Nowadays, people have access to the internet at nearly all times of the day. Whether it’s on a smartphone or a laptop, people can easily access social media networks, personal email accounts, and companies’ merch stores. Each platform they access is sure to provide them with some form of advertising, from notice of an upcoming holiday sale to a video promoting a company’s services.
With so many companies able to target us in the modern age, it should come as no surprise that it can be difficult to earn and maintain a customer’s attention. If you’re having a hard time keeping customers around, there might be a particular reason for the loss in interest; however, these customers don’t have to be lost forever. With the help of performance marketing and a strong affiliate marketing strategy, there are many ways you can get them back.
Reasons Customers Become Disgruntled with Your Business
Not every customer will be with your business for a lifetime. Sometimes customers go, while others will walk away and return at a later point in time. The reasons customers walk away are numerous, but there are some common causes of loss in customer interest.
Impersonal Customer Service
A bad experience can go a long way, and customer service is evidence of that. If a customer decides to leave a review on your website, you should respond to them and show that you are thankful for their opinion. You should never respond in a vengeful tone if someone is critical of your business.
Furthermore, your staff should be trained to respond to customers in a professional, helpful manner. Anything else — perhaps combative — can make customers feel threatened and unappreciated, which may lead them to leave your business behind.
Reduction in the Quality of Product and Services
A loss in quality is an easy way to send customers running to other businesses. While quality can slip due to manufacturing carelessness or an inability to keep up with necessary updates for digital services, a loss in quality can also happen from refusing to modernize. Companies around you will regularly be updating their products to meet the needs of consumers and refusing to do so can lead to a hemorrhage in business.
Inability to Update Your Website
Brand aesthetic has a notable effect on how businesses are viewed. A poorly maintained website that appears as if it were crafted in 2010 and never updated since might cause you to lose valued customers or shoo away customers finding your site for the first time. Similarly, it’s a bad idea to never do research on the way site visitors interact with your website — you might find that the site’s design is difficult to navigate. An update to this could help quell customer’s frustrations.
The Wrong Market Approach
The way brands now talk about themselves is incredibly different from just a decade ago. Social media, changes in human attention spans, and more have led people to consume material in a different way. An old marketing approach can be grating to potential and past customers, causing them to go elsewhere.
Basic Internal Changes You Should Consider
Before you can move on to further implementations of strategic change, you should consider assessing the current quality of a company’s website, marketing, and internal teams. You might catch a major flaw that could burden your company’s growth for the future.
Respond to Online Reviews
If you receive a review, respond in a timely manner, making sure to show your appreciation for their commentary and concern for your business. People shouldn’t feel as if they’re speaking into an empty space — in most cases if they’re leaving a review, it’s because they want you and others to see it. Take some time to reach out and let them know their input is both valued and respected.
Implement Better Customer Service Training
Make sure your staff is prepared to talk with customers in a professional, hospitable way, ensuring their needs are met to keep business around. A poor customer service interaction can spell bad news for your company, so make sure to set aside time to have all representatives on the same page, understanding how customers should be approached. Everyone should walk away from a dispute or question with a feeling of resolve — that even if your company couldn’t fix their issue, they tried to do so.
Update Your Website for Computers, Tablets, and Smartphones
If your website is lacking and appearing outdated, it might be time for an update. Furthermore, if your site is old, it’s likely that it isn’t properly designed for other technological devices, such as tablets or smartphones. You should take the time to update your website for all devices and platforms to ensure every customer has a great interaction with your website.
Ensure Your Messaging Isn’t Outdated
Advertising has changed, and the way brands market themselves — from copy to content to social media — has changed greatly. Take time with other stakeholders to determine a new path forward, investigating how to better your business outreach to bring customers back into the fold.
How Performance Marketing Can Bring Your Customers Back
Influenced by affiliate marketing tactics, performance marketing is a new way of presenting your brand and messaging to the masses, providing better ways to track clicks and engagement in a time when a digital personality is more important than anything else. Similar to the tactics implemented through Refersion’s affiliate tracking software, performance marketing makes it easier than ever to win back customers. Here are some examples on how to do this!
Traditional Advertising Doesn’t Work as It Once Did
Watch an old film, and you’ll see the number of billboards and printed advertisements lining every city street, cafe, and storefront. This used to be the easiest way to get a person’s attention, but, in an age where we’re constantly bombarded with advertisements on our phones, we’ve worked hard to avoid advertising we don’t want to see — unsurprisingly, billboards and posters don’t work like they once did.
Even advertising techniques that popped up within the past decade don’t hold the same power they once did. One example is that of a pay-per-click (PPC) marketing campaign, where you would bid for a spot — for a particular keyword — and would be featured by a search engine such as Bing or Google. Every time someone clicked that link, you paid that host.
Performance marketing is far superior, solely because you’re only paying when you get conversions. With the addition of an affiliate tracking software, you can effectively strategize and fine-tune your approach, thanks to the provided data.
Get the Most out of Your Metrics and Data
Affiliate management software like Refersion provides you with the necessary metrics and data to enhance the strategy of each of your campaigns. With data on your campaigns and affiliates, you can properly limit and structure how your branding is being doled out to the public. Real-time tracking also allows you to determine the effectiveness of certain affiliates’ posts — whether or not they’re making conversions with a specific approach.
This type of tuning is especially helpful, as it lets you keep a finger on the pulse of your customers. Rather than just moving with the trends of the time, you can make a notable movement toward a better approach, using your data to understand just what potential customers want to see.
Pay Only When Your Marketing Works
The greatest benefit to performance marketing, and through the use of affiliate management software, is that you can effectively track each and every one of your conversions while only paying for the conversions completed. Versus PPC and other campaigns, you can employ affiliates to make concerted efforts toward converting customers. In the end, you’ll be getting a much greater ROI on the money you are putting in, compared to marketing campaigns of the past.
Affiliate Marketing and Affiliate Tracking Software
In terms of performance marketing approaches, you can never go wrong with implementing an affiliate marketing strategy within your company. There’s always something to be gained when having influencers promote your brand to their audiences. With our affiliate tracking software, it’s become even easier to manage and maintain an audience, all while continually converting customers.
If you’re just getting started, here are a few ways you can work toward bringing back old customers with some new updates, all thanks to the work of affiliates.
Find Voices that Align with Your Niche
When searching for affiliates, you should be looking for people within your company’s niche. Unsure of what your niche is? Simply put, it’s the audience you’re targeting — what they care about, what they want, what’s holding them back from their goals, and how you can help. It’s possible that you’ve lost customers in the past due to a change in tone or voice — one that made them unsure of whether you were both on the same page.
With the right affiliate — someone who matches your tone, interests, values, and more — you can target those disgruntled customers, causing them to have a revived interest in your company. By speaking directly to them, your affiliates can convince them of your company’s worth. A trusted person’s word goes a long way, and the right affiliate might be just what your company needs.
Reach Audiences Across the Spectrum
Maybe your company has thought about branching out, but it’s been unsure of where to even start. Although these ideas will need some refining before they can be put into action, you can hire affiliates from across different demographics and locations to foster brand interest across the spectrum.
Maybe you’ve found that your brand is big in the major U.S. cities but not in rural environments or elsewhere in the world. It might be helpful to have an affiliate more rurally focused or someone from a European or Asian country to spread your brand’s sphere of influence. You won’t know the success of your brand promotion until you try branching out!
Manage Affiliates and Track Progress
With Refersion’s affiliate management platform, you have the necessary tools to track the effectiveness of your campaigns, affiliates, and more. From checking conversion rates to creating a personalized hub for your affiliates, you can keep a close eye on the progress of your marketing outreach. With the information in hand, you’ll have the time to theorize how you can make your program more successful, all while helping your affiliates to work at their best level.
One way you can help is by motivating your affiliates toward successful conversions. Whether you provide them with occasional bonuses after a specific number of sales or provide them with a hub for brand content, you can work to help your affiliates perform better. You can even track their progress over time by using Refersion’s affiliate management platform.
Try It
There’s no such thing as a perfect marketing strategy, but the right implementation of performance marketing and affiliate tracking software can go a long way. Trends change, and customer’s interests ebb and flow, but your business can take steps to ensure that eyes still remain on your brand and its products and services.
Rather than falling by the wayside, allowing customers to leave for other businesses, you should take the time to evaluate what past decisions might have caused customers to leave and what you can do to improve future customer-business relations. The use of affiliate marketing is a great way to get a step ahead of the competition and to authentically remain in the public eye.
With a bit of foresight and some strategic planning, you can begin bringing customers back into the fold while influencing new customers to want to stick around. Refersion provides you with just the right tools to craft your goals and achieve them.
