B2B customer loyalty. We’ve all had that experience when you purchase a new product and love it, but then things quickly go downhill. Maybe you can’t reach support when you need it and end up wasting valuable time navigating a complicated maze of a phone tree. Or maybe you do reach someone, only to be transferred again and again before hitting a dead end with a dropped call.
Customer loyalty isn’t built on one product or one experience. It’s often built on many, and marketing teams play an important role in creating them. For those looking for creative strategies to improve B2B customer loyalty and support business growth, we’ve tapped our internal experts to capture some of our favorites.
Create Fresh, New Programs
One of the best ways to improve retention and build customer loyalty is by helping your existing customers become even more successful with your products and services. For example, a few years ago, we decided to revamp our customer success webinar program with that exact goal in mind.
Our in-house expert, Jennifer Blanco, transformed what used to be a basic webinar series into something much more valuable. She introduced custom landing pages that guide customers through our solutions, dedicated office hours with product experts, and hands-on workshops for deeper learning.
Webinar attendance jumped by 140 percent. Even better, customers who participated were 25 percent more likely to stay with us, giving our retention rates a healthy lift.
If you already have customer retention programs, consider giving them a refresh. Add more depth, make them more interactive, and focus on helping customers get even more value from your solutions. And if you don’t have any yet, it’s worth building and testing some. Tie the outcomes to your retention metrics (such as retention rate, churn rate, and customer lifetime value) to understand program impacts on loyalty and satisfaction over time.
Set the Tone Early With a Solid Start
Post-purchase evaluation is real. You’ve probably done it yourself. You buy something new and then immediately go back to the reviews to reassure yourself it was the right choice. Research shows that 90 percent of consumers say their post-purchase experience is just as important as the quality of the product itself.
And it’s not just a B2C thing. B2B customers do it too, which is why creating a great experience from the start is so important.
One of the easiest ways to make a strong first impression is with a well-crafted welcome email. Even if you already send one, there may be opportunities to make it even more impactful. Here are a few tips from our welcome email pro, Jennifer.
Send it right away. We’ve found customers are more likely to open the message if it’s sent within the first hour of purchase. Automation tools can help you send timely, triggered emails.
Introduce the team. Let new customers know who is supporting them, how to get in touch, and what to expect next.
Share helpful resources. Link to your best onboarding tools, such as a knowledge base, support site, community hub, or login portal. You might also include relevant webinars to help customers get started.
And here is the fun part. Your welcome email is just the beginning. You can build an entire series of emails that help customers succeed with your products and services. This approach sets the stage for long-term loyalty and stronger retention.
Develop a Customer Nurture Series
You have your welcome email set up, right? Great! Now, if you haven’t done so already, you’ll want to build that out into an automated series to create B2B customer loyalty and retention. But what exactly should you include? In addition to that welcome email we mentioned, here are a few ideas to consider:
- A get-started guide. Help your new customers take their first action. Provide a checklist or a step-by-step guide to get them up and running.
- Pro tips and best practices. To help customers go from basic setup to deeper usage, consider including examples, videos, or use case content. You can also highlight the features that power users love.
- Success stories. Build trust and inspire confidence with a short customer story or case study. Bonus tip: segment your users by industry and make the case study specific to their vertical so it’s as relevant as possible.
- Community and engagement. Invite customers to join your user community if you have one. If you don’t, you can invite them to join you on social channels, attend customer events, or participate in webinars.
“The goal with a welcome series is to give the customer the nod for making the right choice and setting the tone for what’s to come,” says Jennifer.
Look for Key Moments to Grow Loyalty
Automation is amazing, especially for smaller marketing teams, but you don’t want to lose the personal touch when you’re working to build B2B customer loyalty and improve retention.
Another tip that Jennifer shared is to look for moments that really matter to your customers. Talk to the sales team and your customer success team and ask, “Is there anything new going on with our clients?”
Maybe one recently landed on a list of best places to work or earned another notable award. If so, send a special gift and a handwritten note congratulating them on their success and thanking them for being a customer. These kinds of experiences add a personal touch that customers will remember.
Set Up a Listening Station
Have you ever heard the stat about customer complaints? For every customer you hear from, there are 26 others who stay silent. That’s why it’s so important to create a “listening station” to better understand your customers’ needs. The more advanced version of this is called measuring sentiment. It involves collecting feedback from sources such as online reviews, emails, support tickets, and other key touchpoints. It may sound complex, but if you’re serious about understanding your customers, it can give you valuable insight.
You can also go the more traditional route and send a customer survey. To improve participation, offer a compelling incentive and consider keeping responses anonymous. You’re more likely to get honest, helpful feedback that way.
Embrace Complaints as Data
As hard as we try, companies aren’t perfect. Customer complaints are never fun to deal with, but if we look at that feedback as data, we can start asking what we can do better.
For example, maybe the sales team hears complaints that onboarding is confusing. That could be a chance to refresh your onboarding content or expand it. You might also do a little customer research to understand the first questions customers are asking. Then, you can rebuild your onboarding program to be as clear and helpful as possible.
It’s really about spotting those points of confusion and putting the right resources and content in place. That way, customers feel good about their experience from the beginning and get on the path to loyalty and retention.
Guiding Customers Toward Loyalty and Retention
Marketers are under increased pressure to show results. One way they can really support the organization is by building strategies that strengthen B2B customer loyalty and retention. At the end of the day, it’s much easier to “land and expand” than to start from scratch—especially when churn is a challenge.
When you focus on a few key areas and put metrics in place to show impact, you can help your team expand revenue with existing customers, build stronger relationships, and turn loyal customers into brand advocates.
Do you want to learn more strategies for improving customer retention? We created a complete guide for you focused on building quality, lasting customer relationships.