January 17, 2023 4:17PM

Learn to Develop Loyal Customers

Aside from acquiring new customers, retaining customers is one of the biggest challenges faced by businesses today. Developing strong customer loyalty is the key to achieving this.

Customer loyalty is essential to businesses today because it very often leads to repeat business and positive word-of-mouth recommendations, both of which help businesses grow and achieve long-term success.

In this article, we take a closer look at the different area's businesses should focus on to create loyal customers and provide some helpful tips to help you along the way. 

First, let’s take a look at the different factors that can contribute to customer loyalty:

• Product/Service Quality
• Positive Customer Experiences
• Competitive prices
• Ease of Use/Convenience
• Personalized experiences
• Sense of belonging to a community
• Strong brand reputation

How to Calculate & Measure Customer Loyalty? 

There are a variety of ways to measure customer loyalty, including

1. Net Promoter Score (NPS): This measures how likely customers are to recommend a business to others, on a scale of 0-10.
2. Repeat Purchase Rate: This measures the percentage of customers who make repeat purchases from a business.
3. Customer Retention Rate: The percentage of customers who continue to do business with a company over a specific period of time.
4. Customer Satisfaction Surveys: Used to gather feedback on a variety of factors that may impact customer loyalty, such as product quality, customer service, and overall brand experience.
5. Cohort Analysis: This method allows businesses to keep track of a specific group of customers, like the ones acquired within a certain time frame, and track their behaviour over time.

Before putting plans in place to start measuring customer loyalty, it's important to remember that the methods used will vary depending on the business type and its goals. It's essential to focus on the metrics that are most relevant to your business as well as to make use of the data that is most easily accessible. This will save you both time and resources in the long run

What are the Biggest Challenges When Developing Customer Loyalty?

The main challenges when building customer loyalty are the following:

Competition: There is often a lot of competition in most industry sectors today, which often makes it more difficult for businesses to attract and retain customers.

Changing Customer Needs and Requirements: The needs and requirements of customers can change over time, which can make it difficult to keep them loyal to a particular brand or product.

Bad Customer Cervice: If a business provides poor customer service, it can be difficult to build customer loyalty.

Lack of Personalization: In today’s economies customers often expect a personalized experience, and businesses which are unable to provide this will often find it more difficult to build customer loyalty. This is especially relevant to businesses operating in the digital space where consumers often have a shorter attention span and expect to access what they need quickly.

Bad Communication: By not communicating effectively with customers, businesses can lose customer loyalty very fast. 

Customer Expectations: When customer expectations begin to rise, it often becomes more challenging for businesses to meet and exceed them, leading to a drop in customer loyalty.

Top Tips for Developing Customer Loyalty

At Vodus Research, we work closely with businesses across a wide range of industries, to help them better understand consumer perception of their brand as well as develop strategies to develop customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. 

We have put together our top tips for Developing customer loyalty for your business:

Customer Loyalty Programs

For businesses in the B2C space, customer loyalty programs are commonly used by businesses in retail and services as a way of both rewarding customers and also increase retention rates. When introducing a customer loyalty program it’s important to find one that fits well with your business. Some examples of customer loyalty programs include

• Rewards Points
• Tiered 
• Cash Back 
• Fee-based 

Improve Customer Experience

Understanding the customer experience is a key part of developing customer loyalty. While it’s great to introduce new cool features and ways of engaging with customers, it’s important to also look at the entire customer journey and make an effort to remove any obstacles which customers may face along the way. Interested to find out more about customer experience and how it is important for our business, check out What is Customer Experience? - The Complete Guide

Utilise Customer Segmentation

When it comes to engaging with your customers it’s easy to send out an email or create a display ad reaching out to all your customers. By Segmenting your customers into different groups based on different factors such as Age, Buying habits or location, you can target them more effectively with content that is more personalised to them. 

Create More Content

Whether you are a business targeting B2C or B2B customers, the importance of content should never be overlooked. Content such as guides, infographics and educational content is a great way to stand out from your competitors and also position your brand as a thought leader in your industry sector. Depending on your business goals, it’s worth exploring different types of content which may be relevant to your target audience. Short videos have proven to be very effective for B2C brands in today’s mobile-centric environment and are also great for social media.

Always Be Open to Feedback

Customer complaints and Issues are often the first things that come to mind when we talk about customer feedback. Receiving feedback from customers at different stages of the customer journey is a great way to catch issues before they become complaints. For example, Phoning a customer after they have made a purchase is a great way to find out how satisfied they are with your brand and gives them an opportunity to discuss any issues which could save you from losing a future customer.

Educate Your Customers

Whether it is through online webinars or offline events, providing customers with opportunities to gain knowledge on your products or area of expertise adds great value to developing customer loyalty. This has become a growing trend over the past years, especially with consumer brands who are always looking for ways to keep connected with their customers.

Be Willing to Lose Problematic Customers

When trying to create the best customer experience for your brand it’s important to recognise that as good as your product or brand may be, there will always be problematic customers. Create a plan and also set boundaries as to how far you are willing to go to resolve issues and negative feedback. Time wasted on problematic customers is time you could be spending focusing on your good customers.

How can Vodus help you build Brand Equity?

By having the largest online panel in Malaysia via our Vodus Media Network that has a combined sampling frame of 17 million consumers, Vodus is best suited to help you gather the most accurate and representative data to calculate your Brand Equity Score.

Vodus can help you measure and improve your Brand Equity with our Brand Health Tracker, Customer Satisfaction Research and Product Innovation Research solutions. We will survey your target consumers to measure your brand performance, consumer perception and customer satisfaction to diagnose the underlying issues with your brand and construct a strategy to improve your Brand Equity.