Supporting Customer Success: How to Help Shoppers Achieve Their New Year’s Resolutions
With this year ending, New Year's resolutions are on everyone's minds. Whether intentionally or not, consumers are making promises to themselves and looking for the right products and/or services to help them make good on their goals.
As a retailer or D2C brand, you're in a unique position to assist these shoppers by aligning your marketing strategies with their needs and aspirations for the new year. After all, the easier it is for consumers to achieve their goals using your products, the more likely they are to connect with your brand.
The question is, how do you create an experience that successfully supports your customers' New Year's goals? While it's not difficult, it does take some foresight and planning. Here are some tips to help you develop a customer success strategy that's in line with your shoppers' resolutions for next year and beyond.
Target Your Audience
It's difficult to engage audiences and promote customer success if you're not targeting the right consumers. This is especially true in today's heavily personalized marketing landscape, where 91 percent of shoppers say they're more likely to buy from brands that provide personalized offers and recommendations, and 66 percent say encountering content that isn't relevant to their interests would prevent them from making a purchase.
The truth is that these days, helping your customers succeed starts with data and targeting. In addition to creating buyer personas and leveraging dynamic creatives to get your ads in front of the right people at the right time, you need to dig into data to understand your audience on a granular level. Ask yourself:
- What are their hobbies and interests?
- How are their purchasing decisions affected by their daily lives?
- What are their common pain points?
Analyzing this info will help you identify the goals that are top-of-mind for your customers so you can address them very specifically in the marketing content you create.
Give Them Guidance
Once you have insight into your customers' aspirations, you can highlight exactly how your product or service can be used to achieve those goals. Leaving this to consumers to figure out on their own can be risky. If they don't make the connection quickly, they're likely to get frustrated and look elsewhere. But if they're instantly able to recognize how your services can support their goals, they'll want to learn more.
One of the most effective ways to demonstrate this value is to create content that guides customers using your products or services at every stage. Whether you make a short video, write a blog post, create an infographic, or send an email, clearly showing customers how to use your product to achieve their desired outcome will boost customer satisfaction and increase customer retention. It will also help position your brand as a trusted expert — one that's dedicated to ensuring customer success through guidance and support. See an example below from Quip:
Show You're Invested in Their Success
Of course, becoming a trusted expert in the eyes of customers also requires the audience to believe you are genuinely invested in their success. The best way to prove this is to include content that offers helpful and practical advice — and supports your customers' goals — regardless of whether they use your products to meet them.
If you're a skincare brand, for example, make sure your content marketing does not solely consist of your own product spotlights and how-tos. While those are valuable pieces of content for the reasons mentioned above, they should be complemented by non-product-focused content offering helpful advice that anyone can take advantage of. Think "On the Glow: 6 Holiday Travel Skincare Tips" or "Winter Skin Blues: The Best Home Remedies for Revitalizing Dry Skin." Showing customers, you want to see them succeed whether they purchase your products or not can be a big brand loyalty booster.
Provide an Action Plan
As most of us know, fulfilling a New Year's resolution can be difficult. This is where you can step in as a brand and remind your customers that they are not alone. You understand how hard following through can be, and you're there to make it easier by helping them break down their big plans into simple, actionable steps.
The mobile health app Noom has done this masterfully, for example, by taking a behavioral approach to weight loss that encourages clients to set small, achievable goals that pay off over time.
Offer Information, Motivation and Support
Lastly, one of the best ways to help your customers achieve their goals is to establish yourself as their go-to source for information and motivation. Share educational content about your brand and industry that's directly related to their needs and goals and create uplifting blog posts and videos to cheer them along and support them on their journey.
Because the more informed your customers are about your services and how to use them, the more likely they are to find success and feel satisfied with them. And when you position yourself as a trusted thought leader and motivational coach, you'll inspire your customers to keep coming back for more. Ultimately, you want your customers to look at your brand as a resource for achieving their goals and becoming the person they aspire to be.
In Short
Helping customers achieve their goals is essential to the success of any business, especially when it comes to customer retention and loyalty. If your product or service gives your customers the result they are looking for, they will come back for more. And while this is true year-round, there's no better time to start fine-tuning your customer success strategy than at the start of a new year when the desire for positive, meaningful, and lasting changes are on everyone's minds.
The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the ANA or imply endorsement from the ANA.
Jay Kulkarni is the CEO of Theorem.