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Customer Loyalty Guide – How to Measure & Improve it

Customer Loyalty Guide – How to Measure & Improve it

Acquiring customers is hard enough as it’s. You shouldn’t have to lose sleep over keeping them with your business. 

But how do you keep customers from breaking faith?

Customer loyalty programs might be the first thing to come to mind. 

Well, that’s just the beginning.

“The true source of loyalty is to create benefits for people. Sometimes people concentrate too much on devices like a loyalty card.” – Sir Terry Leahy.

While loyalty programs have proven to be rewarding (ha!) time and time again, there’s a lot more where that came from. A powerful lineup of products, engaging customer interactions, contextual customer insights, and the list goes on…

Customer loyalty is a tough nut to crack. 

Building a loyal customer base needs more than one-off loyalty programs to incentivize customers. It rather takes a well-thought-out strategy that turns customers into loyal brand advocates and fosters a meaningful and emotional connection with them.

In this guide, we cover what customer loyalty is and list some strategies to keep customers coming back to your business. Let’s dive right into it!

What Is Customer Loyalty?

Customer loyalty measures the likelihood of a customer conducting more business with you. Simply put, it’s a by-product of the customer experience that determines the probability of customers repeatedly choosing your service over competitors. 

A loyal customer will likely remain profitable for a long time and become an ardent brand advocate. Such a customer has stuck around for a long time and isn’t actively looking for alternate solutions or products.

You can garner customer loyalty by building deep emotional connections with customers and track it by monitoring the ongoing relationship of individual customers with a business.

6 Benefits of Harvesting Customer Loyalty in Your Business

67.4% of customers globally prefer shopping directly from the brands to which they are loyal. Such promising numbers warrant your attention! 

Your customer loyalty model should include a proactive strategy that enables you to build a customer base that isn’t considering any alternative. A loyal customer not only continues to make purchases but will also:

  • Explore and buy new products and services that you roll out 
  • Refer you to other potential customers
  • Spend more money per purchase 
  • Provide you with valuable feedback to refine your offerings 

Let’s explore these and other benefits of customer loyalty in more detail.

1. More Referrals 

Loyal customers not only come back to you time and time again but also bring a great deal of value to your business through word-of-mouth marketing. 

When your customers speak highly of you and recommend your business to people who trust them, your probability of converting the lead increases dramatically. The positive experience of an existing customer can assure new prospects about the quality of your service. 

2. Better Feedback 

Customer loyalty provides you the opportunity to continuously improve your product offerings based on customer feedback.

Watch: What is Customer Feedback

Customers who have stuck around for a long time can give valuable insights into your product that can be leveraged for product growth. They are also the best people to approach for suggestions to enhance your customer service. Such customers won’t be hesitant to spare their time to provide you with honest feedback.

You can use customer feedback tools like Qualaroo to deploy simple in-product surveys and collect feedback about the product’s usability, UI, quality, satisfaction, and other aspects.

Case Study: How Belron improved customer experience and loyalty by leveraging exit intent surveys

Belron, a global leader in automobile windshield repair, required a way to gain insights into its customer behavior. The company brought Qualaroo into play to collect feedback from people leaving the website without making any purchases. 

The insights worked out well for Belron to create seamless offline and online experiences. It helped the brand attain an overall NPS (Net Promoter Score) of above 80, which is a big leap toward creating a loyal customer base.

How did they achieve this?

Simple — by making effective use of customer feedback. 

Belron collected open-ended responses and insights from them with Qualaroo’s Sentiment analysis.

What’s more, the company used exit intent surveys to target visitors leaving the website. It provided a clear understanding of customer journeys and helped identify different user segments.

Both these types of feedback data combined allowed Belron to improve online and offline experiences to convert more visitors into loyal customers.

3. Lesser Churn

Customer loyalty is directly linked with better retention.

Let’s understand this with an example. 

A customer looking for a suitable solution in the SaaS B2B market puts in a lot of effort and time to find the right product.

Now, suppose the customer is satisfied with your product, overall experience, and quality of service. In that case, they are less likely to go through the ordeal of finding a suitable solution again. This, combined with constant product enhancements and clever marketing, will help you turn new customers into loyal patrons. 

Lesser churn will also mean decreased acquisition cost. 

By putting customer loyalty at the heart of your business strategy, you can deliver more value to customers, thereby increasing the probability of them staying with your business.

4. Enhanced Share of Wallet 

Customer loyalty also leads to increased average order value. That’s why, focusing on customer loyalty can help you generate more revenue. 

And since they already have a positive perception of your brand, you can pitch them different product lines and niches as part of your upselling and cross-selling strategy without appearing intrusive.

What’s more, if you have a new product, you can:

Target loyal customers to try it out ⇒Collect product feedback⇒Optimize it for new prospects.

It promotes better selling opportunities, improved product development, and a bigger revenue stream for you.

That’s the win-win situation you should be aiming for!

Case Study: How GraphicSprings used Qualaroo to understand user needs and consequently boost revenue per customer

GraphicSprings, a leading online graphic designing tool, struggled to understand its user demographics and needed to improve website conversions & revenue.

Initially, they used traditional email surveys to collect customer feedback, but the entire process was time-consuming and inefficient.

That’s where Qualaroo came to the company’s rescue. The user feedback tool enabled GraphichSprings to understand its customer base to deliver more relevant user experiences.

With user experience surveys, the team collected feedback and identified areas for improvements, such as improving the color editing functionality, user profile creation, and the website’s interface.

It led to an increase in customers’ spending and customer lifetime value.

5. Improved Brand Image 

Loyalty can also be correlated with how customers perceive your brand. Striving to improve customer loyalty is an effective way to improve brand awareness. 

Loyal customers help you strengthen your position in the marketplace by:

  • Engaging with your business online
  • Leaving positive comments
  • Posting about their experience on their social media handles
  • Recommending your products and services
  • Adding ratings and reviews to your product page and app

It helps spread the word about your business and can enable you to become a household name. 

6. Reduced Cost of Acquisition & Improved ROI

Customer acquisition costs 7 times more than keeping an existing one. It’s a no brainer then that customer loyalty is integral to maintaining your profitability.

Customers who are loyal will most likely try out different products and make bigger purchases. 

What’s more, not all customers are here to stay. Irrespective of your efforts, customer churn is a reality for any business.

The problem is when they leave too early. If a customer leaves your business before you have time to recover their acquisition cost, you suffer losses.

These losses pile up in the long run leading to budget cuts and other monetary issues.

That’s where a hoard of loyal customers can save you. 

You can counterbalance the churn losses and even offset them by targeting loyal customers to increase the average purchase value.

This strategy can boost your ROI and keep the wheels in motion.

Read More: How Top 15 Brands Use Customer Feedback Effectively

 But do all customers turn loyal for the same reasons? Nope. Let’s discover why in the next section.

7 Types of Loyal Customers

What makes a customer loyal?

Well, the reasons for these are aplenty, ranging from pricing and product quality to the quality of customer support.

A report by Deloitte lists the following factors as drivers of customer loyalty:

Identifying the driving factor and characteristics of your loyal customers can help you maximize the returns on your efforts to target different customer types.

1. Truly Loyal Customers

Truly loyal customers love everything about your business and think highly of your services. Long-term positive interactions with your brand usually prompt this behavior. Such customers make repeat purchases from you and recommend you to their network, making them your biggest brand advocates.

These types of customers make up a large portion of your revenue. You must take adequate measures to make these customers feel appreciated and valued. 

A classic example of this is Apple. The company seems to have a complete hold on its customer base, which consists of truly loyal customers. 

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Apple received the highest 82% satisfaction rating in the American Customer Satisfaction (ACSI) report 2021, reflecting the brand’s unwavering commitment to its customers. 

Moreover, brand loyalty for Apple is at an all-time high of 92%.

The company has maintained such loyalty through continuous innovation, a strong branding strategy, and feedback incorporation.

2. Happy Customers

Also known as ‘Butterflies,’ these customers are satisfied with your product or service and have conducted business with you several times. While they do not have anything to complain about, there’s a high probability of them getting poached by competitors offering a better deal. 

3. Loyal Customers Based on Convenience

Some customers are only loyal to your business because of how convenient their past experiences were. The cause could be a responsive support team, the location of your store, or the ease of shopping. These customers value convenience over other factors and will most likely be indifferent to the price, as long as their comfort isn’t impacted. 

4. Price-Based Loyal Customers

Some customers remain loyal to your brand because you meet their budgetary requirements. The drawback of such customer loyalty is volatility.

While these customers are currently with you, they’ll likely move to the competitors as soon as they find a better deal. It’s also just as easy to win them back by offering a lower price and better value.

5. Loyalty Programs Loyal

These customers are willing to continue business with you because they see significant value in your loyalty programs. These customers are not loyal to your brand or products but to the cashback and discounts on their repeat purchases. Still, they’ll derive the maximum benefit from the ongoing loyalty programs. 

6. Long-Term Loyal Customers

Also referred to as habitual loyal, these customers make routine purchases with your business and significantly contribute to your revenue stream. These customers stick around because of familiarity with your business. Yet, they might look for alternatives when making a sizeable purchase. 

7. Benefits-Based Loyal 

Some customers can only be swayed by benefits and only reach out to you occasionally. Benefits-based loyal customers only stick around by virtue of the additional utilities that you have to offer. These customers do not make regular purchases and engage with you less frequently than other types of loyal customers. 

8 Power Metrics for Customer Loyalty Analysis

A loyal customer base is the cornerstone of business success.

To drive this loyalty, you must implement a long-drawn strategy that builds deep connections with customers.

Now comes the part when you would ask, how?

Well, the first step is to determine the customer’s willingness to conduct repeat business and stay with you. It can give you a measure of where you stand in the customer loyalty and retention game.

This can be accomplished with customer loyalty research which involves tracking relevant metrics, such as: 

1. NPS

NPS (Net Promoter Score) is one of the most popular and standardized metrics to track long-term loyalty. It tracks the likelihood of customers recommending you to their friends or colleagues on a scale of 0-10, thereby helping you track your brand’s overall perception.

Then, the respondents are categorized into three segments based on their responses:

  • Promoters (9-10)
  • Passives (7-8)
  • Detractors (0-6)

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The NPS score for your business can be calculated using the following formula:

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Customer loyalty surveys with NPS help benchmark business performance and your standing in the marketplace. Changes in the NPS, caused by an increase or decrease in the number of promoters, can help you track customer loyalty. Such changes let you track the impact of business decisions and optimize your loyalty strategy in real time. 

Watch: What Is NPS Score & Why Do You Need It?

Here are some NPS survey questions for your reference:

  1. On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague?
  2. Please rate the likelihood of you recommending our product based on your checkout experience.
  3. Based on your previous usage, how likely are you to recommend this product?

View This NPS Survey Template

Read More: A Complete Guide to Net Promoter Score Program(NPS)

2. Customer Effort Score (CES)

Customer Effort Score or CES tracks the efforts put in by your customers to get their issues resolved. In simpler terms, it measures the ease of customer support experiences.

As Gartner rightfully puts it:

“Effort is the strongest driver to customer loyalty.”

CES surveys can help ensure that your customers have an effortless experience when seeking support.

In fact, 96% of customers with high-effort support experiences tend to be disloyal. This makes it critical to track and maintain a low CES. 

Following are some examples of highly effective questions for CES surveys.

  1. How easy did the company make it for you to solve your issue?
  2. Based on your experience, how easy was it to get in touch with our support team?
  3. How likely are you to recommend us to a friend with a similar problem?
  4. [Company] made it easy for me to solve the problem. 
  • Strongly Agree
  • Agree
  • Neither agree nor disagree
  • Disagree
  • Strongly disagree 

View This CES Survey Template

Read More: Customer Effort Score (CES): A Detailed Guide

3. CSAT

CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) is a short-term loyalty metric. This score focuses on standalone and in-the-moment experiences such as website navigation, shipping experience, checkout process, customer service interactions, etc. 

Take this post-call survey from Skype requesting feedback from customers, for example. It helps customers provide feedback about their latest experience in real time. 

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CSAT surveys such as these help acquire customer trust and loyalty. Tools such as Qualaroo provide a wide range of question types and prebuilt templates to create effective CSAT surveys in minutes.

How to Create a Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Survey

Use these questions for CSAT surveys:

  1. How can we make the product easier to use?
  2. How satisfied are you with the checkout process?
  3. Please rate your shopping experience.
  4. Does the tool offer all the functionalities you expected? 

Use This CSAT Survey Template

4. Retention Rate

Customer retention rate tracks the number of customers that stay with your business during a specific time interval. You can make accurate customer loyalty and business revenue forecasts based on your current retention rate. 

Retention rate can also help identify and analyze trends in user behavior. You can keep track of how many customers you were able to bring in and identify actions that helped retain these customers. 

Here is the formula to calculate retention rate:

5. Customer Lifetime Value 

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV or LTV) estimates the total profit your business can generate from a customer while being associated with the business. This metric tracks long-term associations rather than individual transactions.

It can help track the current value of customers, predict their loyalty, and measure their future purchase capacity. You can also use CLV data to segment customers based on their profitability and loyalty to your business.

CLV is gauged by the overall lifespan and purchase frequency, which directly correlate with customer loyalty. That’s why, an increase in the lifetime value of a customer is a clear indication of their loyalty to the brand. 

There are various calculation models for CLV, such as the aggregate, predictive, and traditional.

Here’s how you can calculate the CLV:

There are plenty of ways to increase CLV, one of which is offering supporting tooltips to enhance user experience.

Here’s how Ahrefs does it:

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Read More: Customer Lifetime Value – How to Calculate and Boost Your CLV

6. Referrals

An easy way to identify if your customers are loyal is to keep track of the number of new customers they send your way. 

Referral rate is measured as a percentage of the number of referred customers against the total number of customers. 

While different industries have varying referral rates, the global average is 2.3%.

7. Social Media Engagement

Customer loyalty can also be measured by monitoring your brand image on social media platforms. 

  • How many mentions are you getting?
  • Do customers regularly engage with your content?
  • Is the overall sentiment of your brand on social media platforms positive or negative?
  • How actively do you handle the feedback that you receive on social media?

Answers to these questions can help you identify whether your customers are loyal.

Social listening lets you identify your most popular products and services, as well as discover your most engaged customers. 

Netflix uses social listening to keep up with the conversations happening about the brand online and build stronger connections with its audience by analyzing their sentiment. 

“Netflix and Chill”, a popular trend on social media platforms, resulted in the brand coming out with the Netflix DIY socks tutorial. It addressed the needs of its users who wish to pause the show they’re binge-watching when they fall asleep. 

Netflix DIY Socks 

Another illustration of Netflix’s powerful social listening and engagement strategy would be witty tweets based on pop culture references that speak directly to the audience.  

Or prompt responses that build loyalty:

8. Upsell Ratio

Another effortless way to track customer loyalty is to focus on your upsell rate. Upsell ratio tracks customers’ additional, higher-value purchases other than what they initially set out to buy.

Monitoring the upsell rate lets you gauge if the customer trusts you enough to try new products and increase their average order value on your business.

7 Best Ways & Strategies to Promote Customer Loyalty

Driving more purchases from your existing customers requires you to build a powerful loyalty management strategy. Here are some ways you can achieve this:

1. Gather & Act on Customer Feedback

According to Microsoft, 89% of customers want organizations to collect feedback from them. 

While customers wish to provide feedback, only 7% of companies actively seek it.

That’s a humongous disconnect!

It can deprive you of actionable insights that can boost your value proposition and, in turn, keep customers with your business for times to come. 

That’s where efficient user research and customer survey tools can come into play. Deploying such a tool can help you:

  • Collect feedback from customers by asking the right questions at the right time
  • Conduct real-time and contextual user research 
  • Gain relevant insights from different customers with advanced targeting and question branching
  • Automate feedback data mining for effective utilization of AI-based analysis engines
  • Analyze customers’ sentiments toward your business and brand 
  • Deliver customer surveys without interrupting the user experience 

Case Study: How Udemy leverages customer feedback for continual improvement in the product

With such a vast following of learners from across the globe, Udemy faced challenges in determining where its users came from and struggled with collecting relevant feedback from them.

They ended up using a customer feedback software to track the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns. 

The platform also enabled Udemy to gather users’ feedback to optimize the product. For instance, Udemy collected feedback about its machine learning-powered captions and utilized the gathered data to improve the quality of the captioning technology for its courses. 

Watch: How Udemy Learns From Its Students

2. Segment the Audience Base to Set Priority 

79% of customers believe that the more personalization tactics a brand uses, the more likely they are to be loyal to it.

Categorizing customers into distinct sections is one such tactic that can help you deliver more targeted solutions, enhancing the overall experience.

Segmentation can improve prioritization, making it possible to design loyalty programs suited to each customer type. You can also create targeted marketing campaigns, reach out to the audience on their preferred mediums, and deliver personalized solutions.

This niche targeting can improve engagement and make them come to you for more.

Here are some customer segmentation approaches that you can choose from:

  • Geographic Segmentation– Which country or city do they belong to? Do you wish to target urban or rural populations?
  • Demographic Segmentation– What’s the ideal age, gender, income level, marital status, educational qualification, and occupation of the customer you’re targeting?
  • Behavioral Segmentation– Are you targeting first-time visitors or repeat customers? What’s their customer lifetime value? Do they have a high usage rate? What is their degree of loyalty and risk of churn?
  • Psychographic Segmentation– What types of lifestyle do they lead? What are their hobbies, interests, beliefs, values, and social involvement?

Answering these questions can define a clear basis for prioritization, helping you focus on high-priority customers and encourage them to stay loyal to your business. Segmentation can also enrich your loyalty programs, helping you deliver highly personalized and targeted loyalty rewards.

Ikea has hit the nail on the head with its segmentation, targeting, and positioning strategy, making it a front-runner in the furniture retail industry, with over 775 million visitors in FY21.

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Ikea uses geographic, demographic, behavioral, and psychographic segmentation for its international audience. It targets the urban population aged 18 or above, including students and professionals who are cost-conscious and value functionality as well as sustainability.

The company uses mono-segment (appealing to a single customer segment), adaptive (reflecting changes based on customer needs and preferences), and aesthetic (using a democratic design) positioning to acquire and retain customers. It has helped the company acquire a considerable market share and earn loyal customers. 

Pro tip: Don’t have an advertising or research budget like Ikea? That’s okay. You can start off by using simple feedback tools or quiz maker tools like the ProProfs Quiz Maker for sharing product recommendation quizzes to understand what your audience or customers want.

Read More: Market Segmentation – Types, Benefits, Mistakes & Examples

3. Leverage Customer Data for Personalization

The most effective way to warrant customer loyalty is by demonstrating that you care.

After all- 

“People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care”― Theodore Roosevelt.

Customer data can play an instrumental tool in helping you accomplish this. 

How so? 

It’s actually pretty simple! 

Start by understanding your customers and their needs by capturing data from different sources such as emails, surveys, sales interactions, website activity, etc.

Then, collate this knowledge to craft personalized experiences that exceedingly meet customer expectations and delight them.

Here are some ways to do this:

  • Utilize zero-party data (the data provided by the customers voluntarily) 
  • Leverage first-party data (the data collected from customer interactions & engagement) to improve customer experience
  • Maintain detailed contact records using a CRM application to keep customer information well-organized and accessible
  • Provide personalized offers & discounts to encourage loyalty 
  • Use contact list retargeting to match the customer contact information with customer data to suggest products, design mail campaigns, and deliver personalized messages

A case in point is Amazon

The company uses an AI-powered recommendation system to predict individual customer preferences and deliver accurate recommendations. It has incorporated personalization in every step of the buying process. 

The eCommerce giant also enables sellers to retarget customers on third-party applications based on the collected data and Amazon DSP (Demand Side Platform).

Along with targeting customers based on their purchase history, the platform also displays similar items purchased by other customers with shared interests.

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4. Offer Proactive Customer Support 

A study by Microsoft revealed that 90%  of customers choose customer service as a key driver of their brand loyalty. 

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By delivering reliable customer service experiences, you can delight and retain more customers.

As Gartner puts it- 

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Moreover, 86% of customers expect businesses to be up to date with their personal information during customer support interactions- implying that you need an effective system for storing customer information and utilizing it to build a loyal customer base.

Here’s how you can utilize a dynamic and comprehensive help desk solution to accomplish this:

  • Deliver instant and real-time help using live chat 
  • Automate support experiences with conversational AI bots 
  • Track customer data and ticket history to personalize support solutions 
  • Monitor service ratings, resolution times, chat volume, operator performance, etc., with in-depth reports 
  • Seek customer feedback post-support interactions using surveys and forms 

5. Foster Multichannel Engagement

On average, companies using three or more marketing channels retain up to 66% of their customers.

Multichannel engagement not only lets you reach a broader customer base but also assists you in being readily accessible across platforms. This enables you to strengthen your relationships with customers. 

To earn customer loyalty, you must deliver highly convenient experiences.

A vital aspect of this is meeting customers where they are using a multichannel engagement strategy, such as: 

  • Including multiple touch points in the customer journey to stay connected
  • Reaching out to customers across channels such as email, text, and social media
  • Connecting with customers based on their preferences 
  • Delivering more personalized and targeted interactions across the customer journey 
  • Focusing on the overall experience rather than individual interactions

6. Enable Self-Service

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According to a study by Statista, 88% of US consumers expect brands to offer online self-service portals. This goes on to show that self-service touchpoints are no longer optional but a requisite for customer satisfaction.

Customer self-service channels such as a dedicated knowledge base software helps to create FAQs, tooltips, handbooks, guides, how-to manuals, and discussion forums that enable consumers to resolve issues faster without contacting a support representative. 

Self-service touch points can also help to boost loyalty, mainly because of the following advantages that they provide:

  • It’s far more convenient to access the knowledge base rather than wait for a support representative to respond. 
  • Customers don’t have to encounter long wait times to get their queries answered.
  • It frees up more time for support executives to solve complex customer queries. 
  • Information can be accessed remotely at any instant and does not require the availability of a support agent. 

7. Create Customer Loyalty Programs

Encouraging and incentivizing loyal behavior from customers can keep them with your company for a long time. Customer loyalty programs aim at achieving this by offering rewards, discounts, freebies, and other such benefits to customers who demonstrate the willingness to stay with your business. 

Moreover, 85% of millennials attribute loyalty programs to improved customer experience. 

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Here are a few types of loyalty programs that you can implement:

  1. Point-Based Loyalty Programs

The most popular type of loyalty program is point-based. In this program, customers earn points as they continue doing business with you. These points can then be redeemed for some rewards.

An example of this is the Sephora Beauty Insider program.

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The loyalty program members earn points for every dollar spent and can redeem these points for other products. The loyalty program also offers free shipping and free makeover services for the participants. 

  1. Paid Loyalty Programs

Paid loyalty programs charge a participation fee for the customers to be eligible for rewards. These programs offer a lot of benefits, like:

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Some of the popular brands offering paid loyalty programs include Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Grubhub.

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  1. Tiered Loyalty Programs

In tiered loyalty programs, customers enjoy benefits based on the category they fall into. Customers can advance through these tiers by performing certain actions to earn better rewards. 

For example, the World of Hyatt loyalty program has four levels of membership- Member, Discoverist, Explorist, and exclusive Globalist. 

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Members can upgrade from one tier to the next based on the number of stays and earn rewards such as free meals, late checkouts, upgraded rooms, club lounge access, etc. 

  1. Coalition Loyalty Programs

Coalition or shared loyalty programs are based on partnerships between multiple brands, each of which reaps the benefit of returning customers. These partners pool and share resources to deliver highly rewarding loyalty programs. 

Coalition loyalty programs provide a lot of value to the users since the benefits are not limited to a single organization.

Take HSBC rewards, for example.

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HSBC credit card users can redeem rewards while shopping from Amazon, purchasing e-gift cards, or traveling.

  1. Value-Based Loyalty Programs

Value-based loyalty programs reward customers in ways far exceeding coupons or discounts. These programs help foster loyalty by building connections based on shared values and beliefs. 

More people wish to be associated with conscientious brands, and value-based loyalty programs are the perfect way to demonstrate your goodwill.

Building a strong loyalty program can significantly reduce churn and improve retention. In the following section, we list some great examples of loyalty programs to inspire you.

4 Businesses That Get Customer Loyalty Just Right

Here are some brands that have gotten customer loyalty down to a T. 

1. Starbucks 

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The basis for the success of the Starbucks loyalty program is personalization. The company has acquired a very loyal customer base by delivering highly personalized interactions and offers. The engaging reward campaigns for members and exclusive prizes keep customers hooked to this business, making Starbucks one of the top coffee brands in the world.

Starbucks’ loyalty program lets customers earn stars as they make repeat purchases and redeem them to get free coffee. Customers can also sign up for the mobile app and earn rewards with games and challenges. They can also get free beverages on their birthdays. 

2. The North Face

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The North Face has a loyalty program known as XPLR Pass, where customers earn perks such as exclusive products, birthday gifts, members-only field tests, discounts, dedicated customer service, etc. 

Customers have more than just one way to earn points. Other than shopping for products, customers can also refer friends, bring reusable bags, visit national parks or monuments, download the mobile application, participate in surveys, and take other such actions to earn more points.

3. The Body Shop

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The Body Shop uses the sense of belonging to a community to drive customer loyalty. The ‘Love Your Body Club’ is free to join and rewards its members with gifts, offers, free product trials, birthday discounts, and members-only events.

Customers can either redeem their points to make purchases or donate them to one of the business’ charity partners. Since the program lets its customers become part of a community, it has a high value associated with it and has proven to be a success for the brand.

4. TOMS

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TOMS offers more than just monetary value via its loyalty program. It empowers its customers to give back to the community, thereby appealing to their principles and beliefs. 

Customers get points for making purchases at TOMS, which can be redeemed for more stuff or donated to a cause. The model started with the company donating a pair of shoes for every purchase made. It has now expanded into efforts such as mental health support, planet sustainability, and ending gun violence.

Wrapping Up – Loyal Customers are Key to Your Business Success

We couldn’t put it any better than this. Customer loyalty is more than just arbitrary ratings. It’s the overall emotional value that the customers attach to your business. To keep customers from defecting, you must measure and improve essential customer loyalty metrics such as those mentioned above.

Earning customer loyalty is a high-stake endeavor that requires a powerful tech stack. A user feedback tool such as Qualaroo can help you collect customer data and feedback effortlessly. You can utilize this data to deliver stellar customer experiences that translate into loyal customers, letting you acquire an influential position in the marketplace.

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About the author

Shivani Dubey is a seasoned writer and editor specializing in Customer Experience Management. She covers customer feedback management, emerging UX and CX trends, transformative strategies, and experience design dos and don'ts. Shivani is passionate about helping businesses unlock insights to improve products, services, and overall customer experience.