How to Build Brand Loyalty

Understanding how to build brand loyalty could mean the difference between customers shopping with you once or time after time. Nurture enough allegiance, and your customers could even become brand advocates, publicly sharing their positive experiences and encouraging others to visit your website. Brand loyalty benefits every business and forms a key aspect of digital marketing, but why is it important and how is it built? In this article, we cover our top ten tips for creating brand loyalty.

Brand loyalty is when customers repeatedly purchase from the same brand despite competitors offering similar products or services at similar or lower prices. This occurs because there is an emotional connection between a customer and a brand, based on their experiences and associations. How a brand makes someone feel can play a large role in whether they remain loyal or shop elsewhere. While a customer may return to a brand because they value its unique approach and offerings, sentimentality can similarly encourage repeat engagement driven by emotional attachment rather than rational value, demonstrating the importance of building brand loyalty.

Brand loyalty is one of the most commercially significant assets a business can build, helping to lower customer acquisition costs, generate consistent revenue and grow competitive resilience. Foundational research published in the Harvard Business Review stated that improving customer retention by just 5% could increase a business’s profits by 25% to 85%. And, when comparing customer acquisition and engagement, BIA Advisory Services found that returning customers spend an average of 67% more than new ones.

Creating brand loyalty helps businesses both reputationally and financially by driving organic word-of-mouth traffic as repeat customers advocate to their friends and family. A loyal customer base can also help to protect businesses from market lows and supply chain issues, as they are more forgiving and willing to give the benefit of the doubt. All in all, building brand loyalty should be a priority for businesses everywhere.

It can be difficult to know where to start with building brand loyalty, especially when looking at big businesses with established customer bases. Fortunately, there are several simple ways to begin creating brand loyalty in the modern marketplace. Here are our top ten tips for motivating customers to keep coming back and spread the word about your brand online.

To transform your brand from a simple vendor into a trusted advisor that customers will repeatedly turn to, you need to deliver value that extends beyond your products. By producing quality content that informs, educates, entertains or otherwise enriches your audience, you can establish trust and foster that all-important emotional connection. To start creating brand loyalty through content, use your unique selling point, find a new angle in your industry or establish a distinctive voice to make your brand memorable.

To understand what content your audience will value, you need to know your audience. You can learn about them by using website analytics to see which demographics already engage with your brand, or by creating buyer personas to build a clear picture of your target market. This way, you can tailor your site and content to the people most likely to engage with your brand, purchase your products and return in the future.

More and more brands are personalising their digital experience and customer communications, greeting people by name when they log into their account or suggesting products they might like. This gives brands a human touch, showing thoughtfulness, cementing trust and building brand loyalty. To offer the most effective personalisation and avoid coming across as intrusive, you need to know your audience and their preferences.

To ensure that your brand is instantly recognisable everywhere, prioritise consistency across all channels, including your website, social media and email campaigns. The easiest way to do this is to create a comprehensive brand style guide that defines your business’s aesthetic identity, including foundational elements such as your logo, colour palette, typography and tone of voice. Consistency makes brands memorable, meaning customers are more likely to consider your business when they need relevant products or services.

These days, many businesses publicly set out their core values so that consumers can choose to shop with those that align with their ethics and worldview. Research from Ipsos has shown that environmental impact and social justice are increasingly important to modern consumers, who “feel good about themselves when they are using products that have a positive impact on our planet and society”. However, it is not enough for brands to pay lip service to societal issues; when taking this route, ensure you have evidence of your efforts, such as donating to charity or publishing news about positive changes within your business.

Everyone is a unique individual and enjoys being treated as such. Therefore, your brand should be seen to treat each customer with the care and respect they deserve. For example, if a customer has an issue with an order, ensure that your team promptly responds, investigates and offers a solution. Even when issues arise, people are more likely to recommend and return to your brand when they know they can rely on good service.

In the modern digital marketing landscape, social media is an integral part of creating brand loyalty. Every platform offers different opportunities for users to engage with your brand and for you to establish a community with which you can regularly communicate about your products. Consistently posting valuable content is the best way to build brand loyalty through social media and grow accounts that people actively want to follow. To ensure your efforts deliver a return on investment, we recommend partnering with a reputable digital marketing agency for expert social media consultancy and regular performance analysis.

The first time consumers properly engage with your brand is on your website, so it is vital to leave a good impression. Mainly, this means making your site easy to navigate, so that prospective customers can quickly explore and find what they need. Technical SEO is essential for maximising web accessibility and can involve improving page speed, resolving HTTP errors and optimising for mobile. Your products or services could be the best in the world, but if the process of learning about or buying them is too difficult, few customers will be willing to convert at all, let alone return and exhibit brand loyalty.

To build brand loyalty, it is important not only to invite customer feedback but to be seen to act on it. Asking for feedback from customers who have completed their buyer’s journey with you is the best way to identify which parts of the experience could be improved and show them that you value their input. The feeling of having contributed and made a difference can create a positive association with your brand, incentivising customers to come back. To invite feedback, consider sending a post-purchase email, running polls on social media or signposting customers to third-party review sites such as TrustPilot.

The simplest way to build brand loyalty is to buy it. Consumers are more likely to shop with you again if they stand to gain from their brand loyalty. For example, you may offer 10% off their next purchase or a complimentary item in their next order. Referrals work under the same principle, encouraging customers to bring others to your site in exchange for a reward.

We hope this article has improved your understanding of why customer loyalty is important in business and how to keep shoppers coming back to your brand. Competing for consumers’ attention in the first place is harder than ever, however, due to the sheer amount of choice available online. If you need support to increase your business’s organic search visibility, tailor paid ads to your target audience or solidify your content strategy, then contact our expert team. At Zelst, we have over 20 years’ experience driving traffic and boosting conversions for big-name brands. For more information about our services or to claim your free site audit, please get in touch.