A study showed that there is a 60-70% probability of selling to an existing customer, whereas there’s just a 5-20% probability of selling to a prospective customer. That may help you appreciate the subject of brand loyalty and prioritize it in your business strategy.
The loyalty of your customers to your brand is as golden as it sounds! The last thing you may want is for your customers to make their first purchase, switch to another brand, and never return.
It is a very satisfying feeling to see that your customers are very willing to keep connecting with your brand and making purchases.
You rest assured that you’ve improved your customers’ lifetime value and have a constant influx of revenue. It also goes further to bring you, new customers, as satisfied customers are very likely to advertise your product or service to others.
As a matter of fact, you are close to your brand loyalty dreams. Believe it! But your closeness is determined by how willing you are to take certain strategic actions that will be shared below.
But first, let us look at various ways to evaluate brand loyalty to enable you to take more informed actions to improve your business’s brand loyalty.
Metrics for Brand Loyalty
Photo Credit: olm26250 on istockphoto.com
Brand loyalty is more far-reaching than just the number of customers engaged with and consistently buying from you.
Knowing just the numerical strength of your most responsive, committed, and most consistent customers is basic. It is great, but it doesn’t give you a wholesome insight into your customer loyalty.
In the very competitive market, customers’ attitude and behavior towards the brand, perception, word of mouth, online activities, and various other relevant actions taken in favor of your brand all constitute brand loyalty.
Different metrics can be used to evaluate your brand or customer loyalty in greater detail, and we are going to be looking at some of the most important of them in detail below:
Customer Retention Rate
This measures the brand’s or business’s ability to retain customers. It could also be called repeat purchase rate, reorder rate, or repeat customer rate and can be calculated by dividing the sum of customers retained by the total number of customers in a given period.
Customer Acquisition Rate
The customer acquisition rate measures the percentage of new customers to a brand within a certain period.
CPE (Customer Price Elasticity)
The customer price elasticity measures how much loyal customers adapt to price changes. It captures the likelihood of loyal customers to buy products whose price has increased and their attitude towards price increases.
Purchase frequency
The Purchase Frequency measures how frequently the average buyer makes a purchase. The purchase frequency can be calculated by dividing the sum of all orders per annum by the number of unique customers within the period.
Customer lifetime value
Your customer lifetime value measures how valuable a customer is to your brand, looking at their relationship with you generally. In essence, It tells you how much each customer is worth to your brand.
Customer Attrition Rate
This metric identifies the number of customers lost over a given period as a percentage of the total number of customers within the same period.
Churn rate
The churn rate is the percentage of customers that opt out of your product or service or don’t renew their subscriptions, including those using your mobile app.
Having seen some of the most important brand loyalty metrics, let’s jump right in into ways to elevate your brand loyalty:
1.Maximize Your Branding
Photo Credit: tumsasedgars on istockphoto.com
The exterior attractiveness of your product can help you attract and retain your dream number of customers. A customer will often base their engagement with a brand on sentiments, and you need a thoughtful and strategic design to achieve loyalty:
Here are some ways through which you can leverage your branding to garner an interesting number of loyal customers.
-
Use Your Logo Color to Tell Your Brand’s Story and Convey Your Message
Color psychology experts say color impacts general human behavior, and it’s pretty much the same when it comes to branding.
The right color can project your brand story and personality, help you command reciprocal action from customers, and help you make your most desired impressions on them. It helps you express the mood or role you want your brand to evoke.
For instance: green is a more versatile color option with an ability to inspire greater engagement from a cultural basis.
It works very well for brands seeking to create a more natural impression on its customers, such as herbal brands and brands that seek to exude an eco-friendly aura.
Now, it can be better understood why girly brands or female product brands mostly have a touch of pink. It can give your brand a contemporary look of luxury and youth.
Black and grey colors help you to project a modern, slick, and luxurious look. Their simplicity often makes them mysterious, and luxury brands usually capitalize on that trait, whereas white is a more universal color that is almost always blended with other colors.
The colors on your logo can make your customers feel more passionate, emotional, and active about your brand. That’s why you may need to work with a professional or gather enough knowledge to create the best color combination for your logotype to foster loyalty.
-
Integrate Your Branding Into Your Website and Social Media Channels
Your landing pages and home pages must contain relevant images that reflect the values and personality you want people to connect with your brand.
Ensure that your contact information and brand description across all your social media channels are uniform and up to date.
In addition, all pieces of content and images on your intros, such as profile images and cover photos, must be up to date and consistent with your brand.
2. Invest More in Your Product Packaging. It pays!
Packaging encourages brand loyalty. 40% of buyers say they would be somehow more likely or much more likely to buy from a retailer again if a product they ordered online comes in a gift-like or premium package.
There’s so much competition in the market. Customers have too many options out there, and it’s very crucial to prioritize how your packaging plays out before your customers and how effective it can be in attracting, engaging, and retaining them.
Eye-tracking studies reveal that, on average, consumers read only seven words in a whole shopping outing. That shows how impatient and instinctive consumers can be—buying only based on shape, color, and familiarity with the eCommerce store or location.
Most times, it may be wrong for brand owners to completely predicate their designs on consumers’ ability to make rational, informed decisions.
Seeing that the vast majority of your customers are impatient, so to speak, a very smart way to engage them is to summarize most of the information a more cerebral and rational clientele would have taken time to analyze on the packaging.
Here are some ways to use your packaging to spark up customer participation and improve loyalty:
-
Eco-Friendly Packaging
An Accenture survey showed that half of the consumers said they’d pay more money for eco-friendly products designed to be recycled or reused—which is why eco-friendly packaging is among the best ways to create a loyal customer base.
It is no more just about your product. Customers want to see how you are going about packaging—whether it’s healthy for them and the environment generally.
The importance of sustainable packaging explains why paper and paperboard is the most dominant packaging material with luxury brands. It not only gives customers a feel of luxury, but it is also durable and allows you to be more flexible with your designs.
Plastic packaging is rapidly getting replaced by biodegradable alternatives as the days go by. You may like to join the bandwagon! Go for packaging with more natural, reusable, and recyclable options, as they are the majority’s choice.
Natural fiber-based materials, paper, and minimal use of recyclable plastics can help you be more sustainable in your packaging and retain the surging number of pro-sustainability customers.
-
Custom Packaging
Custom packaging is a relatively cheaper way of packaging your products while having ample branding opportunities.
Why should your customers ditch thousands or millions of other brands and be loyal to yours? What makes your brand special? What solution can your product provide? Relevant branding on custom packaging helps you answer all these questions and more in the simplest way.
Also, it can take your brand higher up the ranks as a highly professional and reputable entity, thereby improving customers’ trust in the brand.
Good custom packaging can help you treat your customers to a great unboxing experience, excellently enhance sales, and improve brand loyalty.
In today’s commerce industry, you need to give your customers commensurate value for their money, or at least make them feel they are getting more than they ordered. This can stimulate them to want to come back again.
High-quality, well-designed, custom packaging, aside from improving perceived value for the product, can also be well received as a bonus from your customers.
Custom packaging also offers you many options to dazzle your customers with custom thank you cards, hand-written notes, gifts, and sample products.
Your customers are human; they aren’t space robots! They need those things because no matter how small or irrelevant you may think they are, they are the things that evoke customer sentiments and foster brand loyalty when done right.
3. Interact and Connect With Your Customers
One of the easiest ways to increase your brand’s attrition rate, i.e., the rate at which your customers leave your brand per period, is to not engage them with relevant content after their purchase with relevant content and post-purchase assistance.
Below are ways to properly engage your customers and grow a loyal fan and customer base:
-
Connect and Engage on Social Media With Relevant Up-to-date Content
Share your brand’s latest and most exciting developments on your social media channels so that customers and prospects can be optimistic about it and want to commit their loyalty to it.
You can flaunt new products, discounts, campaigns, special deals, and other customer programs on your social media channels. It helps you spark up your relationship with customers by making it more conversational.
Carry out surveys, post relevant branded memes if possible, listen to what they are saying and reply to as many comments as you can.
Customers naturally become more loyal when brands show that they care for them outside the business setting. You can use bots or some of the most specialized technologies to gather their data and give them a “happy word” on their special days like anniversaries, etc.
-
Beef Up Your Customer Service
You need to keep your customer service alive and active to command great brand loyalty. A 2021 survey showed that up to 86% of customers would pay more for great customer service.
And, if that didn’t convince you enough, customers are likely to make repeated purchases with companies that provide excellent customer service.
Study your customers to see through what channels they best communicate. Fortify your customer service team with enough agents and tools to provide prompt and relevant support to customers.
4. Make Buying Easy For Customers
A Walker study proposed that customer experience will beat price and product as the major brand differentiator at the end of 2020.
Bad experiences are rapidly driving customers away, and you may not get many chances to get it right, especially as 32% of consumers say they’ll leave a brand they love after their first bad experience.
Mobile experience is a big thing, and 57% of customers would not recommend you if you have a poorly designed website on mobile. Optimize your checkout process and make the navigation on your site easy and slick.
Also, consider creating a more comprehensive payment system to accommodate customers that may want to use less traditional payment options.
Consumers all over the world have begun to value speed more than ever—whether in delivery, service, etc. Speed up your processes and improve convenience for your customers so that they can see your brand as trustworthy.
5. Reward Your Customers
Photo Credit: Leylaynr on istockphoto.com
According to the CMO Council, 54% of consumers consider stopping shopping with retail brands that don’t give them relevant coupons and content. What more can be expected when a good 57.4% of consumers participate in loyalty programs to save money?
Your customers are your business! That’s why it will greatly pay off to appreciate them with strategic rewards here and there as much as you can.
Depending on your business model, you can create a loyalty program and give points—or take a chip or more off product prices—to put a smile on your customers’ faces.
You can also go a step further and make it more fun by organizing treasure hunts on your website and giving cash prizes to the winners. Besides increasing your web traffic, this will also produce more optimistic, enthusiastic, and most especially, loyal customers.
Conclusion
The various factors that affect brand loyalty have changed a lot, especially within the past few decades. The tips above have not just been proven to elevate brand loyalty, but if well applied, they can also help your brand to stand out amidst the intense competition in the business world.
