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.

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:

• reduced expenditures on customer retention;
• word-of-mouth promotion;
• advantages over competitors;
• new leads and customers;
• increased brand value;
• customers who stay with a company for a long time;
• brand recognition;
• positive associations and emotions.

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.

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:

• net promoter score (in a survey, ask customers how likely they are to recommend your brand to their friends);
• repurchase ratio (the metric gives you an understanding of the number of customers who come back to repeat their purchase);
• upsell ratio (the metric gives you a clear picture of customers who buy your new products and demonstrate trust in your company);
• customer lifetime value (the metric helps determine how much money a company can earn during the entire relationship with a customer).

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.