Brands are forced to work even harder as consumers are given more choices.

In a world overtaken by digital media, consumers have been provided a never-ending pool of products, services, and brands to choose from.

This is quite a big problem for certain brands, as a lot of them have built their businesses off a solid base of loyal customers.

According to Smile.io, loyal customers are said to be more profitable than your average customers. With the high-ranking top 10% of loyal customers spending over 3x more per order than the lower 90%, and the top 1% spending up to 5x more than the lower 99%.

Yotpo’s poll takes these numbers even further to highlight the importance of brand loyalty. With 67.8% of the poll’s respondents defining brand loyalty as repeat purchasing, 36.5% stating that they will spend more on products from a brand they love, and 59.3% saying that they have referred their favorite brands to friends and family.

With all that in mind, it’s understandable why brands try so hard to ensure brand loyalty.

Unfortunately, despite being provided with more choices, it’s actually quite difficult to make a loyal customer of a person that is already hooked on a different brand.

Which makes it all the more vital for your brand to be their first choice — and hopefully, their only choice.

More on this below.

Providing a Personalized Customer Experience

Another consequence of being provided with more choices is that customers are now more ‘demanding.’ They expect more from the brands that they choose.

As such, being able to provide what your customer believes is the best possible customer experience (CX), should be one of your foremost priorities.

In fact, according to CMO, over 73% of consumers worldwide say that a good experience is the key to influencing their brand loyalties. They also expressed that they are willing to pay an average of 16% more just to experience the premium quality CX they’re looking for.

In the long game, ensuring that you are providing the best possible customer experience will also encourage more customers to refer others to your brand — either through word of mouth or digital reviews and posts on social media.

Which only adds to the importance of providing your customers with a personalized experience that will satisfy their need to be both heard and understood.

Find Out What Your Customers Want

Of course, before you are able to provide the personalized CX that your customers demand, you must first know what it is that they want from you.

For this, following the industry-standard just won’t cut it.

You will need to set up avenues of communication, or otherwise, make use of tools that will allow you to collect the information you need to better satisfy your customers.

The simplest way of doing this is to encourage more customer engagement. A lot of brands are now making the effort to connect with their consumers on social media and such. While others compile customer experience reports from reviews.

This is a great way of establishing an image of open communication. Although, it’s definitely not the most efficient way of finding out what your customers want. For that, you might want to look into a business intelligence software or a marketing automation platform that will provide easy-to-understand analytics on how your customers are behaving.

An example of one such platform is Maropost. According to Econotimes, Maropost works with hundreds of brands to simplify customer engagement through a variety of software and tools for customer behavior analysis, lead nurturing, reducing customer churn, and so much more.

Having access to a platform such as Maropost, or any of its other competitors, is a great way of establishing a more efficient method of learning customer behavior. Which is what will allow you to create and employ strategies to improve accordingly.

The Shift of Power

Simply put, customer experience is king. A survey from Gartner highlights this fact by indicating that up to 89% of businesses are now competing primarily on providing the best possible customer experience to attract customers and ensure brand loyalty.

As such, once you know what your customer wants and have made the changes to meet their demands, then you’re well on your way to becoming a customer’s first, and perhaps only, choice. This is what it takes to participate in today’s current economy.

The consumers hold all the cards, and it’s up to you, as a brand, in order to fight tooth and nail for their attention.