Customer Retention Strategies to Improve Brand Loyalty

Improving brand loyalty is one of the most effective ways brands can increase profits. But what exactly is brand loyalty? Brand loyalty, aka customer loyalty, is the extent to which your customers engage with or purchase from your brand over your competitors over a long period.The most strategic brands understand that to get the best return on investment, you need to focus marketing spend on boosting brand loyalty over acquiring new customers. They also know how important brand-retailer collaboration is for increasing brand loyalty, as it allows you to share insights to increase sales, ROI, online market share, and digital shelf performance.

So, why is brand loyalty so important? What are the key customer retention strategies you can implement to improve the loyalty of your customers? In this blog, you’ll find out. Just keep reading!

According to Harvard Business Review, it’s anywhere between 5x and 25x cheaper to retain an existing customer than it is to convert a new one. And it makes sense. The more loyal a customer is to your brand, the more likely they are to purchase from your Retailers again and again, and spend more per purchase – since they already like and trust your brand. In fact, loyal customers spend 67% more on products and services than new customers.Conversely, to acquire a new customer, you have to increase your marketing budget on ads targeted to new customers, many of whom won’t convert, driving down ROI. The marketing budget you spend on current customers will almost always produce a higher ROI, since they will take less convincing to buy from you again.

Another reason why brand loyalty is so crucial is that it builds brand awareness. According to HubSpot, 81% of customers trust recommendations from friends and family. When your customers are loyal to your brand, they become almost like your brand ambassadors, spreading the word about your excellent products and customer service.Word-of-mouth marketing and positive customer reviews online increase your brand’s credibility and help you acquire more new customers while decreasing the marketing budget you’d spend getting fresh eyes on your brand.

We can’t overstate how vital giving your customers an outstanding customer experience is, especially with this Salesforce report stating that 80% of customers say customer experience is just as important as products or services. From their customer journey across your Retailers’ websites to the quality of your customer support, giving your customers a consistent, reliable, and positive experience of your brand is key to retaining them.Make sure you’re optimising your customer experience at every touchpoint, but especially when it comes to customer support. Do your delivery processes meet their high standards? Is your website well-optimised for target keywords? Are your products easy to find? Are the images and content compliant with your guidelines?

If you’re constantly putting out fires when it comes to customer service, rather than identifying and resolving issues before they become a major problem, then you’ll be stuck in a reactive strategy that makes your customers feel uncared for. Instead of just reacting to issues with product quality, delivery, or stock, be proactive when it comes to your customers.Reach out to them and ask them for their feedback on your products or services and keep a close eye on your stock levels to make sure you don’t disappoint your customers. You can even use a highly-intelligent data and analytics platform, like Convert Group’s eRetail Content, which helps you forecast stock depletion and trends, helping you renew your products before they sell out.

Consistency is the cornerstone of all strong brands because it helps customers understand what to expect from you and reinforces your brand identity. When your brand is consistent across all channels in terms of visuals, communications, and products, you appear more reliable, trustworthy, and of higher quality in your customer’s minds.Staying consistent when you have an omnichannel brand presence or sell with multiple retailers can be tedious. But with Convert Group’s digital shelf analytics platform, maintaining consistent branding is easy since you can see all your brand’s products across different retail channels in one place – making inconsistencies more obvious.

If your brand sells products across multiple retailer websites, understanding performance across each platform is essential. But poor communication, inadequate data sharing processes, and ineffective data analytics tools can cause vital customer insights to fall through the cracks.This is why brand-retailer collaboration should be a core part of your customer retention strategy. With a unique data sharing platform like Convert Group, you’ll be able to pool your customer intelligence data to identify conversion roadblocks, customer trends, and benchmark data to help you craft a winning brand loyalty strategy.

We hope that you have a better understanding of the importance of brand loyalty and can start implementing our top 4 customer retention strategies today to increase loyalty for your business. If you’d like to make brand loyalty your mission, why not try Convert Group’s user-friendly digital shelf analytics platform?Convert Group helps brands and retailers collaborate through comprehensive data insights and market analysis to better understand performance, market share, and competition. With Convert Group, you can turn complex data from several retailers into actionable insights to help you boost brand loyalty, accelerate customer retention, and boost ROI.

If you’re interested in developing a more data-driven customer retention strategy, get in touch with us today and our friendly team will help you understand the benefits of Convert Group for your business.