The Role of Voice in Brand Loyalty

Brand loyalty can be overlooked as the focus is often solely on sales or bottom of the funnel activity. However, it is extremely important to facilitate brand love and create brand evangelists to keep people engaged, excited and coming back.

There is a subtle difference between customer loyalty and brand loyalty:

Customer loyalty is based on lower prices, save offers and price constructs. Customers will keep coming back because of better value in terms of price comparisons but will consider and switch over to another vendor if they offer a better deal.

Brand loyalty, on the other hand, is much easier to maintain once established but needs a more strategic set up. Brand loyalty is based on product quality, your values and what you represent and is a more two- way conversation. Developing a voice skill or experience enables you to speak to your customers in the language you want to speak to them in. The first step here is to establish your voice.  Decide on what your brand represents and whether this skill is to educate or entertain.

Regardless of the product or service, the purchase funnel is often long with many touchpoints.  The challenge is to find the right points in the consideration journey.   While delivering on price and quality, make sure you are keeping communication paths open and speaking to customers regularly as this helps encourage brand loyalty. Voice technology is in its nascent phase and has proven to be a highly effective way of communicating with your customer base.  Creating a Google action or Alexa skill is a creative and relatively inexpensive way of communicating with customers. Some great examples of how this has been done are below:

Patron tequila gives customers the ability to access personalized cocktail recipes

Domino’s enables customers to order a pizza without picking up a phone or opening a laptop

PayPal users can engage Siri to send money to friends, family, or businesses

Nestlé has developed a recipe related voice skill that gives cooking instructions as you cook

Diageo has delivered a skill to help customers taste their Talisker whisky range

As mentioned in one of our previous blogposts, if you align your voice experience with the product and encourage the customer to engage, you have the opportunity to deliver information that encourages them to be a brand advocate, articulating to their peers the benefits of the product. This will augment recall and increase recommendation, thereby increasing sales. An important benefit from this two way communication from the brand standpoint is you can understand exactly what questions your customers are asking and where their interests lie, allowing you to better shape your product and service delivery against demand and align to other channels in the media mix.

According to Juniper Research, consumers will interact with voice assistants on 8.4 billion devices by 2024.  As voice technology continues to grow and voice assistants become more ubiquitous in households, it is increasingly important for all businesses to have a voice strategy in their overall digital marketing plan. Developing a voice skill/experience not only enhances customer experience but can also provide a method of purchasing as evidenced by Dominoes and Paypal (above). At Say It Now, we focus on voice commerce and crafting conversations that lead to a transaction.  We can help you from brainstorming your voice strategy, developing your skill and running and optimising your experience. Get in touch now to start the conversation!