We are more than pleased to announce that Mr. Sander de Bruijn rejoins the Momentum family! Mr. De Bruijn will focus on investor communication and help to expand the community as Momentum is entering a new stage. In the past Mr. de Bruijn has already been very influential in the growth of Momentum.

Momentum is entering into a new phase in its development, expansion and operation, and the immense experience and knowledge of Sander is integral for the future that Momentum is headed towards.

Mr. Sander de Bruijn said,

“I am happy and excited to rejoin the Momentum team. I am looking forward to bringing the same dedication to the table as in the past and to accompanying Itay and his team into the next stage of the venture.”

Momentum is close to releasing its new AI driven customer-centric loyalty program platform which focuses on strong program ROI through customer behavior analysis, tailored customer engagement and custom retention flows.

Mr. Itay Kasre said,

”Having a person that has already been a part of our family back on board at this actual stage helps us as a company. And I am happy to work with Sander. Having a familiar face back proves that the vision of Momentum is alive.”

Mr. Sander will serve as a bridge between the management team, token holders, customers and equity investors. Our supporters can be sure that Sander will deliver excellence and push the interest of Momentum labs and protocol across all channels.

You cannot sell effectively to your customers if you don’t know them.

IT is important that you not only know who they are in terms of their demographic data, but you should also understand how they behave and why they behave the way they do.

Customer relationship is becoming more critical by the day. The internet has made the business-customer relationship better, healthier and more personal. Customers are no longer just a number on the excel spreadsheet; they are no longer a generalized group that businesses lump into one hole; every customer is essential and wants to be treated as a particular person.

Therefore, for every business that wants to thrive, every company that wants to move past the status quo, understanding how your customers behave and why they behave the way they do is a significant needle-mover.

How do you understand your customer’s behaviour?

Buyers’ personas are increasingly becoming a significant part of every marketing and advertising team’s list of must-haves. With a buyer persona, a business can better understand how their customers behave.

A buyer persona is a document created to highlight and define a business’s ideal customer lookalike. A buyer persona is a combination of qualitative and quantitative values. Also, a buyer persona uses some level of assumptions and researched data to create an ideal customer.

With a well-researched buyers’ persona, businesses can better understand what customer’s fears are, their goals and ambitions, their hobbies, where they like to hang out, what inspires them, and many more.

When creating a buyer’s persona, a business must be ready and willing to understand the three primary factors influencing a customer’s behaviour.

Besides knowing what influences the customer’s behaviours, the business must also be willing to help the customer ease roadblocks and make the buyer’s journey smooth and exciting.

FACTORS THAT AFFECTS HOW A CUSTOMER BEHAVE

1. Personality Traits: These include the buyer’s background, upbringing, where they live, the type of social interactions they have, and many more.

Personality traits and Social factors are very subjective; therefore, it is compulsory that a business properly understands the social environment a customer is coming from and how it affects how the customer interacts with the company.

For example, a person who is from an affluent background and regularly with wealthy people will feel offended if the waiter at a restaurant doesn’t greet them in a certain way. Or if the food tastes a certain way, the affluent customer might react with disdain and complaints.

But a person from a less affluent background may not react the same way the ‘affluent-background’ customer reacted.

A business must understand where their customers are coming from to improve the customers’ experiences better.

1. Psychological factors: The psychological aspect deals with how a customer sees and perceives things, which invariably determines how they react to situations.

The psychological reaction a customer gives varies with their state of being emotionally and psychologically. For example, when a male customer’s proposal to hie fiancée is accepted, he will friendlier, and his response to even bad customer service would be milder.

But if the love of his life recently dumped him, he will react differently.

Because customers’ psychological responses are very fluid, the business needs to learn not to attach these responses as the entirety of the customer’s being. Instead, the company should try to understand why the customer responded the way he/she did.

1. Social Trends: These external influences motivate a customer to buy certain goods and patronize certain services.

Social trends include recommendations from friends, online reviews, and social media conversations.

What are the current trends? And how do these trends affect your customer’s behaviour?

As a business, your life’s work is to please and satisfy your customers at all times. And you can’t do that if you don’t know them and how they behave. And what influences their behaviours.

How have you been able to know your customer’s behaviours? Could you share with me in the comments?

It costs five times more to attract a new customer than it does to retain an old one. In the world of ever-changing customers’ needs, retaining your old customers is crucial if you want to remain in business. Therefore, correctly predicting when your customers may want to leave is vital for sustainable business growth and success.

The rate at which a customer leaves a business is called churn rate. The dictionary defines “churn rate” as the annual percentage rate at which customers stop subscribing to a service or employees leave a job.

Reasons for High Churn Rate

There are many reasons why customers stop patronizing a business. The reasons could range from:

• Poor customer service: How customers feel about a business is greatly dependent on how the company treats them. customers are more likely to stop patronizing a business if they don’t feel loved, seen, heard and accepted. Customer service makes or mars a customer’s experiences.
• Better prices from Competitors: When a business’s competitor offers better prices and better customer experiences, a business is bound to lose customers.
• Economic changes: A change in a customer’s finance can be a major reason why he/she will stop buying certain goods and using certain services. It may be upward economic mobility or downward mobility.

Why Understanding Churn Rate is Important

Every business wants to stay relevant. Every business wants to make sales and make profits. If a business doesn’t know how much customers it’s losing, the business will be unable to properly plan and strategize on how to grow its business.

Understanding a customer’s lifetime value is imperative if a business is to take its churn rate seriously. A business which cannot properly contextualize its churn rate, and sees how much it affects the business if it does not know is most likely foolish.

Customers lifetime values are defining how much money a customer will spend in his/her lifetime on a business. When a customer is dissatisfied with the product or services a business offers, the customer would easily switch sides and patronise the business’s competitors.

It is important that a business knows and understands when a customer is about to leave, and do all that is necessary to retain the customer.

What is Churn prediction?

Churn prediction uses predictive analysis tool to determine when a customer will leave, and therefore device methods to retain a customer.

Predicting when a customer’s interaction with the business is reduced, or reducing, would help a business keeping old customers.

How to conduct Churn prediction analysis

Before using a predictive analytics tool, the churn prediction goal must first be understood. You can’t input data into the predictive tool if your goal isn’t specified from the start. The insights the tool will give you is dependent on what parameters you’re looking out for.

After you have defined what the goal is, the next step is inputting the relevant data that will be analysed.

There are two major types of churn data: Usage and contextual data.

Usage data is how much a customer used a business before they stopped, while contextual data refers to the contexts in which the customer used your business.

For example, a boutique will measure its usage data as the number of times a customer buys cloth from the store. And the context data will be the peak periods the said customer buys clothes.

The predictive analysis tool will then calculate the churn rate, providing the human analysts with enough information on how to stop the customer from leaving.

The solution to the customer leaving could be offering coupons, calling the customer, and many others.

Do you know your business’s churn rate?

Tell us in the comments below why you think some of your customers are leaving.

Communicate with your customers

Communication is vital in any business venture and even more so during uncertain times. Be proactive and transparent when communicating with your customers. Inform them that you are putting them into consideration with every decision you make. Share all the activities you are engaged in as regards the cause of the uncertain time. Inform them that you have taken every necessary precaution to protect them from the harm of the uncertainty. Ensure you speak plainly and avoid making sales pitches.

Understand Your Customers’ Priorities and Endeavor to Match Them

Depending on your brand, your customers will look to you to provide solutions to their varying challenges.

Do they request entertainment? Then make provisions to cater to their entertainment wants.

Do they want educational services? Then make them available online.

Do you sell essential supplies? Hold an online sale and offer easy delivery options or other services you usually wouldn’t offer to show that you prioritize their wants.

Increase Your Social Media Presence

If you have your business online, you may want to start to make active use of it.

1. Engage your audience on different social media channels; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, etc.
2. Share meaningful content on the platforms and advertise your events, services, and online specials.
3. Take constant note of your updated business hours and methods of business transactions.

Give Back to the Community

Several people desire to contribute to the community and nation. However, they are unable to do so as a result of several factors. Endeavour to carry out philanthropy through your company. You can entice your customers and make them want to support your business and the community simultaneously by linking your sales to donations.

Plan for the long term

No one knows how long these uncertain times will last. Hence, temporary measures may not be enough. Start making plans for the future of your business. Look ahead and consider the effects the situation has had on your business operations. You can attempt to incorporate specific new ideas into your regular strategies. Cooperate with your suppliers and have them adjust your costs and orders. Be open and honest with your employees about your options as relates to them.

Conclusively

While no one expects uncertain times, we should prepare for when it comes. Adhere to the strategies as mentioned above and take care to stay true to your value.

The million-dollar question every business should ask is, which customer types deserve the most attention, new or existing customers?

Well, the answer is both. However, there is another type that most businesses usually ignore, and this is the returning customer. These kinds of customers are those who have bought your product or service once before and have returned to make another purchase. These customers are secured in a sense and require little cost in comparison to acquiring new once unaware of your brand.

In this article, you will learn why investing in customer loyalty towards your brand equity is a strong decision for your business.

Many businesses prioritize their efforts in various endeavours such as new user acquisition strategy an investing heavily in marketing channels but not in a proper customer loyalty solution.

This mindset for a business will lead to negative user experience over time and will result in customers leaning towards the competition and eventually leaving your brand. Companies with this approach ignore the potential benefits of fostering customer loyalty towards your brand. Businesses that operate in such ways, can potentially lose money due to failed efforts of conducting expensive advertising schemes. These businesses usually suffer from highly volatile customer retention rate and will most likely continue in this pattern indefinitely without learning from this dire experience.

Strategies for Customer Loyalty Towards Brand Equity

Strategies to encourage customer loyalty towards your brand and building up your brand equity can take many forms. Give them discounts and promo codes, provide additional assistance to your customers, or offer limited access information to loyalty program members. Essentially, you must find a way to make your customers feel special. Creating this foundation between yourself and your customers will push their thoughts and inclinations towards your brand in their next time of need.

Studies show the positive effect of customer loyalty towards a brand and its brand equity. Loyalty programs incentivize repeated behaviour. A loyalty program should complement customer needs in relation to the goods or services you provide as a business. The effects of well-planned loyalty programs will result in high customer retention rates and will help your business in the longterm.

By implementing a loyalty program, you decrease customer volatility. In other words, your incentive holds their attention and stops them from exploring other brands. Importantly, loyalty programs are more effective than wasteful than traditional advertising campaigns. Rather than offering coupons and discounts with costly ads, registering your customers for a loyalty program establishes an emotional relationship between the customers and the brand.

Strategizing Your Loyalty Program to Increase Business

When trying to establish loyalty with returning or existing customers, the old adage “out with the old, in with the new” does not apply. In fact, your mindset should focus on the patterns and behaviours of your old customers. Taking time to learn about your customers helps with both their individual and collective future satisfaction. Also, various case studies show what are the “wants”, the “needs” and preferences of customers in general. The knowledge you gain from loyal customers will help you understand the marketability of your product and brand, as well as how to market your product to unfamiliar, new customers.

Some of the world’s most successful companies implemented impressive customer loyalty programs. For example, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, was early to understand the importance of customer-first business techniques. Bezos directed his product towards customer experience over company and shareholder assets, and the outcome is remarkable. Today, Amazon is a major global power and a role-model for customer retention.

Reward Your Customers, Make Them Want to Return

It’s time to reward your loyal customers. Take your service to the next level with a loyalty program that enhances customer experience and boosts business. Your loyalty program will draw customers from other brands and secure those you already attracted in the past. It’s always a safe option to reinvest in your loyal customer base.

The more options customers have, the less likely they are staying loyal to a brand and in the digital world your competition is just a click away. The world is changing, and people’s loyalty to a brand is also evolving.

In today’s business world, ‘good enough’ is no longer good enough.

Wow is the new good enough?

This implies for companies to stay in business, they have to understand what their customers want, and how to satisfy them. Customer loyalty is the willingness to continue doing business with a company.

Several factors affect customer loyalty:

• The customer service delivered:

Many customers have stopped doing business with a business because of poor customer service.

• How the business responded in times of crisis:

The response a company gives a customer when they are dissatisfied with a product or service plays a significant role in how loyal a customer will become. Suppose a business’s response is positive and helps the customer feel better after a service or product dissatisfied him/her. In that case, that customer will trust the business more, and therefore become loyal.

• A business’s consistency with excellence:

In today’s business, customers are quick to go to the competition. Although a company won’t deliver excellence all the time, still, a business must thrive on treating all customers — old and new — with the utmost respect and excellence.

On the days when excellence is achieved, the company should be humble enough about it. Customers know that every business can’t deliver top-quality all the time, but the ‘bad’ days should be far and few.

• Customers emotional attachment to a brand:

A brand specialist will always say that people buy into how a business makes them feel. For many people who are associated with a brand, it is the feeling the brand gives them that truly matters.

For example, people who use Apple products feel like they are superior, intelligent and productive. This feeling makes many run into apple stores on the release date to get the latest iPhone, MacBook or Smartwatches.

WHAT CUSTOMER LOYALTY MEANS IN THE DIGITAL AGE

In the digital age, customer loyalty is about connecting with the values and struggles that resonate with your ideal customers. The ‘cancel culture’ is prevalent these days, with young people quick to stop patronizing a brand once they feel offended or unheard.

Social media has made it possible for customers to give real-time feedback to businesses. What this means is that businesses who want to retain their old customers and win new ones have to be proactive.

Also, brands who speak up in support of their customers when the customers are going through forms of injustice are more likely to retain their old customers. and gain new ones

During the recent BLACK LIVES MATTER movement, brands who didn’t show solidarity with the protesters got terrible reviews online. Getting involved with social-political issues is no longer an option for brands; it is a necessity. It is now part of the norm.

In the digital age, if a brand doesn’t recognize the social-economic and social-cultural struggles of its customers, that brand is sure to lose market sales.

Customer loyalty is becoming fickle as the days roll by. Customers are no longer settling for the barest minimum; they demand a business goes the full length.

As a business owner, how are you ensuring that your customers stay loyal to you? Tell us in the comment section below.

More customers are searching for businesses that understand them and their specific needs. With a large amount of data, companies have to choose from, analyse, and understand, businesses are left at sea on what matters and what doesn’t matter. There is so much data to choose from, and so much personalization with a customer’s journey that every business that wants to thrive in the 21st century must either embrace the help of Artificial Intelligence or be left behind.

Customer’s journey and customer experience needs artificial intelligence

The world of customer service is getting dicier as the days roll by. People no longer patronize businesses that treat them like every other customer; customers want to be treated like the only customer the business has.

For a business to properly deliver personalized user experiences, they need to understand the customers and their buyers’ journey.

A buyers’ journey is the process through which a customer hears about a business, patronizes the business and interacts with the business. The experience the customer has with a business is often influenced by a series of factors, ranging from social trends to psychological and personality traits.

To better understand these customers’ experiences, data — useful data — must be collected.

How does a business then sort through the sea of data? How do they make sense with the monitoring of the customer’s experiences, placing them into categories and sub-categories to better understand and treat the customers right?

Artificial intelligence is the answer.

Artificial intelligence is the no longer the new cool with data mining and data analytics, it has become a necessary cog in the business wheel. Artificial intelligence is important because, aside from gathering lots of relevant data in record time, categorizing and analysing the data, it also helps with customer service. For example, chatbots help to reduce the workload on a human customer service agent and respond to customers’ needs promptly.

Recent research on customer response time revealed that customers feel unheard and unimportant when their complaints are not responded to within 24 hours of laying the complaints. Therefore, AI, in the form of Chatbots, helps to reduce the response time to customer queries, thereby building better customer service and customer relationship.

How does AI affect Customer Data?

The fear that AI would take work off the hands of many data analyst is not farfetched. However, there will still be need of Data Analyst, because it’s only humans that can interpret and implement these analysed data.

Artificial Intelligence affect Customer service in the following ways:

1. AI helps with quick Unification of Data: With customers needing real-time responses and more personalized services, Artificial Intelligence provides business with quick data unification. Combining all the necessary data and making sense of the ocean of data. Customers expect companies to deliver a unified experience — experiences that meets their need in a personalized way. And when businesses don’t meet these expectations, customers are often disappointed. With AI, these data can be easily collated, unified and personalized customer journey created, thereby leading to a better customer experience.
2. Helps Deliver Real-Time Insights: There are so many customers who want to get real-time answers to their questions. Artificial Intelligence helps to accelerate data analysis, helping to find useful relationships between a large amount of data. These relationships, after they’ve been revealed, helps the business deliver real-time results to the customers. And this improves customer experience.

There is a plethora of benefits that Artificial Intelligence in customer data — gathering, analysing and interpreting — hold for businesses. It makes work faster, create a better and more personalized buyers’ experience.

Which Artificial Intelligence tools do you use in your customer Data gathering and analysing? Or you have not started using Artificial Intelligence yet?

Share your thoughts with us.

Businesses have always relied on the conventional way of reaching out to customers. These traditional methods include the distribution of flyers, billboards, TV and Radio ads, and many others. While these approaches are beneficial in some ways, the truth is that they have lost their efficiency.

This loss of efficiency is based on the businesses’ failure to answer an essential question before deploying these methods. Without answering this vital question, all marketing and advert efforts will yield very little, if any, results at all.

This question is none but “Who is my customer?”

Understanding your target audience is an essential process of any marketing strategy. It ensures that you deploy the right marketing method, at the right time, to the right audience. It ensures that you get value for every resource spent in the marketing effort. By understanding who your customer is, you get to understand why they want the things they want.

This knowledge will help you streamline your product and services to suit the needs of your customers. Having realized the benefit of understanding your customer, let’s examine how you can do this by utilizing data and analytical frameworks even before deploying marketing approaches.

Knowing Your Customers;

For many years, most businesses rely on intuition to determine their customers and what they want. However, a new approach could be of immense benefit to businesses in the area of customer acquisition and maintenance. While this new approach is fast, effective, and cost-efficient, it doesn’t seek to eradicate the intuitive process. Rather, this new approach partners with the intuitive method to help businesses determine their target audience and keep them.

This new method is known as a data-driven and analytical method. It involves the acquisition of data and analyzing these data to determine your business’s target audience and how best to reach them. The approach involves three major processes that make up its framework. These processes include;

Data Wrangling

This process involves acquiring the data you need to use. You review the nature of the data and prepare it by removing extraneous dimensions and creating new dimensions for the data. You may also need to add new data if required. Lastly, you must identify the most appropriate valuation method that produces the best result you crave.

Data Analysis

At this stage, you need to check out for trends and patterns that could influence or give insights about the analysis. You also need to determine the best clustering approach that offers the best insights based on your data.

Data Output

This is the last stage, and it involves you segmenting your customers based on the result from your analysis. You also need to use the insights gained from the analysis carried out. Finally, you need to prepare for possible changes in the trends and patterns noticed in the data analysis carried out with the future in mind.

These are the three stages involved in the data-driven and analytical approach. Regardless of the business type or customer demography, these steps are applicable. The only variation is the valuation approach to be used.

Customer retention is an essential aspect of business for most small and medium enterprises. This strategy can hugely contribute to the profits generated and the overall success of the company. Before discussing ways through which this is possible, let’s discuss the concept of customer retention.

Customer retention is the process through which businesses take concerted efforts to maintain their existing customer base. In simple words, it is the process of retaining existing customers to the point of loyalty. When a business has achieved its customer retention goals, it will have a vibrant and loyal customer base that buys or patronize any of its products or services at all times.

The process of retaining existing customers includes several simple steps. Some of these steps are

Manage Customers Expectations

Whenever an individual approaches your business, they have expectations. While some may expect average results, others may set their expectations a bit lower or even higher. What you need to do at this point is to ensure that you meet their expectations, at least. Ensure that your customer does not leave your business disappointed.

Maintain Trust

Once customers catch a whiff of shady practices or behaviours in your business strategy, they may start to leave. As much as customers are concerned, they cannot trust your product or services if your practices are shady. Hence as much as possible, stay clear of any dubious practice or image tarnishing news.

Personalization works

Go personal with your customers. This means that you ensure that your products and services address their issues. Rather than doing what the general market is doing, seek how you can help them solve problems pertinent to their personal lives.

While this step may require creative thinking, extra cost, and effort, the benefits overwhelm the resources spent in its course. However, no matter how personal you get, you should mind their privacy and not cross the line.

Reward Loyalty

Another critical step in the process of customer retention is rewarding loyalty. While you give customers reasons to remain loyal to your brand by providing quality products and services, you should ensure that you reward their loyalty.

Rewarding your customer’s loyalty comes in different forms. It could be in the form of bonuses and bonanzas. You can also set up a form of a discount on services for long-standing customers. The underlying point is to ensure that customers get something beneficial for staying loyal to your brand at the end of the day.

How increasing Customer Retention Increases Revenue Growth

Having discussed how to retain customer’s patronage, let’s examine how these processes help your brand make more profit.

Loyal Customers

Many of the big names in numerous industries gained their status through their loyal customer base. Customer retention begets a loyal customer base. When people see that your products and services not only solve their problems but also exudes elements of transparency, they stick with your brand.

Free Referrals

Your loyal customers will patronize your brand and refer their friends and colleagues to your brand. This is a form of free publicity for your brand, all thanks to customer retention. These referrals mean more customers, which translates into more sales and profit.

Loyal customer means that your products and services get patronized by a large population of people and you have a bright future for your business.

Today’s digital market is highly competitive. Companies can lose customers in a snap of the finger. The digital era is pulling future generations of shoppers from traditional offline marketing towards online marketing. Online shopping is much cheaper nowadays and offers people numerous options from many vendors. Because of the trend towards digital marketing, companies must adapt and utilize various techniques to gain their customer’s loyalty. Above all, multi-brand loyalty programs are one of many methods out there in the saturated digital market.

Multi-brand loyalty programs offer customers a streamlined reward solution that spans numerous companies. Many multi-brand loyalty programs have a points system in place to reward customers for their purchases. Customers love using these points between brands.

The programs allow both customers and various businesses to benefit from multi-brand collaborations. Loyalty programs dramatically increase the sharing of marketable information from customers to businesses as well as providing financial benefits to both parties.

How Do Companies Benefit From Multi-Brand Loyalty Programs?

Loyalty programs involving multiple brands that disrupt customers in their decision journey when it comes to purchasing products. Before any customer will reach their decision point of either placing a purchase or rather moving on to the next brand they have in mind, the system will attract them by offering them enhanced options or draw their attention towards deals with partner brands.

Here are some examples of the benefits companies can expect from joining a well-organized multi-brand loyalty program:

1. Companies are able to enjoy a large community of customer information when they commit to multi-brand loyalty programs. By coalescing their customer data with other brands and companies, they also become privy to a greatly enhanced data set to help optimize their workplace. Any loyalty program is a keyhole into customer preferences and behaviours. This information is invaluable for planning future products around customer preferences established by data collection.
2. All parties are able to enjoy enhanced promotions from multi-brand loyalty programs. All companies involved in cooperative loyalty programs enjoy increased exposure from the combined customer community.
3. Cross-brand programs dramatically increase customer engagement, fostering a positive relationship between companies and their associated partners.
4. Rather than a temporary incentive for customers such as coupons or sales calls, loyalty programs provide repeatable and predictable means to increase sales opportunities.
5. By having access to a multi-brand loyalty program, any company’s marketing strategy becomes more streamlined and far more efficient, resulting in reduced costs and overheard in lead generation as well as highly increased workplace productivity.

Multi-brand loyalty programs are essential tools for generating sales opportunities in today’s modern age of digital commerce. The program’s combined data resources allow marketing professionals to enlighten potential customers with the notion of different price ranges and niche subgroups. Any of the above benefits should give companies a good reason to consider engaging in a multi-brand loyalty program.

How Do Customers Benefit From Multi-Brand Loyalty Programs?

Customers engaging in loyalty programs receive several benefits. These benefits promote positive bonds between companies and their customers. Let’s examine some of the benefits that customers enjoy by joining a multi-brand loyalty program.

1. Customers remain engaged and updated with new products and information.
2. Customer interaction is formed through community spaces, blogs, reviews, and Q&As creating a closer connection and a sense of intimacy with the brand.
3. Rewards and deals keep customers happy and inclined to revisit the various brands for future purchases. Customers love earning points from one brand and using them on another brand for something else.
4. Purchases and interactions are more enjoyable and convenient when streamlined across brands. It is easier for customers to explore options across brands as opposed to choosing from only one brand.

Time to Get Started

In conclusion, if you want to enjoy strong relationships with your customers, multi-brand loyalty programs are a sure way to go about it. Your customers will love a new points system they can use to switch points from one brand to another. Start creating new, personalized experiences that benefit you and other companies. This mode of commerce amplifies company exposure and increases the accumulation of rewards for both parties. In this era of highly competitive digital marketing, teamwork between brands is the only option.