Marketing to Ensure Customer Happiness

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It doesn’t matter if you call it customer happiness, customer satisfaction, or anything else, the contentment of your clients with your products and services is a crucial element for long-term success.

Nevertheless, cultivating customer satisfaction can be challenging in the complex, online-offline, multichannel modern marketplace. At times, the daunting task of managing your customer’s happiness can even be straight-up overwhelming.

Fortunately, as with most business activities, if you break things down, the task of maintaining happy customers becomes much less daunting. Here are a few tips and suggestions for how to ensure that you infuse your business efforts — and your marketing strategy, in particular — with an overall focus that leads to contented, satisfied, pleased customers on a regular basis.

Manage Expectations

Right out of the gate it’s important that you manage expectations. A company that offers the world in order to close a sale is in for a rude awakening when the customer reviews and feedback start rolling in.

Deceptive marketing messages and naked sales tactics aimed at generating income no matter the cost are always a recipe for unhappy clients. Instead, focus on honesty throughout your marketing messages by emphasizing the genuine positive aspects of your business that you can guarantee on a regular basis.

Understand Your Customers

Research is a critical part of customer satisfaction. If you don’t know your target audience, it’s very difficult to please them. This isn’t just a startup concern, either. Regardless of the maturity of your business, this should be an ongoing focus.

The rapidly changing zeitgeist of 21st-century customer interests makes it critical for a company’s marketing team to always be studying their target market. This enables you to adjust your marketing voice, tone, and emphasis whenever your customer’s interests, needs, and expectations shift.

Communicate Properly

Maintaining customer satisfaction hinges on proper two-way communication. When it comes to marketing, in particular, it’s important that you don’t just use your marketing materials to direct your customers towards generic, automated sales funnels.

Make sure to provide quality communication throughout the customer journey. From the first point of contact on through follow up and customer service, keep those lines of communication wide open.

Create a Quality Customer Experience

Along with setting expectations and communicating, it’s important that you craft a customer experience that is of the highest possible quality at every point along the customer journey.

One well-known infrastructure company did this the wrong way. Its strategy consisted of selling a product and then making it very difficult for customers to cancel their policy. This led to many frustrated and dissatisfied people who felt they had been lured into a trap.

Instead, look for ways to provide genuine value throughout your marketing, including:

●     Providing quality marketing content (think informative blog posts, sales, free promotional materials) that benefit potential customers.

●     Give them a smooth e-commerce experience through a user-friendly website.

●     Follow up with genuine, timely customer service.

Garner Feedback

Along with striving to proactively provide quality marketing collateral, it’s important to ask customers for honest feedback regarding their experiences. Gather information and then analyze your findings in order
to discover where you succeeded and where your efforts are lacking and can use improvement.

React to Reviews

Along with using customer feedback to improve your marketing (and by extension, your customer happiness), you can also use feedback as an opportunity to create currently satisfied customers.

Take advantage of your customer service efforts by utilizing it as a de facto branch of your marketing. Provide multiple channels for customers to easily interact with you, including Google My Business, social media accounts, and your website. Encourage honesty, use active listening, and respond in a timely manner.

Starbucks’ customer satisfaction is an excellent example of how responsive customer service can help to increase the overall satisfaction of your clientele — and your image as well.

The way that your team interacts with others can have a huge effect on how customers perceive their experience with your company. Make sure to establish clear guidelines and train your personnel in how you want them to communicate with customers. This will enable your company to have a unified, consistent approach to customer happiness across all of your marketing.

In addition, look for ways to infuse your marketing collateral with psychologically impactful elements like color and emotion that can help to create a more relatable experience. This strategy has been used successfully by numerous companies. Google’s bright yet simple letter coloring is a shining example, as is GoPro’s exciting, real-world promotional videos, and even Apple’s recent commercial highlighting the together-while-apart emotional appeal of the COVID-19 quarantine.

Personalize Whenever You Can

Finally, take advantage of analytics data whenever you can. The modern ability to use tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel to compile and analyze data from your customers throughout their customer journey has made it easy to improve their experience in a variety of ways.

From crafting your website to creating content, maintaining customer profiles, and generally creating real-time personalization for buyers, using big data to personalize your marketing strategy has become quite accessible even to smaller businesses.

Creating and Maintaining Happy Customers

There are numerous tactics that can boost your customer satisfaction. The most important thing to keep in mind, though, is that the concept of a happy customer is emotional in nature. No matter how well you meet all of your customer’s needs, you may still end up with the occasional dissatisfied customer.

However, it’s still essential to tend to the details of your customer’s experience in every way possible. If you can do this, your efforts will become increasingly more apparent to the vast majority of your customers and will begin to have a positive effect on your brand’s image, your company’s reputation, and your bottom line.

Indiana Lee is a writer and journalist from the Pacific Northwest with a passion for covering business best practices, social justice, environmental protection, and more. In her off time she enjoys hiking with her two dogs. You can follow her on twitter @indianalee3, or reach her at indianaleewrites@gmail.com.