Principles Of Loyal Customers — an Interview With Chloë Thomas
Almost a year ago we started a cooperation with successful podcast master — Chloë Thomas from the amazing eCommerce MasterPlan. She’s not just a respected proffesional among eCommerce gurus, she’s very charming and kind preson. And we’re happy we had a chance to talk to her about topics that you may find interesting too.
In this interview, we’ve covered the trends such as next day delivery services, mcommerce and the use of Facebook for this purpose and the principles of creating a relationship with customers. Chloë’s ideas are pure wisdom and we do not want you to lose any piece of it so we decided to split our conversations into two parts. So let’s move straight into it!
1. Chloë, you’ve done a bunch of great stuff to help eCommerce merchants ranging from writing ebooks to your blog to your podcast. Can you tell us a bit about how you got started with eCommerce MasterPlan? What motivated you to get started?
Chloë: Well, as weird as it sounds, I’m kind of primarily motivated by a hatred of waste. I mean, obviously in the recycling sense as well, but mainly seeing businesses miss just the most obvious opportunities. Why on earth are you not doing that?! They’re putting a load of time and effort to something that’s just not going to bring them the results they deserve.
So I’ve been trying to help businesses make the right decisions about what their marketing should be whilst also running a marketing agency and trying to flock the marketing. Which is obviously a bit of a disconnect, so then I realized I should write a book about it all and launch eCommerce MasterPlan. And that was about four years ago and now we exist to help eCommerce businesses to find the right path.
2. That’s great! I experience it daily when I deal with new concepts, ideas, and reports and simultaneously try to understand a little from our own customers. There’s so much going on.
It’s just so hard to take all that information that’s out there and really know what’s good to go with. You’re working so hard on your own day to day.
Chloë: Completely. The problem with online a lot of the time is that there’s so many of us involved in trying to help people with online marketing, we spend an awful lot of time and effort writing blog posts and creating content and all the rest of it. So there’s just so much online noise about online marketing compared to offline marketing, and then trying to pick through it, to work out which bits are relevant to you, could be quite difficult.
You can lose an awful lot of time, looking at B2B stuff while you should be able to see all the rest of it. So I try and help guide people to the right information so they can get to the right tools that help them make right decisions once they find it.
3. I’d like to chat a bit about CUSTOMER LOYALTY.
Keeping customers coming back to your website and turning them into friends. We wrote a blog post recently about the importance of focusing on the right target customer. From the eCommerce merchants that you’ve seen, what are some of the best principles to follow when trying to improve customer loyalty?
Chloë: Well, I think you know that the #1 principle to follow when you’re trying to improve customer loyalty is to think about being consistent with every single interaction that customer has with your business. If you think about human relationship with other people outside the work and all the rest of it, the people you feel loyal to are the ones you trust and who tell you the truth and who are consistent and who aren’t your strange acquaintances who do odd things and change their mind every five minutes.
“Loyalty gets breed through trust and trust is easiest to create if people are constantly getting the same impression of your business.” — Chloë Thomas
So the concept I referred to is the conversation, which is every single interaction a person has ever had with your business, and many of those you don’t know about — they heard about you in a TV, or their friend heard / been saying great things about you, or they saw someone using your products etc…
There’s a lot that you’re not in control of, which means that you have to make sure that everything you have an impact on, everything you’re in control of, is as consistent as possible. Which does mean making sure that everyone on your team understand your mission, the reason your business exists, and all those kinds of great angles.
The principle is that part of that conversation is obviously that people have deeper relationship with you. The further they travel through the interactions with your business, and that’s something I referred to as a customer relationship levels. So you have people who inquire, you get their email addresses, then you got the next level on which is first-time buyers, they actually bought from you, you take it on another level where they become regular buyers and so on. And there’s six of thousands in total.
The key thing to understand is that as the customer deepens that relationship with you, they go to a higher relationship level, then the type of conversation you should be having with them is changing.
If someone’s a regular buyer, you shouldn’t keep asking them to sign up to your emails and you should be asking them what they love about your business. It’s about that kind of consistency and the relationship level pace.
How do you deal with creating loyal customers? We hope these Chloë’s words were useful and you’ll be waiting for the next episode :)
Stay tuned and communicate! Thank you, Chloë!
