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There are many strategies in the business world that you can use to market your products to consumers and make sales. These traditional business-driven marketing strategies are being eschewed in recent times for another marketing strategy known as the customer-centric marketing strategy.
Simply put, a customer-centric marketing strategy leads to marketing methods that take stock of which products customers are buying the most, and then building and rebranding these products or services around the needs of customers. Customer-centricity holds that satisfied and happy customers are the best customers, so why not keep creating and improving their favourite products and services to make them happier and more loyal?
Affiliate marketers, both merchants and publishers, need to understand that a customer-centric marketing strategy is beneficial to increasing their earnings. Customers are what make a business. Without customers, your business is as good as gone. With a customer-centric approach to affiliate marketing, merchants and publishers could see a vast increase in impressions, click-throughs, and profits.
How Can Customer-Centricity Boost Your Earnings?
Loyal Customers Are The Best Customers
When customers are loyal to you, they tend to stick with you. They won't take their patronage anywhere else unless they have been truly and properly convinced to switch affiliate marketers. Loyal customers with high click-throughs, the most site visits, the highest number of conversions with the largest amount of money spent, means more money in the affiliate bank account.
Loyal Customers Bring More Customers
Word of mouth is a powerful tool for spreading information, whether you want that info out there or not. Maybe you write the most helpful content on your affiliate site or blog: maybe you and the merchant, are very polite and patient with customers and want to hear them out before asking questions and making suggestions. These customers will spread this news to others, and soon your customer base will increase because of how well you treat the people who do business with you. As an affiliate marketer, one of the main ways to get profits in affiliate marketing is to drive traffic. Because of your great customer service, traffic is being driven to you, and more traffic means more CTRs, which in turn means more revenue.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Become Customer-Centric?
As an affiliate or publisher, your customers technically belong to the merchant whose product you promote, but how you treat these customers (although they aren't yours) matters just as much. For merchants, how they treat their customers also affects the business of their publishers: if their customer service is terrible, the affiliates lose a lot of traffic, thus losing you and the merchant, some business. But being good to customers and attuned to what they need will ensure customer loyalty and greater returns and commissions for affiliate marketers. Look at the links that they click to most for products, look at the customers with high conversion rates, and set your product promotions to leverage on those data.
Improve Customer Loyalty
Make sure that you do all that is possible to keep your current customer base loyal to your business. Merchants should make sure that their customer care is stellar and be accommodating to your customers. Ensure that your payment methods are diverse and flexible, not forcing all customers to pay via one payment method. Make sure your payment methods can be accessible to a large percentage of your customers. PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa cards are good payment methods to use that many customers will able to pay with. Make sure your delivery methods are diverse as well and let the customers know exactly when to expect their purchases, if not to the exact date, then a specific time range. If there are going to be any delays with deliveries, inform the customers.
Affiliates should also work to maintain customer loyalty by offering discounts on links to their best customers and informing them of sales and limited-time offers.
Get Personal With Your Customers
Do not stay strictly professional with your customers: get personal with them as well. Don't just send promotional emails to your mailing list: send emails commemorating their birthdays as well. Inquire after their health, ask about vacation plans, celebrate anniversaries by giving them huge discounts, etc. Get to know them, and let them feel appreciated as people, not just the other end of business.
Be Efficient
Make sure you cover all the angles you need to when promoting your product to customers. Invest in the appropriate promotional channels and campaigns, making sure they are aimed specifically at your target audience. This means that you should know who your target audience is, and promote your products with them in mind.
Be Flexible
Customers' preferences always change. Change your products and services to suit those changes as well. A business that isn't flexible doesn't have what it takes to stay in business. Affiliate marketing has to be flexible and agile, so as to suit customers' preferences. To know how to change to fit what your customers need, one should always keep an eye on the markets, checking the gravity of products at certain periods. A product or service with high gravity shows that that product or service is in demand, and a product with low gravity shows that the product is in low demand.
As an affiliate marketer, you should monitor the impressions of your links, and click-through rates as well: these can show you what products customers are really interested in, and what they aren't particularly thrilled about.
