Customer retention is the key to higher profits for your business. Existing customers bring in most of your revenue, who will also bring in the majority of your future revenue.Acquiring a new customer is often more expensive than keeping an existing one, making it more cost-effective to focus on building customer loyalty and retention.By focusing on your existing customers, you are investing in the long-term success of your business. This guide will explore how you can retain customers effectively, boost clientele, and keep them coming back for more.

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Customer Retention: How to effectively build and measure customer loyalty

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Brand trust is central to building your business. Described as the ‘make or break difference for brands’ it relates to how customers expect to have a positive experience when they interact with you. It involves consistency in delivery of high-quality products and services. But it goes further, with 53% of respondents in a <a href="https://www.feefo.com/uk/business/contact">2020 Edelman survey</a> stating trust in the brand was second in importance only to price when purchasing from a new brand.All age groups, gender and income segments saw brand trust as more important now than ever before and looked at the impact that a brand has on society, as well as how brands can protect individuals during times of uncertainty and change.<h2>What is brand trust?</h2>Brand trust acts as a signal to let your customers know that you’re worth spending their valuable time and money on. It’s invaluable, hard won and based on consistency. Your customers want you to meet their expectations, every time.As Elizabeth Arden, founder of Elizabeth Arden, Inc. said: “Repetition makes reputation and reputation makes customers.”<h3>Shoppers trust brands when they:</h3><ul><li>Deliver high quality products or services</li><li>Receive good ratings and reviews</li><li>Charge a reasonable price</li><li>Treat customers fairly</li><li>Handle any problems quickly&nbsp;</li></ul>Brand trust comes from a combination of great products, consistently good service, meaningful customer interactions, great content, and glowing <a href="https://www.feefo.com/uk/business/features/advanced-analytics">customer feedback</a>.<h3>Why is it important to build brand trust?</h3>People buy brands rather than just products or services. Brand trust is what distinguishes you from your competitors.&nbsp;Brands add value – we all know that a small white T–shirt from Balenciaga will cost significantly more than one from Primark.&nbsp;Brands provide peace of mind -consumers are comfortable with what they’re offering, which saves decision-making time. And they express who consumers are – we identify with them – everyone can choose whether they’re a PC or a Mac.A positive outlook on your brand, created through the delivery of consistently high-quality products and services, drives sales and creates loyal customers.<h2>How to gain brand trust</h2>Start with a clear value proposition - define what it is that you offer your customers and focus on providing that in as honest, fair and transparent a way as possible. Once your foundations are in place, then use social proof and reviews to build up brand trust.People trust people, especially when they know their opinions are the real deal. In fact, <a href="https://www.feefo.com/uk/business/resources/business-insights/review-and-brand-growth-advice">84% of shoppers</a> trust real reviews from genuine customers even more than the recommendations of friends and family - making your customers your best salespeople.&nbsp;The more reviews you’re able to collect from your genuine customers, the more trust in your brand increases. And once you have a stream of positive reviews pouring in, you can start promoting them on your website, in your search ads, and in marketing materials to spread the word even further and continue to build a positive brand reputation.<h3>Prove the quality of your products</h3>Collecting product reviews gives you the perfect opportunity to showcase the quality of your products. <a href="https://www.edelman.com/research/brand-trust-2020">Honest reviews from real customers</a> help shoppers feel more secure they are making the right choice, as they get an unbiased view of the products on offer. <a href="https://www.feefo.com/uk/business/resources/customer-experience/customer-reviews">Reading feedback</a> from other customers helps make the buying decision so much simpler. <a href="https://www.feefo.com/uk/business/resources/customer-acquisition">Photo and video reviews</a> add an extra layer of trust by giving customers the chance to show off their experiences firsthand.<h3>Focus on your customer experience</h3>Improving your <a href="https://www.feefo.com/uk/business/resources/customer-experience/negative-reviews">customer experience</a> will create greater brand trust. Reach out to your customers to see how they feel about their interactions with you to find out where you’re doing well and where you need to improve. Feefo Surveys allow you to find out about any part of the buying journey, so you can gain insight on all your customer touchpoints.<h3>Climb the Google search results</h3>Collecting feedback provides search engines with plenty of user-generated content, which pushes your website up the rankings. Higher ranked sites show off your brand and help to build trust. As a Google Premier Partner, you can show your Feefo ratings and reviews on your Google My Business page too. If you want to read more about how reviews can help, check <a href="https://www.salesforce.com/blog/category/digital-transformation/">our SEO guide</a>.<h3>Keep an eye on what people are saying</h3>Monitoring what people are saying about you allows you to keep track of how you’re perceived. Brand trust can fluctuate over time and Feefo’s Customer Sentiment Insight tool can accurately measure the positive and negative customer sentiment from within your reviews.    <h3>Create loyal brand advocates</h3>Reviews carry on working long after they’ve been posted. If your customers are happy enough to sing your praises in a review, they’re likely to continue to do this on and offline, promoting your brand amongst their network and strengthening your reputation. Consumers respond well to recommendations from people that don’t work for the brand and haven’t been paid, making your reviewers credible and influential brand ambassadors.<h3>Show you can deliver on your promises</h3>Reviews give you the platform to publicly engage one-on-one with your customers. providing a platform to spark conversations, respond to queries, show that you’re willing to make improvements, and let everyone know when you make those changes. Just by addressing your current customers, you’re not only more likely to keep hold of them, but <a href="https://www.feefo.com/uk/business/resources/customer-experience">attract new ones too</a>.<h3>Turn critics into advocates</h3>Believe it or not, negative customer reviews can be just as useful as positive ones. They let you know how you can improve your business and help to build on your customers’ trust. The best opportunity lies within how you go about replying – a well written response could even turn your grumpiest customer into a loyal brand advocate.Much better to receive a negative review highlighting an issue that lets you take action to address the problem than having negative feelings towards your business passed on to a customer’s friends and family by word of mouth.Collecting customer reviews lets you take back control of that conversation and use the platform to publicly respond to negative feedback and help solve the customer’s issue long before it damages brand trust. In fact, openly and honestly admitting fault, and going above and beyond to solve the issue they’ve raised, shows your company in a positive light and helps further cement the level of trust people have in your customer service.Find out more about <a href="https://www.feefo.com/uk/business/resources/customer-experience/negative-reviews">responding to negative reviews</a>.With <a href="https://www.feefo.com/uk/business/resources/customer-retention/how-to-effectively-build-and-measure-customer-loyalty">95% of shoppers saying</a> they are more likely to be loyal to a company they trust, there’s no better time to start collecting customer reviews to build brand trust and prove to the world just how great your products and customer service really are.Nine-in-ten customers are worried about fake reviews affecting their experience with a business - which is where we come in. As an invite-only review and insight platform, Feefo is proud to only collect real reviews from your genuine customers.

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What is brand trust and how can you build it? 

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What is brand trust and how can you build it? (blog)

Things are changing, though, and companies need to take a long, hard look at the consumer information they collect and how they use it.&nbsp;What’s changing? Data is becoming increasingly harder to gather - especially depending on what you want to do with it.&nbsp;The rules around data protection are getting stricter and leading to the demise of third-party cookies. People are getting more savvy about leaving a digital footprint and have become less comfortable with the idea of being tracked and targeted – particularly by businesses they don’t really know. Not only that, governments, and large tech companies, like Apple and Google, are now becoming increasingly focused on the needs of the individual and protecting them.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;So where and how do you uncover meaningful insights that you can confidently use to improve your business?&nbsp;<h2>The types of data available to companies now&nbsp;</h2>Before we move on to what companies should be looking to do moving forwards, let’s take a brief look at the various forms of data available to businesses now.&nbsp;<h3>Zero-party</h3>This is the type of information a person is willing to give a company openly. Examples of this include details people give when entering a competition, filling out a survey, or completing a Feefo review&nbsp;<h3>First-party</h3>The data a business gets when a customer deals with them. Things like the types of products you buy, how often you buy them, what sorts of products you can be persuaded to try with special offers&nbsp;<h3>Second-party</h3>First-party data from another company you’re legitimately allowed to use. This can include, for example, your address details a delivery company would need from a retailer to ship something to you&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<h3>Third-party</h3>Information gathered from other sources, public and non-public, that’s not been openly given by the individual it’s about. Consider the electoral roll, no matter what political party you support, and they can all access your details and contact you whether you like it or not&nbsp;<h2>Which of these is the best to build your business insights on, though?&nbsp;&nbsp;</h2>We agree with Fatemeh Khatibloo, VP principal analyst at Forrester Research, when he said about zero-party data, ‘When a customer trusts a brand enough to provide this really meaningful data, it means that the brand doesn’t have to go off and infer what the customer wants or what their intentions are.’*&nbsp;And gathering zero-party data can be done easily in a number of ways, including reviews, surveys, quizzes, and polls.&nbsp;&nbsp;As <a href="https://www.feefo.com/uk/business/resources/business-insights/what-makes-a-review-verified-and-why-it-matters" target="_self">verified reviews</a> experts and the biggest in the world, we’re probably a little biased. But we think reviews from genuine customers that have bought from you are the best way to get zero-party data.&nbsp;&nbsp;<h3>Why?&nbsp;&nbsp;</h3>Because you can be sure the feedback you get from these customers isn’t fake, unlike that you can get from open review platforms - where anyone can say what they want, whether they’ve shopped with you or not. And that means you can confidently use the information you get through us to build insights you can use to boost your business. Our AI technology also helps you spot trends and improve your service by addressing any recurring problem areas.&nbsp;So, what sorts of business changes can you make with the insights verified reviews can give you? Here are just a few examples:&nbsp;&nbsp;<ul><li>Uncover how to improve your customer experience &nbsp;</li></ul><ul><li>Fix or improve a product &nbsp;</li><li>Understand trends and general sentiment&nbsp;</li><li>Identify new opportunities - such as a new product or service&nbsp;</li><li>See where you’re better than your competitors&nbsp;</li><li>The list goes on… and you can see some examples below&nbsp;</li></ul>

<h2>The power of reviews in action&nbsp;</h2>How do you turn customer reviews into business-building insights? Here are some examples of small, medium, and enterprise businesses that made valuable changes using their customer insight: &nbsp;<h3>Case 1: Coffee loyalty cards &nbsp;</h3>With increasing competition from larger chains, the owners of a small independent coffee shop were looking for ways to keep hold of their customers. By using Feefo, they were able to implement customer reviews and ask their customers questions about their products and service. When looking through the most used terms and phrases in the data, they noticed a reoccurring theme. Customers loved the coffee and the ethics behind the brand but were used to using loyalty schemes at bigger coffee chains. The coffee shop introduced a loyalty card scheme – a simple change that quickly gave them back their edge and saw the number of repeat customers quickly increase. &nbsp;<h3>Case 2: Strengthening any weak links  &nbsp;</h3>A car dealership with ten sites nationwide noticed some disparity in the sales figures across the different sites. They didn’t just want to know why some were performing better than others, but they also wanted to bring all the figures in line with the highest-performing locations. The business started collecting customer reviews and quickly realised that certain dealerships were suffering due to poor customer service. The company sent surveys to their staff, and the results showed that the staff in the worst-performing dealerships felt they could benefit from more training. Customer Service training was rolled out in all the weaker locations, and sales gradually began to rise. &nbsp;<h3>Case 3: Reviews highlighted the real issue &nbsp;</h3>A holiday company found they were getting poor reviews for the trailers at one of their properties. At first, they assumed the trailers themselves needed refurbishing and allocated a substantial budget to refresh them. But when they analysed their Feefo review data more fully, they found that the poor reviews were from trailers in one particular location of the park - a more shaded location that didn’t receive any direct sunshine.  &nbsp;So, they moved the trailers to a different area with more natural light. Review sentiment subsequently improved – saving them thousands of pounds on a refurbishment that wouldn’t have addressed the underlying issue. &nbsp;<h3>Case 4: Delayed delivery leading to increased returns &nbsp;</h3>A well-known online gift retailer noticed it was experiencing a sudden peak in returns, so it started collecting customer reviews to find out why. After analysing the insight, the company noticed that the majority of the negative reviews were about gifts arriving too late, often missing the occasion, and then ending up being useless. The business had recently swapped courier companies, so it took swift action to return to its previous delivery provider. A few weeks after, the returns had plummeted, and posts from unhappy customers on social media quickly got lost amongst the positive ones. &nbsp;

<h2>Reviews, insights, and their impact on business - facts and figures&nbsp;</h2>What can you actually achieve with all this valuable, zero-party review insight directly from your paying customers? Take a look at these statistics and consider what a difference verified customer reviews would make to your company:&nbsp;<ul><li>Increase sales - when customers leave positive reviews, studies have shown online sales can be boosted by <a href="https://www.dixa.com/page/reconnecting-the-customer-experience/" target="_self">up to 18%.</a> Reviews are also one of the biggest influences on customers’ buying decisions, with up to <a href="https://www.brightlocal.com/research/local-consumer-review-survey-2017/" target="_self">85% of consumers trusting online reviews</a> as much as they do personal recommendations. Displaying reviews of individual products has also been shown to increase sales by up to 200% better than those without.&nbsp;</li></ul><ul><li>Improve customer experience - <a href="https://www.qualtrics.com/blog/online-review-stats/" target="_self">89% of consumers</a> pay as much attention to the reply to a review as they do to the review itself. So, when you proactively <a href="https://www.feefo.com/uk/business/features/respond-to-reviews" target="_self">respond to reviews</a>, especially if things haven’t gone perfectly for a customer, it shows others you’re committed to great customer service.&nbsp;</li></ul><ul><li>Build trust in a brand - lots of things can affect brand trust, and one of the biggest is customer reviews. Using a platform like Feefo that collects genuine reviews from real customers establishes your business as a brand that people can trust. And believe it or not, having both positive and negative reviews on your website increase trust. In fact, the likelihood of someone buying <a href="https://spiegel.medill.northwestern.edu/how-online-reviews-influence-sales/" target="_self">peaks at ratings in the 4.0 to 4.7 range</a>, then starts to decrease as ratings approach 5.0**. Consumers obviously feel a brand that gets just glowing feedback is too good to be true.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li></ul><ul><li>Boost traffic and online conversions - our reviews can help improve your performance in search results and <a href="https://www.feefo.com/uk/business/features/reviews-on-google" target="_self">generate Google stars</a> to make you stand out from the competition. Adding our reviews to your adverts can <a href="https://blog.reviews.io/post/how-online-reviews-impact-click-through-rate" target="_self">triple click-through rates</a>. Simply displaying reviews can <a href="https://spiegel.medill.northwestern.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/04/Spiegel_Online-Review_eBook_Jun2017_FINAL.pdf" target="_blank">increase conversions by 270%</a>.&nbsp;</li></ul><ul><li>Increase customer loyalty - by adding the simply deceptive Net Promotor Score® (NPS) question, ‘How likely are you to recommend the company to a friend or colleague?’ to your review invitation. Analysing your <a href="https://www.feefo.com/uk/business/features/nps" target="_self">NPS</a> results can then help you: measure customer loyalty, make business decisions, and fix problems your customers may have had so they move up your NPS scale from Distractors or Passives to Promoters who will buy from you again and again and will tell people that they should use you too. According to <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/economics-net-promoter-score-temkin-group-research-bruce-temkin-ccxp/" target="_self">research from Temkin</a>***, when it comes to loyalty, Promoters are over four times more likely to buy again from a company and over five times more inclined to use a company still if it gets things wrong – now that’s loyalty.&nbsp;</li></ul>

<h2>To sum things up&nbsp;&nbsp;</h2>Even though it’s getting harder to collect data, there is a solution. Feefo. The customer insights we can deliver through <a href="https://www.feefo.com/uk/business/features/collect-reviews" target="_self">verified reviews</a> will become the most valuable thing you can own as a business. Having them means you can: &nbsp;<ul><li>Find out how both potential and existing customers perceive your brand&nbsp;</li><li>Take a deeper look into your customers’ buying decisions&nbsp;</li><li>Build long-term relationships with your customers&nbsp;</li></ul><ul><li>Make meaningful changes in your business, which your customers will love&nbsp;</li></ul>

<h2>Find out more - talk to us&nbsp;</h2>To discover how verified customer reviews can deliver the data and the insights you can build your business on, <a href="https://www.feefo.com/uk/business/enquiry/request-a-demo" target="_blank">book a demo</a> with one of our experts.&nbsp;&nbsp;