Building a successful business requires a great deal of planning, investing, researching and plain hard work. Attracting customers to your business is the first step towards helping your company to grow. Building customer loyalty will solidify your growth efforts.

Connecting with your customers is a must for building loyalty. This requires that you work on strengthening your business relationships through regular communication. The Internet and mobile phone connections offer many opportunities to stay in touch with your customers. You can utilize these means to develop a marketing strategy that will encourage greater customer patronage and loyalty. The following provides some ideas on how to use online services to help you increase customer loyalty.

Blogs

Business blogs offer great opportunities to connect with your clientele. Through a well maintained blog, your customers can stay informed of your latest products and services at a glance, which can save them time and effort in looking for what they need. Blogs can serve many useful purposes that will benefit your clientele. You can pass on valuable information to your customers about your business niche by posting well written articles on your site. Customers with special interest in your line of work will appreciate useful information that you share. You can even invite customers to comment on any of the articles posted to encourage interaction between you and other customers with the same interests. This can help promote a closer knit community among your loyal clientele.

Social Networks

Through the use of social networks, you can keep in touch with your customers anytime, anywhere and encourage two-way communications. Three popular networks that you can consider using are Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. Choose the site or sites that are more relevant to your particular business. Through these medium, you can attract customer attention to product promotions, special discounts, current events, incentive programs, etc. that your company has to offer. You can also encourage customer participation in posting comments about products and services they have received.

Emails

Emails have long been used in marketing campaigns to attract new clientele. They are also an extremely effective means of building customer loyalty. By sending short email newsletters to your regular customers, you can keep them updated on your latest products and projects as well as offer special discounts and deals that will whet their appetite for more. Many customers look forward to seasonal or promotional deals at certain times of the year as well as discounts for special occasions. Your follow-up could be just the reminder they need to reconnect with your business and avail themselves of all that you have to offer.

Texting

When used properly, mobile phone texting can be a great marketing tool. It enables you to connect instantly with former customers and keeps you at the forefront of their mind. You can use short, concise messages to notify customers of upcoming sales, discounts and rebates. Encourage customers to sign up instantly for incentive programs that provide special bonuses, promotional deals or free giveaways by answering your text right away. By researching your company’s product sales records, you’ll have a better idea of what products customers are interested in to get them coming back for more.

Video Marketing

This is an area that has seen extensive growth in recent years and with good reason. Through video marketing, you can connect with existing customers by providing informational and how to videos on whatever products or services they need. Your videos should provide substance and value to your clientele, demonstrating your experience and credibility in your field. This will encourage them to seek your valuable products and services when they have need.

When it comes to strengthening customer relationships, do remember that a major factor in building customer loyalty is trust. Customers appreciate doing business with a company that provides quality products and services and has their best interests at heart. By establishing a business relationship based on mutual respect and trust, you can count on a solid customer base where loyalty continues to grow.