Online Communities Can Work Where Newsletters And Emails Don’t Deliver The Customer Loyalty & Retention Your Business Needs
It seems that more businesses are turning to the online communities as an answer to challenges with building and retaining their customer bases every day. Just the other day, I met with a business development team from a market research company looking towards developing an online community, after they started observing that their current customer loyalty programs (including a fortnightly newsletter) was just not as effective as it was a few years ago when they first started. While the newsletter resulted in some click throughs and reads from their 5000 strong email database, it lacked the participation and two way conversation they were seeking to have with their customers and prospects — which they felt was necessary to build a stronger relationship with them and create more loyalty towards the services and reports they deliver.
The organization had almost 6 different business arms, each catering to the research and business intelligence needs of a different industry vertical. And each arm wanted to create a single customer facing online community (rather than fragment it across the different verticals) and then allows the user to select their category of interest according to their industry or area of interest. This way, they could divert all their attention towards building one really valuable community and resource for their customer base — and then make it easy for each customer to find the information that’s most relevant to them within the community, rather than manage several smaller ones.
This model has the following benefits:
- Having only a single location online to manage allows the team to focus on developing a single resource with quality, rather than scattering efforts over multiple smaller communities.
- A single community makes it easier to promote, while still being able to provide customers a section within the community that’s their “go to” place to interact with the business as well as find information valuable to them.
- The content within the community gets updated more frequently, giving it an SEO edge which benefits the business.
Using this model and leveraging a social networking online community software platform, the company hopes to gradually replace their newsletters and email marketing efforts with this more pull based model, which will allow the customers to play a more upfront and personal role in the company’s customer retention efforts and grow their online community rather than their email lists.
Venturebeat.com recently published a post around online communities helping build customer loyalty and the article said:
Online communities are one of the most efficient ways to listen to your customers. When your company hosts an online community for your small business customers, and you truly have the goal of listening and being a valuable resource for them, something special starts to happen. Your good intentions and efforts will begin to translate into actual business results for your customers, and ultimately for you as well. As you open your ears to their thoughts, concerns, and complaints, you gain their respect and confidence, causing you to no longer be simply a vendor who provides a service, but rather an indispensible partner.
With the right social software platform and a focused plan to bring the customers into the conversation, the online community could be your center of customer loyalty and retention.
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