6 Guaranteed Ways to Build Customer Loyalty

Customer loyalty is a key driver of business growth, as repeat customers are generally the most predictable source of revenue and have a lower cost of sales than net new customers. Therefore, creating an effective strategy that attracts and helps retain existing customers is a top priority for organisations. Creating and implementing an effective customer loyalty strategy involves communicating and understanding customer needs.

What is customer loyalty and why is it important?

Loyal customers have become accustomed to doing business with selected brands and seeking them out even when their competition offers a similar product at a reduced price. Customer loyalty therefore offers many benefits, such as business recommendations from satisfied and loyal customers, positive customer feedback on social media sites, insight into customer purchasing behaviour, more targeted marketing to existing customers, and a better understanding of customer needs.

How can you strengthen the loyalty of your customers?

Building customer loyalty requires understanding several key areas that can help ensure a business has an effective customer loyalty strategy. This strategy can help retain customers and turn potential customers into satisfied and loyal customers. To help you achieve these goals, we’ve found six ways to create customer loyalty for your business.

1. Stay in touch with customers through multiple channels

Notify existing customers of new products, promotions, and any other relevant information that affects the products or services the customer is generally looking for from that company. Tools like HubSpot and Marketo support multi-channel communication and can maintain contact with potential and established customers within the platform. These marketing automation tools natively support a variety of digital communication methods or integrate with popular email, SMS, and social media tools.

These messages can also serve to remind customers of the company’s core values ​​on topics such as climate change, recyclable materials, and supporting non-profit organisations.

2. Show that you know the customer well

Data sets such as sales data and customer demographics, and provide insight into general customer behaviour, can be used to direct the delivery of timely promotions and product recommendations based on the statistical likelihood that customers will accept that direction.

Big data and artificial intelligence have provided a huge boost in this area, supporting initiatives that help provide purchase predictions based on unique customer characteristics.

3. Capture and leverage customer feedback

Organisations need to be able to capture and act on feedback from their existing customers. Today’s many top tools like Salesforce, Microsoft CRM, and others are great ways to collect and centralise customer feedback from social media posts, customer calls, email surveys, phone surveys, or suggestion boxes. By analysing this feedback and creating a strategic plan, companies can better understand what they need to adjust to retain these customers.

A company must emphasise its ability to evolve with the market and meet customer needs in order to maintain customer engagement.

4. Show appreciation with a loyalty program

While customers may not save huge amounts of money by participating in a loyalty program, even small rewards can show how much a company values ​​its customers. Providing customer-only discounts or promotions is an easy way to encourage those customers to keep coming back. These programs also give the company the means to gather actionable data, such as identifying the most valuable customers and those at risk of taking business elsewhere. In addition, a loyalty program can motivate repeat visits as the customer wants to achieve a certain goal or discount. For this to work, the company needs to provide an adequate and appropriate incentive.

Several platforms allow businesses to access a loyalty program, including LoyaltyLion, Qualtrics Customer XM, TapMango, and Salesforce Experience Cloud.

5. Stay relevant to the customer

A company must emphasise its ability to evolve with the market and meet customer needs in order to maintain customer engagement. Products don’t necessarily need dramatic changes, but they do need enough to show that the company is keeping up with current events and customer needs. By being open and honest about these changes and why they happened, you can encourage positivity as customers consider their purchasing options.

6. Know your numbers and measure them often

Simply creating a loyalty program is not enough to increase revenue or maintain loyal customer support. The company must also measure and analyse key data points to assess its performance and correct course if necessary. These key measures are as follows:

• customer satisfaction ratings or net promoter ratings;
• customer lifetime value (annual revenue per customer multiplied by the average number of years with the customer, minus customer acquisition costs);
• the ratio of customers who made a repeat purchase in a year (the number of repeat customers in an annual period divided by the total number of customers in that year or period);
• annual revenue generated by loyal and repeat customers compared to other customers;
• revenue based on loyalty level – if there are different levels of membership;
• number of purchases related to multi-customer promotions.

Customer engagement and retention should be a top priority for any organisation. One of the best ways to do this is through a loyalty program that rewards returning customers and attracts new customers to the business. However, the best loyalty programs require the right tools to collect and analyse data insights, marketing and sales tools to implement those insights, and a strategy to bring it all together.