How can companies create brand loyalty

What is Brand Loyalty: Complete Guide

Find out 5 effective strategies to build brand loyalty

Brand loyalty is a customer’s attachment to a certain brand or product and their tendency to make repeat purchases. It also includes consumers’ positive emotions and feelings associated with a company and its word-of-mouth promotion.

Contents

In this article, you’ll get to know the importance of brand loyalty, explore its benefits, and compare brand and customer loyalty. We’ll also review several strategies, metrics, and examples to help you improve your brand loyalty.

Why is brand loyalty important?

Business owners allocate their marketing and customer service resources to ensure the best customer experience. This way, they try to build brand loyalty with a certain product or service and maintain good relationships with consumers. Clients loyal to a particular brand will buy from it without considering purchasing from competitors. They can buy products they need even at a higher price.

Since there are hundreds of options available for customers both online and offline, your company needs to be the best option for them. If everything goes well, brand loyalty enables a company to grow its customer base and encourage consumers to refer friends. Brand loyalty allows companies to establish emotional connections with customers and make customized offers. Everything is built on trust, which means that companies shape their reputation for years to make people choose them for credibility, quality, and innovation.

Brand loyalty is critical for the long-term efficiency and success of a company. By boosting brand loyalty, business owners can obtain the opportunity to increase their constant profits, reduce expenditures, and improve sales volume and the number of repeat purchases.

Now let’s consider the main benefits of brand loyalty.

Benefits of Brand Loyalty

It’s pivotal for companies to make the best offers since loyal customers contribute to their business development. The pros of brand loyalty are as follows:

Now that you know all the pros, it’s time to find out the difference between brand and customer loyalty.

Brand Loyalty vs. Customer Loyalty

Brand loyalty and customer loyalty start to form when people have a good experience with a brand, positive emotions, and associations. However, there’s a slight difference between the two concepts, so let’s take a closer look at them.

Brand loyalty refers to the way consumers perceive a company. It also entails a customer’s attachment to a certain brand, emotional connection, and positive associations with a specific company. Companies implement different strategies to establish a positive image in customers’ minds and improve their brand loyalty.

Customer loyalty is about providing consumers with products and services that meet their demands and budget. To reach high customer loyalty, companies come up with discounts, special offers, and affordable pricing plans.

In a nutshell, if you provide consumers with a product or service that meets their expectations and has reasonable pricing plans, you’ll be able to increase customer loyalty. At the same time, it’s critical to develop trust to build brand loyalty. Customers who are loyal to your company will buy your product regardless of the price you offer.

Let’s explore our five effective strategies that will help you establish brand loyalty.

5 Strategies to Build Brand Loyalty

Building brand loyalty can often be challenging since it requires a lot of effort from a company’s team. However, it will bring positive word-of-mouth promotion, new customers, and significant revenues in the long run. Follow our five brand loyalty strategies to get started.

Design a testimonial page

If you want to become a leader in your industry and build authority and credibility, you need customers’ trust. Still, it takes a lot of time for customers to explore different products and choose one brand with the best quality. Consider creating a testimonial page and showcasing customers’ product reviews to help them decide.

Position yourself as an expert in the industry, maintain a positive reputation, and establish a unique tone of voice to communicate with your customers to earn their trust. Prove that your product is high-quality and your brand is reputable.

The example below demonstrates mHelpDesk’s customer testimonial page.

Provide the best customer service

To deliver an excellent customer service experience, you need to be friendly, polite, and respectful. Besides, your customer support reps should respond promptly. Good customer service needs a team of specialists who know a product well and are ready to listen to consumers’ problems and solve them. Build relationships with your clients: ask questions, explore social media profiles, or conduct a survey. These steps will allow you to provide customers with the support they need.

Respond to customers’ comments on your social media profiles

In order to simply ask a question about a product or service, customers often prefer to write a short message on social networks and receive a prompt reply. That’s why it’s crucial for you to track these messages and provide informative and clear answers as soon as possible. Apart from that, remember to monitor your company’s mentions on social media.

For example, Burger King answers customers’ questions on Twitter.

Develop loyalty programs

Many customers research available offers before purchasing. People look for flash sales, best deals, and reduced prices to save costs. That’s why you need to offer something more attractive, a loyalty program, for example. Give customers a special status when they comply with your conditions to encourage them to stay with your brand. You can provide them extra incentives, such as discounts, gifts, bonuses, and special offers.

For example, The North Face’s XPLR Pass loyalty program provides customers with exclusive access to limited-edition collections, rewards, gifts for birthdays, and a lot more.

Meet customers’ expectations

If you strive to become a favorite brand of hundreds or thousands of customers, you need to create quality products and keep your promises. Make sure to maintain a high standard of your products, customer service, and sales process and focus on your customers to make them stay with your brand for a long time.

It’s time to explore several metrics that will help you determine whether your brand loyalty strategy is effective.

4 Metrics to Measure Brand Loyalty

To have a clear picture of your brand loyalty, you need to pay attention to these metrics:

Let’s grab some inspiration from the examples below.

Brand Loyalty Examples

There are dozens of great brands with high brand loyalty that implement successful marketing strategies. Next, we’ll explore some of them.

GoPro

The technology company famous for its high-quality video cameras is widely perceived as one of the best in this industry. The brand strives to be closer to customers through its website that contains user-generated content. It provides visitors with a sense of ownership. GoPro also entices customers to join its huge following of fans by growing its social media presence. The company rewards its social media contest winners with great prizes.

The MINI Cooper

The brand presents its vehicles as different from others. In a world full of cars that become bigger, the company decided to make its products smaller in size.

Congrats, now you know why brand loyalty is crucial for the success of any business. Make use of the strategies mentioned in this article to establish brand loyalty and assess it.

How can companies create brand loyalty

How to build brand loyalty?

What is brand loyalty?

Brand loyalty is a feeling of trust and inner attachment that customers have toward your brand.

Successful brands have a crowd of fans not only in the countries they operate, but also abroad, where customers have access to what the company has to offer.

Why is it necessary to increase brand loyalty?

With the growth of customer loyalty, sales start to grow too. However, the number of clients is not as important as their quality – increase in the regularity of purchases and the amount of the average purchase. For example, if a client instead of one visit per month makes one visit every three weeks, such increase will automatically result in an impressive 25% growth of revenue.

Increasing brand awareness and customer loyalty is a long and laborious process. For successful results a complex solution is needed: you should evaluate the product you sell, market and competition, customers’ needs, and how you present your product.

5 steps to build brand loyalty

Rate Your Competitors

You can use Internet search or any other way that works for you. The information you collect about the market and competitors will not just tell you how many companies are operating in your market but also let you evaluate their strategies (e.g. online presence, promotions, communication channels, etc.). Highlight your strongest competitors; you can learn a lot from them.

Attention: Do not try to copy them. Think critically and creatively, find your own style of communication, the one that your customers like.

Rate Customers’ Attitude Toward Your Brand

Find out how your customers react to your brand. What do they think about it? Do they think it’s modern, edgy or traditional? What do they dislike and love about it? If your brand is a new one, you have a lot more freedom to shape its perception. A great service or product will impact that perception, however, marketing techniques such as promotions, advertisement and bonuses can help you shape customers’ attitude toward your brand in the best way.

Develop a Strategy to Increase Loyalty

No matter your product or service, this is the ideal path for your customers:

First, the customer finds out your brand exists and gets to know more about it; she slowly starts to like it, then she trusts it and later on goes on to try it. If the experience is positive, she will repeat the steps again and again, eventually building a special connection with your brand. She is now ready to share her experiences with her friends, relatives, and even the world, recommending it to whoever is willing to listen.

Repeated contact with your clients is the key – the more you do it, the more often they will visit your point of sale. You need to choose a method to contact them, be it SMS, push notifications, emails, posts on social networks, etc.

Customers love to be pampered! Plan special offers, gifts, bonus points, and discounts. Show them you care about them.

8 Ways to Build Brand Loyalty + Examples of Companies that Nailed It

Pushing for new sales is, no doubt, vital to the survival and long-term thriving of any business. But are we forgetting something in this feverish race to drive growth? Or rather, someone?

It’s easy to get so fixated on acquiring leads that the very bread and butter of your income fades into the background—your existing clients.

Building customer brand loyalty is all about widening your focus and making customer retention an active part of your marketing strategy.

A 2019 retail study conducted by Yes Marketing found that more than 50% of consumers are willing to pay more for a product if it’s from a brand they trust.

This confirms not only that it makes financial sense to continue investing in keeping your customers that you worked so hard to acquire in the first place, but also that they want you to.

In this article, we’ll lead you into the basics of brand loyalty in marketing, outline some basic strategies to building brand loyalty, and look at some companies that have understood the importance of brand equity and brand loyalty.

But to see what’s what, we first need to get our definitions straight:

What Is Brand Loyalty?

Brand loyalty is defined as the tendency of customers to choose the same brands instead of the competition for a prolonged period.

In other words, it’s basically your clients’ desire to stay your customer. Unlike customer loyalty, brand loyalty has to do less with the financial reasons and more with the client’s perception of a brand—from customer experience to the company’s reputation, and even its mission and values.

In more actionable terms, we’re talking about customer retention. Essentially, it’s a measure of your ability to keep customers coming back for more, and the sum of your efforts to make it happen—after having successfully converted your leads.

Why Is Brand Loyalty Important?

In simple terms, building brand loyalty is your warranty to keeping your business in motion and growing. It’s a stepping stone for continued progress.

It’s actually easier to put it the other way around—if your business can’t keep its customers, you’ll slip back to square one over and over again, sinking money into bringing in new clients just to stay afloat.

There are four main ways you can reap the benefits of a strong brand loyalty strategy:

Right off the bat, that’s a considerable improvement ROI-wise, but the same study concludes that returning customers are 50% more likely to try more products and spend, on average, 31% more than a newly converted lead.

That’s a welcome boost to another metric, customer lifetime value, which gets more and more relevant as your business scales.

While it’s crucial to keep an eye on costs, weirdly enough, your marketing machine runs by far the most efficiently where you intervene the least. Word of mouth is king—although it’s a double-edged sword. But once people start recommending your brand to each other, you’ve struck gold.

That’s not to say it’s all out of your control. The trick is to harness the power of social media and user-generated content to make it work for you and not against you.

A loyal customer base is like a backup generator for when the power goes out. By investing resources into nurturing your existing customers during the good times, what you’re really doing is building a nice little cushion for when things start looking south.

From a simple supply-line hiccup, through a sneaky new competitor rendering you second-best overnight, to a full-scale economic meltdown, there’s a lot that can send you back to the drawing board when you’re least prepared.

When the unexpected happens, it’s good to know that you’ve proven your worth, and your brand is still number one for your loyal customers.

Today, more so than ever, as little as a bad review can stir up a lot of controversies and force you to spend time doing damage control instead of focusing on growth. That’s especially true if you don’t have a critical mass of positive customer journeys to back you up.

Loyal clients are not only more skeptical when they see a bad review themselves, but given there’s enough of them, they can also act as a counterweight in ratings and a buffer for when your reputation suffers a blow.

How to Build Brand Loyalty

By now, it shouldn’t be a question whether the hard work of keeping your existing clients happy is worth it or not.

The know-how is where it gets interesting, especially because this part can be very industry-specific, and there’s always a lot of room for creativity.

There are a few essential areas and channels that you should devote attention to, regardless of your domain, your market position, or the demographic you’re targeting.

1. Up your customer service game

Increasing brand loyalty is all about what happens after the sale. Consistent quality and reliable customer service are costly, but they’re the most influential drivers of brand loyalty.

And it’s a classic case of what goes around comes around. Treat your customers with respect, and they’ll respect you for it.

In the following example, both the brand and the retailer answered an issue raised by their customer on Twitter. Zappos is one of the most popular companies in the world known for its excellent customer service.

2. Build your authority on trust

This is a tricky one because trust, just like in a friendship, takes time and exceptional circumstances to develop, and both are luxuries you can’t really afford most of the time.

Positioning yourself as an expert in your field, taking reputation management seriously, and even tweaking the tone of voice in which your brand communicates with your prospects and existing clients can go a long way in earning their trust.

Sometimes to prove you’re trustworthy to your potential customers, you may need the help of your past ones.

Create a testimonial page and showcase their opinions on your product or service and how they benefited from them. Testimonials will encourage others to trust your company, as well.

3. Tear down the walls with social media

How disappointed and desperate would a consumer need to be to grab pen and paper, or even just to write a complaint in an email?

I know I imagine quite a horrible scene where there’s not much left that can undo the harm anyway.

But how about social media posts? A quick instant message or comment takes seconds to write, and ideally, not much more to get an answer. The engagement is more than worth it—it actually ties into both of the points above.

A great example of social media engagement is Wendy’s Twitter profile. Whenever someone mentions them, they’ll get back with a witty reply, making anyone want to engage in a conversation with them.

4. Get their attention with an offer

Regardless of the phase of the customer journey, offers are as great to hook existing customers as they are to attract new ones.

However, rewarding customer loyalty explicitly (whether it’s in the shape of a coupon, a limited time offer, or any other incentive), this offers an exclusive experience to your customers while also giving your sales a potential boost.

For example, GoPro started a contest on Instagram, and they are offering prizes to the winners consisting of GoPro products. This way, they encourage their customers to actively engage with the brand and, in the end, reward them for that.

5. Use loyalty programs

Few people can sincerely claim their loyalty to a specific brand, and it’s somehow understandable. Everyone does their research online before purchasing something, and they’ll always stumble upon flash sales, which encourage easily changeable customer behavior.

To get those customers out of a continuously flash sale loop, attract them into your website with an offer they can’t ignore and start building a loyalty strategy based on rewards.

Consider giving special status to your customers and other non-monetary reasons to make them come back.

In other words, make people change their opinion on what true value means.

An excellent example of this practice is Sephora’s Beauty Insider rewards program, which is extremely popular. Customers earn points for each purchase, and they can later choose how to spend those points.

We all know Sephora doesn’t sell the cheapest products, but this program, based on points, helps customers redeem gift cards or discounts, encouraging them to stay loyal to the brand.

6. Build a community

Build a community, they said, and you’ll never have to struggle again. It’s true. Community is an extension of advocacy, and it’s the perfect place to make people loyal to your brand.

Since the majority of people shop online, you should build an online community. Once you know your audience’s expectations, create an online group, and bring those people together. Make them the first ones to hear about your brand’s novelties and offers.

Of course, a community can be built in other ways too. A simple hashtag will help you interact faster with your followers. The power of a hashtag can be massive. Any campaign can start with one, and all the customers will have a sense of belonging just by using the hashtag.

At one point, the community will turn into brand loyalty, and you’ll discover this when you’ll see your followers tagging you without starting a specific campaign.

7. Make sure your brand is consistent

Consistency is a crucial element in building loyalty. Customers will form a particular perception of your brand and want to feel it every time they interact with it.

So, brand consistency comes in the form of an excellent experience to be continuously delivered to your customers.

We can also talk about visual consistency. Try to maintain the same high-quality in your logo and design elements on all devices.

Visual consistency also comes in the same type of design with which your customers got used to. Ideally, you should change your visual branding elements only when you feel they don’t align with your brand identity anymore.

An excellent example of a loved brand, with an impeccable corporate reputation that also maintained its consistency and its customers happy, is Lego.

8. Deliver value through high-quality products/services

If you want to win loyal customers, you must understand they need a loyal brand in return. To secure your way of becoming their brand of choice, deliver on everything you have promised, and exceed their expectations.

Maintain a high-quality standard in everything you do. Get to know your customers’ expectations and always focus on them.

By continually being reliable with the best quality products or services, your customers won’t feel the need to go for something else.

Rocking our world since the ’40s, Fender guitars remained high-quality throughout the years, and, in return, many famous artists relied on them.

4 Main Types of Loyalty that Steers Customers to your Brand

We tend to throw the term around as if it only means one thing and one thing only.

In reality, though, there are many different levels of brand loyalty. It’s a very malleable concept that, on one hand, differs from one individual to another, but even the same person’s loyalty can change shapes depending on the situation.

Don’t let this scare you, though—it’s not like fingerprints. We can and will classify them into four easily recognizable types of brand loyalty, with examples of brands that are doing it right.

1. Price-loyalty

A bargain deal is hard to say no to the first time, let alone the second time, the third, and so on. It has one thing in mind when comparing offers: value for money.

This kind of brand loyalty, however, is only as long-lived as your offering. Once the competition drops their price below yours, they’ll move on without so much as a blink.

That said, this loose attachment is in your favor when it comes to increasing your market share. This consumer segment is the first to engage with a new product on the market, especially if it’s being offered at an unbeatable price. Once you have their attention, they’ll quickly become truly loyal customers if you play your cards right.

2. Benefits-loyalty

While there’s an overlap with the previous brand loyalty type, the emotion behind it all is very different. It’s true—promotions, discounts, and the likes do carry that all-important financial aspect, but they’re not the only way to attract this customer type.

They may only choose your product over the competition because it makes financial sense. Still, an exclusive benefits program like a membership, a loyalty card, or a referral bonus may turn them into your number-one fans.

Example: JetBlue Airways

JetBlue’s frequent flyer program, TrueBlue, is a classic example and just one of the many similar loyalty programs used by airlines. It offers travelers points for every dollar they spend that may even add up to a free flight in the future.

3. Convenience-loyalty

These types of customers will buy from you because it’s simply more convenient for them. Life is hard enough on its own, so if you can make your customer experience just a little bit smoother than your competitors’, congrats—you’ve just got yourself a devoted fan.

Of course, no one says no to good bang for the buck, but this category is not particularly price-sensitive. A more eco-friendly packaging, a friendlier customer service, or supporting a cause close to their hearts can earn you their loyalty, even if yours is not necessarily the cheapest solution on the market.

Whether you like Starbucks coffee or not, we can agree that they make it really easy to buy. The mobile app and its Order & Pay feature, which shows you your previous orders gives you pairing suggestions, and even guesses where you’d like to pick it up, has radically transformed the way you get your morning joe.

4. Satisfaction-loyalty

Nothing beats good old-fashioned customer satisfaction, the ultimate “loyalizer.” People who are quite merely happy with the overall experience will come back for more without any extra incentives. Providing a high-quality service earns you this type of loyalty with no extra effort on your part.

Careful, though, because it’s fragile, and it’s just as easy to lose their trust as it was to gain it.

These customers will have no problem going to the competition if they have something better to offer, and it will probably be the first thing they do once you make a mistake. Consistency is the name of the game in both acquiring and keeping this kind of customer.

Ever since the early days, Apple has built computers and gadgets designed around their customers’ needs. Feedback and engaging in conversations with consumers is a large part of their product development routine. As a result, they’ve managed to build a worldwide community of satisfied, loyal customers.

Conclusion

The importance of customer retention and whether it falls strictly under marketing or it’s a shared responsibility between multiple departments depends on a complex constellation of business decisions and the industry you’re in.

One thing is universal, though—investing resources towards brand loyalty always pays off. It means you can capitalize on your lead capturing and nurturing efforts for a longer time, thus stabilizing your revenue stream and allowing yourself to continue growing.

Remember, however, that a returning client isn’t necessarily a loyal customer. It might only mean your current offer is a cheaper or more convenient offering, and they’ll turn to the competition once you lose that certain edge.

True brand loyalty is built on positive emotions. Earn your clients’ trust, offer them the comfort they’re seeking, communicate in a relatable tone, and don’t lose sight of the key to brand loyalty in any industry and niche: customer satisfaction.

The Ultimate Guide to Brand Loyalty

It’s important to keep your customers happy.

Allow us to illustrate with a few brand loyalty statistics:

To recap: You should definitely be investing in building brand loyalty, whether it’s through a full-fledged customer loyalty program or using strategies like amazing customer service and optimized customer experiences.

In this article, we’ll go over the importance of brand loyalty, benefits and examples, and some steps and tools for building brand loyalty for your business.

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What Is Brand Loyalty?

By definition, brand loyalty is “the tendency of some consumers to continue buying the same brand of goods rather than competing brands.”

Essentially, it’s your customer’s desire to stay your customer. Viewed from your end of the business, it’s customer retention – your ability to keep customers coming back in the long run.

Brand loyalty can be driven by several factors.

Maybe your products have unbeatable quality. Maybe your customer service is impeccable, leaving them with a smile every time they interact with you. Maybe you closely align with their beliefs and values to the point that they see your brand as an extension of themselves.

But remember: Just because a customer makes more than one purchase doesn’t necessarily mean they’re loyal. You might just have a cheaper or more convenient offering, which can easily be scooped up by a competitor.

The key difference is that brand loyalty is deeply rooted in positive emotions – trust, comfort, relatability, satisfaction, and others that make you their No. 1.

Why Is Brand Loyalty Important?

To put it frankly, building brand loyalty is a guaranteed path to keeping your business afloat and thriving.

If you’re not able to retain your customers, you’re going to have to perpetually sink money into marketing and advertising techniques to find new ones.

So, why is brand loyalty important? It gives your business the beautiful gift of these benefits:

Benefits of Brand Loyalty

Here are just a few of the many benefits of brand loyalty.

If enough of your customers are coming back on their own, you can theoretically earn the same amount of revenue without having to spend an extra dime on marketing.

So, if you’re spending less and earning more, voila – higher profits.

When customers love you, it creates a ripple effect.

Ultimately, this goodwill and positive word of mouth makes you more popular and easy to recognize in your niche. This, in turn, makes it easier for you to convert prospects into new customers – whether it’s successful referrals from current customers or people who find your brand in other ways.

There are oh so many things that can go wrong while you’re quietly minding your own business (pun intended).

Here are a few examples of how conditions in your market can change and the potential importance of brand loyalty in protecting you from the aftershock:

Have you ever heard or seen something bad about a company you love? What about a company you’re ambivalent about?

Chances are, if you’re devoted to a brand, bad reviews and other negative reputation impactors will have less of an influence on your decision to stay with them. If what you see doesn’t align with your own experiences, it automatically has less clout.

That’s part of why building brand loyalty can be so beneficial. It takes a lot more than just a bad review to push those customers away – and trust us, you’re going to get at least a couple of bad reviews.

That’s just the way the consumerism cookie crumbles.

So, now that you know the importance of brand loyalty, let’s dip our toes into how you can build it.

How to Create a Brand Loyalty Program

One of the best brand loyalty strategies is to create a brand loyalty program, also called a customer loyalty program.

You’ve seen them around – sign up with a brand to receive points, extra discounts, and other rewards when you make certain purchases, refer a friend, or otherwise engage with a brand.

Customer loyalty programs are so effective because they make your customers feel special. Also, who doesn’t love a good deal or free perks?

Here are a few types of brand loyalty programs and examples of companies that use them well.

Points-Based Brand Loyalty Programs

True to the name, these brand loyalty programs award you points for certain actions, which you can then redeem for rewards.

Customers can then redeem their points for all kinds of goodies, like makeup, skincare products, and even exceptional rewards for true VIPs, like facials, a beauty benefit, or a house call to touch up your brows.

Tiered Brand Loyalty Programs

Tiered brand loyalty programs are typically points-based, too, but they also divide members into tiers based on their participation and engagement. The higher the tier a customer is in, the more perks they get.

SheFit does this beautifully, with a program that earns “crowns” (or fancy-looking points) for actions like signing up, sharing or following on Facebook and Instagram, and celebrating their birthday, in addition to crowns per dollar spent.

The program has four tiers, each offering special perks that compound on each other. For example, someone in the “VIP She” tier gets 100 crowns for sharing on Facebook, whereas the lower tiers get only 50.

Other high-tier perks include early access to sales, sneak peeks at new products, an annual gift, and even being featured in the company’s social media promotions and product shoots.

Those are some serious perks.

VIP Brand Loyalty Programs

A VIP brand loyalty program takes the tiers to a whole new level by offering outstanding perks for the highest tiers.

These programs have a clever strategy of identifying and absolutely pampering their most loyal customers.

The InCircle program has five circles (or tiers). But here’s the cool part: Starting at Circle Three, customers are mailed a physical card called The Perk Card.

This card gets them unique benefits like in-store dining, valet parking, alterations, salons, and upkeep of valuable items like jewelry, handbags, and shoes.

As you can see, Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman really know their target audience – they know that they own luxury items that need special attention like furs and high-quality jewelry, and they use this as leverage to become more involved in their customers’ lives.

While a dedicated program can work wonders for building brand loyalty, it’s not the only way.

How to Build Brand Loyalty: 3 Additional Tips

There are several loyalty strategies that you can build into every part of your brand strategy and marketing tactics. We take a look at a few actionable ones below.

1. Shift Your Customer Service Into High Gear

This is a no brainer. Just one positive interaction can make a customer’s fears and doubts over doing business with you slip away. In its place, you can gain a lasting appreciation and word of mouth that generates referrals for your brand.

However, canned responses aren’t going to win you any brownie points. If you want to win customers over, you’re going to need to take things up a notch. You can do this by:

2. Personalize the Customer Experience

Another great way to build customer loyalty is to make your customers feel like you not only understand their needs, but also care about them on an individual level. This can be done with the help of personalization.

The above email is simple enough to replicate in your own branding, and it makes the customer feel like they’re your one and only audience.

3. Leverage User-Generated Content

Sharing UGC (user-generated content) in the shape of customer success stories, testimonials, reviews and other content is a great way to increase brand loyalty. Instagram is a key place for finding customer images and brand mentions that you can boast about to the rest of your fans.

For instance, brands such as Luxy Hair regularly share and repost content that talks about the satisfactory experience their product or service delivered from their customers’ Instagram profiles.

Simply put, user-generated content allows you to acknowledge your existing customers while also impressing new ones. So, dig into your social media profiles to find UGC that you can use to build and improve brand loyalty.

Brand Loyalty Tools and Apps

Smile: Rewards & Loyalty

Smile.io lets you create three programs: a loyalty points program, referral program, and VIP program. You can reward your customers in ten-plus ways, like account registrations, purchases, referrals, social shares, and more.

If you’re hesitant about making the investment, you can customize your programs using the free version to take it for a test run.

Rewards and Referrals by Swell

Used by some of the biggest Shopify stores, Swell’s app lets you use VIP tiers and gamification techniques to give your customers a sense of exclusivity and ultimately garner more engagement.

Rise.ai – Gift Cards & Loyalty

This app from Rise.ai focuses on using gift cards and store credit for building brand loyalty. Customers can send branded vouchers and gift cards via email and instant message, and they’re usable across multiple stores.

You can send bulk gift card campaigns and offer credit, loyalty points, and discounts to incentivize purchases.

Marsello Marketing Automation

The app’s loyalty program automatically rewards loyalty points to your customers based on factors like spend, product reviews, referrals, social media engagement, and more.

Meet and Exceed Your Goals With Brand Loyalty

Having an online store – especially a dropshipping store – isn’t getting any less competitive.

To plow their competition and secure their share of the market in the long run, savvy brands are building brand loyalty strategies into virtually every aspect of their businesses.

From targeted brand loyalty programs to better customer service to more personalized experiences, brand loyalty gives your company a highly significant boost. Not to mention, you’ll also have a much better chance of meeting and sprinting past your business goals.

What types of brand loyalty are you incorporating into your business model? Let us know in the comments below.

How to build brand loyalty

Building brand loyalty isn’t easy, but it’s totally worth it in the long run.

What real brand loyalty looks like. Illustration by Vladanland.

When you’re building a brand, getting customers is essential, but it’s really just the first piece of the puzzle. If you want your business to thrive, it’s not enough to just get customers—you need to keep those customers coming back for more.

Brand loyalty is a huge part of building a brand that’s sustainable in the long-term. But what is brand loyalty? Why is it so important? And how can you build brand loyalty and transform one-time customers into lifelong brand enthusiasts? Keep reading to find out.

What is brand loyalty?
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Brand loyalty is the tendency for a customer to buy from a specific brand instead of going to other options on the market. It’s a sense of trust and loyalty to a particular brand that can make a huge difference in the success of your business.

Why is brand loyalty so important?

It is, of course, important to focus on introducing new customers to your brand. But if those customers make a one-time purchase and then drop off the face of the earth (or the internet), they’re not going to have a huge impact on your bottom line.

Icon design by DreamMaster

But if you focus on building brand loyalty, those customers will continue to come back, engaging with your brand and driving profits for years to come. Plus, they will probably recommend you to their friends, which is crucial.

Bottom line: brand loyalty is a game changer for your business. Now, let’s dive into how to create that sense of customer loyalty for your brand.

How to build brand loyalty in 5 steps:

1. Make quality non-negotiable

The truth is, it doesn’t matter if you have a buzzworthy product or service. The market is full of companies with products or services just as buzzworthy as yours. If you want to break through the clutter, make sure that buzz lasts and your customers stay loyal to you in the long-term, you need to live up to your promises. Exceed their expectations and keep showing them that you’re a brand worth doing business with. Making quality a non-negotiable is a good way to do it.

Delivering quality needs to be non-negotiable. Logo by martinem design

New brands launch every day, so putting quality at the top of your priority list is a way to not only add value to your customers, but to stay relevant in an increasingly saturated marketplace.

If you can establish yourself as a company that maintains quality across the board—whether you’re talking about product quality, the quality of your customer communications, or the quality of your ecommerce technology—you can break through the clutter of competitors who don’t provide that kind of quality and consistency and inspire the kind of brand loyalty that will keep your customers coming back for years to come.

For example, investing in quality control testing for your products might cost some extra time and budget on the back end—but when your customers realize your products are built to last, they’ll be inspired to keep shopping.

You might have to spend longer training your support staff on how to deal with customer issues, but when your customers are blown away by the ease of your support process, they’re going to keep coming back and buying your products.

The point is, quality can mean the difference between a flash-in-the-pan brand and the kind of brand that inspires customer loyalty for a lifetime. Make sure you’re the latter.

2. Develop a strong “why”

Ideally, people want to do business with brands they can stand behind—and the reason customers will be willing to stand behind you and your brand boils down to your why.

Develop a strong “why”. Question mark shaped logo design by Ocelittle.

Having a strong why is a must to break apart from the competition and forge an authentic connection with your ideal customers—and develop the kind of brand loyalty that makes them customers for life.

Put some real time and effort into defining your brand mission values. Start with key questions: why are you in business? What do you stand for? What is your authentic identity as a brand—and how do you want that brand identity to come across in the marketplace?

When your customers see your authenticity, it helps to deepen the trust between consumer and company. And when your mission and values align with theirs in an authentic way, it can inspire the kind of loyalty that turns one-time customers into lifelong brand evangelists.

So, in a nutshell, what you do as a brand is important—but when you’re talking about creating brand loyalty, why you do it is even more important.

3. Make your branding consistent

Brand loyalty starts with trust. If your customers aren’t having a consistent experience of your brand, that trust isn’t going to develop—and neither is brand loyalty.

An attractive and consistent brand design by nnorth

Your customers should have a consistent experience wherever they encounter your brand, whether they’re looking at your website, scrolling through your social media feed or interacting with your team at a live event. Basically, consistency is a way to build trust—and trust is the key to brand loyalty.

Or, in other words: consistency = trust = brand loyalty

Take the time to develop your brand identity, define who you are as a brand, and how you want to communicate that brand to your customers—and make sure you replicate that experience across every platform where they might interact with your brand.

So, for example, if you decide you want to go with an edgy brand voice, that edginess should be apparent in your web copy, your email and your social media posts. If you decide you want to go with a softer brand color palette, you should keep that palette consistent across print, web and other branding elements.

The more consistent and authentic you are as a brand, the more your customers will trust you—and the more loyalty you’ll foster as a result.

4. Create an unparalleled customer service experience

Your customers initially made a purchase with your brand because of the products or services you offer. But while having a great product or service will lure them in, it’s not enough to keep them there.

Offering stellar customer service is one of the biggest value adds you can deliver for your customers.

When your customers trust that the process of doing business with you will be easy, convenient and straightforward—whether that’s buying a product from your website, making a return or interacting with your customer service team—they’re going to be more likely to continue doing business with you in the future.

Become a support ninja. Logo design by Vi.

The good news? So many companies fail to focus on customer service that standing out and making a real impact on your customers doesn’t take much. If you want to create an unforgettable customer service experience for your customers (and drive brand loyalty in the process), here are a few tips to help you get started:

5. Give your customers incentive to keep coming back

A lot of brands put a crazy amount of time and effort into converting their prospects into customers—and then completely drop the ball once those customers have made a purchase.

Loyal customers will come back time and time again. Logo design by hummingbird.

If you want to foster brand loyalty, you need to put as much time and effort into taking care of your existing customers as you do getting new customers in the doors.

Things like existing customer discounts, exclusive events and early access to sales or product launches are a great way to add value and show your customers you appreciate their business.

When your customers feel valued and taken care of, they’re also going to be more loyal. They are more likely to recommend you to their friends and continue doing business with you over the long-term.

Get out there and inspire the kind of loyalty your brand deserves
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Creating brand loyalty with your customers is key to taking your business to the next level. Now that you know exactly how to create that sense of loyalty, all that’s left to do is get out there, connect with your customers and inspire the kind of loyalty your brand deserves.