Instagram is a great platform for sales of your brand or business. With over 500 million daily users on Instagram, it must be important for you to keep your own share of customers for your products or services on Instagram. You can easily use Instagram to promote your products or services, generate leads and turn them into customers, build a trusted brand image, and increase your customer retention. To improve customer retention, there are some tips to learn from excellent brand examples.
Businesses and brands are using Instagram for their sales by adopting Instagram marketing strategies. Today, there are nearly 25 million businesses on Instagram which should be an alert for those businesses who still have not considered Instagram for their sales. The present article aims at introducing some tips for increasing your customer retention.
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Why Use Instagram for Business?
There are three main reasons you should think of Instagram for your sales if you have not already:
- The popularity of Instagram among a very wide age range is undeniable. Therefore, your customers are already out there waiting for you. So, it can be said that your business can highly thrive by boosting its sales on Instagram.
- Since Instagram is an image-based platform, it makes you influence your customers using impressive pictures of your products and captions that are both entertaining and informative.
- Customers in general care a lot about your customer service. Instagram allows you to build up relationships with your customers through comments and DMs.This is how Instagram helps you to keep your customers satisfied so that they are willing to buy from you again.
Taken as a whole, the fertility of Instagram regarding the turn of your followers to customers, its high engagement rate, and that it improves your customer service is important enough to make you consider it for your sales.
So, How to Use Instagram for Customer Retention?
Obviously, Instagram does not have website features such as exit popups to prevent the customer from exiting your website at the beginning of the sales funnel. Therefore, you should see how you can use Instagram to gain more customers and keep your current customers. Here are the tips:
1. Know Your Current Customers
One of the successful techniques of increasing your customer retention is to have the targeted content for your current audience. If you know the type of your customers thoroughly, it will not be a hard task. So, knowing your customers can significantly help you get new customers.
As a consequence, you should base your content marketing strategies on the preferences of your current customers. You can access the feedback of your followers through Instagram analytics. Using what Instagram tells you, you can see which posts or stories were most engaged and keep on creating them. Remember to have a visually impressive feed with informative yet entertaining captions.
2. Post Various Content
Be creative enough not to post always about your products or services. The reason is that your followers, even if they are your customers, get bored with the photos of your products or services at some point in time. To avoid such danger, you have to post various content no matter how awesome your products or services are.
Here is how @lushcosmetics keep its feed vibrant and dynamic:
Talk about the advantages of your products over the competitors in the posts that are related to your products only. Specify why they should buy your products by telling them about the features of your products. In addition, you can highlight how your product or service can enhance their lives and solve their problems. This is how you can persuade the new viewers of your posts to first follow you and then buy from you. Moreover, your current customers realize that your claims match your products and they are eager to buy your future products too.
3. Keep your Feed Active
A viewer spends just a couple of seconds on your feed when they get curious to check your profile. If you want them to stay, become a follower, and turn into a customer, you should keep your feed active and attractive.
Post daily on the peak hours when there are a lot of online users on Instagram. You can find these hours either by a simple Google search or by referring to your Instagram analytics. Schedule in advance for your posting strategies so that you do not miss any day. Make it a habit for your followers to expect you on their feed at a special hour during the day.
On the other hand, you have to keep your feed visually attractive. You can choose different themes, grids, or colors for your posts. For instance, if your business sells accessories for girls, you can choose the pink color as the dominant color for your feed. Furthermore, the color that you choose for your feed can then be recognized as your brand color.
4. See Instagram as a Customer Service Tool
Customer service is crucial for almost all buyers. Given that you already know how to improve your customer satisfaction, you should assure your future customers about the services that you provide for them after they make the purchase. If you use Instagram as a customer service tool, you make a better relationship between you and your customers. So, they can directly ask you any questions or report any problems in the comments, story replies, or DMs.
One thing to always remember is that you should never ignore any story replies, comments, or DMs of this kind. Because then you will forever lose your unsatisfied customer. Reply to them swiftly. Try to see what the problem is in a friendly tone and do anything you can to compensate for what has occurred.
5. Optimize Your Profile
On the way to make an efficient relationship between you and your customers, you should be aware of some points:
Firstly, your Instagram bio is more important than what you think. Write a bio that encompasses the keywords of your business. Hence, new visitors would know what you actually can do by reading a few words.
Secondly, the link that you provide in the bio is a way to promote both your other platforms and your products. For instance, if you add the link to your website in your Instagram bio, your followers can turn into a customer on your website and can grow your website traffic remarkably.
Tip: According to Instagram daily limits, you are not allowed to add more than one link in bio. However, If you have more than one link, you can still put them all in your Instagram bio using the available AI tools.
Thirdly, the contact buttons on your Instagram profile can ease the way your followers/customers contact you. They can find your email address, contact number, and address in addition to the DMs they can directly send you right away. So, in case of any complaints or inquiries, they can find a way to contact you in less than seconds.
6. Ask for Feedback
Every once in a while, ask the opinion of your followers about one of your products, services, customer service, etc. in the captions or stories. Instagram stories have great features such as stickers that you can use to see what your followers think about a particular subject.
@sally_hansen has asked its followers to drop a heart in the comments if they like the new nail polish color:
Asking for feedback in this way has several advantages:
- You get high engagement for the story or post and the Instagram algorithm notices you and shows your posts and stories to a wider group of audience.
- It is obvious that your followers recognize the fact that you care about them. So, you get a better reputation.
- Using the feedback of your products or services help you enhance their shortcomings to meet the satisfaction of your customers and gain more customers in the future.
- The feedback tells you if you are going in the right direction. Because if you ask for feedback and no one gives any, you realize that something is wrong in the way you are heading.
- You can measure the percentage of satisfied and unsatisfied customers.
- And finally, you can increase your customer retention.
7. Apply Instagram Strategies that Gain You Loyalty
Raise your reputation by getting your customers to trust you easily. When a customer trusts your brand, it is highly likely that they introduce you to their friends or family members for further shopping. Apply these important Instagram customer retention strategies to gain more loyalty for your business:
Use All Instagram Features to Boost Your Engagement
Using the features of Instagram can visually influence your audience and appear thought-provoking to them. As a result, these features encourage their engagement. How using Instagram features can increase your engagement? As said before, when the engagement of your account is increased, the Instagram algorithm automatically boosts your stories or posts and you will get more views.
Use stickers, polls, emoji sliders, quiz stickers, question stickers, and countdown stickers in your stories to better engage your followers. In other words, using these stickers can create more effective interactions between you and your followers. Use IGTVs and go Live as well and let your followers see you and interact with you directly.
Consider Influencer Marketing
To increase the number of your followers, you can start collaborating with micro or macro influencers regarding your budget. Moreover, you can make a partnership with another brand to reach out to new followers. Laying your content open to influencers and brands can significantly help you as they already have a lot of engaged followers.
If you want an influencer to promote your products or services, you should remember not to force them into saying something that you want. You do not want negative results for your investment in an influencer, do you? So, give them enough elbow room to criticize your products or services. They have a good relationship with their followers who can easily notice if they are introducing something they have liked or they are forced to introduce it.
Create a Limited Offer or Promo Code
Limited offers and promo codes are irresistible in general. No matter if your followers are shopaholics or uninterested in shopping, a special offer can tempt them hugely. The point of passing out limited offers is to increase engagement, increase customer retention, and generate more followers using the word of mouth of your current followers who recommend you to their friends.
Organize Contests/Giveaways
Competitions like taking part in a contest or giveaway are usually popular among Instagram followers. It is actually clear because they like getting things without paying for them. If you make the prize worth taking part in your contest or giveaway, you can surely get a lot of responses and further engagements.
Some suggestions for the conditions that your followers can participate in are sharing a photo of a pet, skincare product, a particular author’s book, a dish they have had in your restaurant, a dish they have cooked using your recipe, etc.
Conclusion
Instagram is a popular platform that enables businesses to build brand awareness, generate more leads, promote products, and finally increase customer retention. Analyzing the feedback of your current customers can help you keep them satisfied and earn more customers. This is due to the fact that taking analytics seriously results in solving the problems of your business and products or services.
In conclusion, pay attention to your analytics and feedback and apply the aforementioned Instagram marketing strategies to get the most out of your presence on Instagram.
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