engagement strategies will keep your customers happy and satisfied.
Looking for more tips? Find other helpful content on the Scoop.it blog.
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