Social media marketing is perfectly suited to sustain relationships with your consumers, even after they've made a purchase.
An effective social media strategy that accomplishes this will result in sustaining and strengthening loyalty, and will ultimately result in higher repeat purchase intent.
In virtually every category, repeat purchases can be substantial contributors to long-term growth and success. If you can sustain a meaningful relationship with consumers through their ownership of your product or effect of your service, your sales efforts for repeat purchase will be much more efficient. It is always easier to sustain meaningful relationships with consumers than it is to cultivate new ones from scratch.
So, what should you do to sustain relationships with existing post-market consumers on social media?
Following are a few ideas:
Continue to provide contextually relevant value
When consumers graduate from being in-market, to making a purchase and being post-market, the content they see value in is going to change. They will see much more value in learning about ways to make the most of their purchase and reinforcement that they made a good purchase decision than relearning key attributes and selling features, after all, they've already bought into your value proposition.
Try to find ways to make your consumers feel even better about their purchase in the days, weeks and months following the initial excitement and enthusiasm wears off, you'll be that much more likely to having them remain loyal and make repeat purchases.
Invest in supporting your product or service
It doesn't matter how good your product or service is, nothing is perfect. At some point, you're going to be faced with a decision on how to provide support and service to your customers, and increasingly, consumers are looking for it on social media.
I strongly recommend thinking through every imaginable scenario that you might encounter, and figure out how to deal with those circumstances in advance of them occurring. This will enable you to act with confidence and more swiftly when you need to, and your consumers will appreciate how organized and professional you are.
Treat every interaction as an opportunity to strengthen loyalty
For many businesses, making a sale is the ultimate goal. Making a sale though, is really just a step toward building long-term loyalty and driving repeat purchase.
Whether online or offline, treat every follow-up interaction with your consumers as an opportunity to impress them and strengthen their loyalty to your business. Use consumers' inherent skepticism about dealing with businesses to your advantage and create huge emotional swings in favour of your business and brand by surprising and delighting them through the quality of your interactions and the value that you continue to provide to them.
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Investing in areas to build loyalty and motivate repeat purchase is difficult for many businesses. Justifying the energy, effort and expense in these areas requires a long-term vision and in some cases, ROI isn't experienced for some time. Have faith that the efficiency of sustaining the relationships you build with post-market consumers will yield great results, giving your business a stronger, more sustainable future.
How do you build and sustain loyalty with your consumers?
Do you have a strategy in place to encourage repeat purchases?
I'll be writing about the importance of engaging and interacting with in-market consumers in a future post, but if you have interest in related reading on influencing pre-market consumers, please check out my article, 'The Importance of Influencing Pre-Market Consumers on Social Media'.