Markets are becoming more and more diverse, and products and services are constantly expanding, so retaining customers is becoming increasingly difficult. 🙈

Indeed, customers may decide to buy a product from another company by doing a quick search on the internet. For this reason, the challenges of customer loyalty are unavoidable. 👌

How do you Define Customer Loyalty?

Generally, customer loyalty can be defined as a consumer’s repeated purchase of a product or service for the same brand. So being a loyal customer of a brand means considering it as part of your habits and feeling connected to it. 🥰

Loyalty therefore includes the actions taken to keep customers loyal. In marketing terms, loyalty also has implications in the area of customer relations.

When a brand implements a customer loyalty strategy, the goal is to persuade the customer to make another purchase or renew their subscription in the long or short term. 🧲

Customer retention is critical to the growth of your business. 🚀

When you’re trying to grow your business, it’s easy to focus too much on attracting new customers and forget about keeping existing customers happy, i.e. doing “lead nurturing”.

That’s why customer retention is as important as customer acquisition. If you don’t do it, you give the impression that you are not interested in the customers who buy your product. 👀

Therefore, it’s all about balancing customer acquisition and retention to accelerate growth and optimize your business performance.

How to Build your Customer Loyalty?

In addition, loyalty or retention often has a positive connotation and is generally defined as the conscious or unconscious selection process (evaluation and decision) that the customer makes, when they have a preference for your brand. 💫

The term “customer retention” refers to all activities and strategies aimed at persuading customers to continue buying your product or service rather than competing with it. 🤫 It’s a process of continuously building customer loyalty. Loyalty activity begins when a prospect first interacts with your company and continues throughout the customer relationship.

When a customer leaves your company to find another competitor, we call it churn. It means “losing customers”. 😥 Therefore, the goal of effective sales strategies is to avoid losing customers and encourage existing customers to make new purchases!

However, retention, depending on the context, can result from persistent loyalty, passive behavior or actual new purchase decisions in favor of the brand. Let’s take the example of a subscription activity, such as a gym membership, or a specific service with commitment (software, internet box, etc.). This is a tacit renewal of the contract, or due to the inertia of the customer because of the costs involved in a possible cancellation.

Thus, there are different types of customer loyalty, including: 👇

What are the Three Types of Customer Loyalty?

• Desired Loyalty

Sought loyalty is a loyalty behavior that customers reflect through the implementation of specific strategies and actions 🎯 (such as loyalty programs, implementation of solutions to manage customer personalizations, customer-centric approaches, etc.).

• Induced Loyalty

Induced loyalty is a state of brand loyalty where consumers suffer from market conditions (monopoly, barriers to exit, exclusivity of offer, etc.) rather than true brand appeal. 😑

• Behavioral Loyalty

This is due to inertia in behavior and habits, not the result of true brand preference. 😦 This is often due to convenience. Customers may remain loyal to the point of sale because it is part of their daily journey, for example.

• Attitudinal Loyalty

Describes loyalty behaviors, or repurchases, that correspond to preferences developed in the real world for brands.

The various factors that can drive attitudinal loyalty, or “Attitudinal Loyalty”, are generally: ⏬

• Quality of the products,
• Pricing,
• Customer or purchasing experience,
• Customer relationship.

Therefore, loyalty has its own attitude, and it is very often the result of a demanded loyalty.

👉 The existence of these different forms of customer loyalty shows that the relationship between customer satisfaction and loyalty is much more complex than we think. Satisfaction is certainly a loyalty lever, but there are “dissatisfied loyal consumers”. 🫶

Moreover, consumers are rarely totally satisfied and totally loyal to a brand.

Stakes of Building Loyal Customers:

• For your e-reputation

For businesses, building customer loyalty is about more than just increasing sales. Maintaining the digital marketing relationship between customers and companies is also about ensuring that they maintain the company’s e-reputation through customer recommendations, a key factor in the success of today’s businesses. 🌐

Did you know that satisfied customers talk about their positive experiences with an average of 3 people? 🗣️ Conversely, unsatisfied customers share a negative experience with 10 people… Customer satisfaction is not only important for online reputation, but also offline, through word of mouth.

• For your brand

Customer loyalty helps retain acquired customers, but paradoxically, it also facilitates the acquisition of new customers. 💎

In fact, when customers turn their back on your product or service, you run the risk of them leaving a negative review of your business online. On the other hand, potential customers feel comfortable when they are satisfied and rate your business positively. This way, new customers are much more likely to buy one of your products.

• On collecting reviews

Customer reviews should be collected, as there is a strong correlation between customer loyalty and customer reviews on the Internet. ✍️ On the contrary, rather than ignoring or fearing customer reviews on the Internet, the publication of customer reviews should be encouraged and taken into account in the business strategy.

The more reviews we have, the more content we can collect and analyze.

This is an opportunity for your company to improve its products and services. 👌

In fact, analyzing customer reviews can help you learn more about average satisfaction and service weaknesses. Also, the more relevant and constructive information you get from your customers, the easier it will be to create a marketing plan to increase your company’s sales.

• On your visibility

Last but not least, customer reviews guarantee increased visibility on the internet. 🔍

Google’s search engine algorithm takes into account the average rating of a business. So, if you have few customer reviews or a lot of negative reviews, your online visibility can drop significantly. Therefore, you can use strategies adapted to the e-reputation and loyalty of your customers, to gain visibility on all your communication platforms.

What are the Benefits of Customer Loyalty?

The implementation of a customer loyalty strategy presents an opportunity to improve a company’s competitiveness on several levels. Then, if the strategy is used effectively, sales will increase significantly. 💥

Customer retention is paramount to the long-term growth of your business. Customers who buy from you know your business, making it easier to predict future profits. 💹

They are not one-time customers, as they buy regularly and consciously. By selling quality at the right price combined with excellent customer service, you already have the magic formula!

In other words, your company has already established a relationship of trust with these customers. A successful customer retention strategy has a direct impact on the customer lifecycle within the company.

When customer acquisition efforts result in a steady loss of existing customers, company growth can slow or stop. Conversely, customer retention steadily increases the customer base, sales and profitability.

1. Economic Benefits of Customer Loyalty

First, customer retention can result in significant savings. In fact, the cost of retaining an existing customer is one-sixth of the cost of finding a new customer. 🤑 The effectiveness of the strategy allows these economic and human resources, to be better used in other more useful projects or processes!

2. Limit the attrition rate

The attrition rate, or “churn” rate, is a reference of the number of customers you lose monthly or annually. Unfortunately, no company can avoid losing customers and is not 100% able to keep them either.

The calculation of this rate is very simple:

• Step 1: Divide the number of customers lost in a given period by the total number of customers.
• Step 2: Multiply this number by 100 and you will know your churn rate.
• Step 3: This customer erosion can be limited by retaining the company’s existing customers.

3. Get committed customers

Finally, loyal customers are also an opportunity to have a brand ambassador. 🤩

Assuming your loyal customers are happy with your service, they will try to spread the word to those around them. For example, in social networks and forums, between satisfied and dissatisfied customers, they can defend your company.

Thus, loyal customers become powerful allies of your e-reputation. This is an excellent form of passive influence for you!

4. Impact on sales

Ultimately, the impact on a company’s bottom line cannot be ignored. On average, a company that retains 5% of its customers will see a 25-55% increase in sales. Building good customer relationships is therefore a successful medium to long-term strategy. ⚒️

How to Measure and Increase Customer Loyalty?

Therefore, customer service management must become a priority, thanks to effective strategies and KPIs that must be implemented. In practice, some important performance indicators are recognized as benchmarks. 📊

A customer retention strategy can save a ton of money for a company. 🪙 According to several studies, it costs 6-7 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one.

These numbers are due to the fact that existing customers have already had a positive experience with your company, they know it, they like it and they trust it. 🥰

In turn, you certainly know their needs, and preferences and so they are much more responsive to your business offers. For existing customers, you can easily maintain relationships with minimal marketing efforts and costs.

In addition, these customers are an excellent source of referrals and leads to help you grow your business. Qualified leads are existing customers who have recommended a product or service they are already happy with, so they have the advantage of being easier to convert. 😏

Existing customers are great informational capital, through which businesses can continually improve their offerings and stay competitive in the marketplace. Selling to your existing customer base also protects your profit margins. These customers are less concerned about price, knowing that they are already convinced of the superior quality of your product.

1. Satisfaction Survey

To examine the most relevant metrics for your work, you need to address the issue of satisfaction surveys. 📞

This is an ideal way to learn more about your customers’ satisfaction by collecting feedback on your services and products. This should be the basis of all your efforts, as it allows you to regularly track customer satisfaction trends.

2. The “Customer Satisfaction Score”

The CSAT or “Customer Satisfaction Score” is a classic customer satisfaction survey. 👂 It is effective and gives a complete picture of customer satisfaction at any time. In surveys, it is expressed through questions like “Are you satisfied with…?”. To use CSATs, you will need to choose from some of the most common types of evaluation, such as 1-10 rating, or YES/NO answers.

3. The “Net Promoter Score”

The NPS or “Net Promoter Score” is particularly interesting from the point of view of customer loyalty. It is presented in the form of questions such as “Are you likely to recommend our services/products to others?”. This will show you how many customers in their personal circle of friends or colleagues might appreciate the quality of your service. 😁

It’s important to know that this decision to speak positively about your product correlates with customer retention.

4. Purchase Rate

This rate represents the percentage of customers who buy again, after making their first purchase. 🫰 This rate shows your ability to retain customers and bring them back to your business.

Note that implementing this indicator requires the ability to track a customer’s purchase, for example via a loyalty card or points accumulation system.

5. Upsell rate

This rate is very similar to the purchase rate, as it allows us to know the percentage of customers who have recently purchased a different product than the previous one. 🤔

This is an interesting concept, because if a customer is likely to buy another product or service from you, it means that they are confident in the quality of your original product or service.

6. Loyalty rate

You can calculate your loyalty rate by taking the average of the last three rates above, the NPS, the Purchase Rate and the Upsell Rate. 🧮

To do this, you need to ask 3 different questions from 1 to 10. “How likely are you to make a new purchase?” “Would you consider testing new products or services?” “Would you recommend our brand to your family, friends or colleagues?”.

Each of these questions will give you a score out of 10. Then, you’ll need to average these three scores to get the overall loyalty rate – get your calculators! 🤣

👉 Also, ask yourself what metrics are you already using? Different analyses of your customer base may use all, or some, of these metrics. There are no rules, as it all depends on your business and industry. Based on your current needs, you can create a satisfaction survey that contains the metrics you consider most relevant to gaining insights to solve your specific problem. 😉

Conclusion: Customer Loyalty in B2b Business

In this article, we have shared valuable tips that you can implement to build customer loyalty. 💘 However, there are a few important points to note:

• First and foremost, high-quality customer service and great products are the foundation of successful customer retention. But this is not enough. Customer retention requires going further and implementing real retention strategies and a concrete prospecting plan.
• Personalize the customer relationship: To build a long-term relationship of trust, you need to establish a strategy upstream. Customers should feel valuable and unique from their first experience and contact with your brand. 😘

Also, when communicating with you, it is important to know your customers: customers stay loyal to your brand when they feel cared for, they need quick support and to get the right answers.

💡 Save time, make your team more efficient and build customer loyalty by choosing a customer relationship management solution that gives you all the information about your customers at a glance, thanks to Waalaxy CRM :

In short, the key to successful loyalty is to treat every customer well 👑 (the big ones, as well as the small ones)!

Encourage customer loyalty and voice: Today, consumers have an average of 14 loyalty cards. 😅 Thus, brands don’t hesitate to reward their customers’ loyalty by awarding points that offer discounts, gifts or even access to additional services.

Moreover, customers like to interact freely with the company and other customers. 👋 Creating a community of customers around your brand allows for more engagement and a sense of belonging to your brand.

FAQ: Customer Loyalty Marketing

What is Customer Loyalty and Why is it Important?

Building customer loyalty is a major concern for companies of all sizes in all industries. 🧨 Because it contributes to the sustainability of your business, it is known that it is difficult to attract new customers in the long term, so keeping your current customers is cheaper than finding new ones.

The goal of customer retention is to maintain lasting relationships with customers, building trust. You this you must: 👇

• Provide offers that are easy to understand,
• Be your best advertisement (build word of mouth),
• Increase your company’s profits,
• Improve your image,
• Strengthen customer loyalty,
• Become more competitive.

👉 Customer loyalty is characterized by repeated purchases of products or services from the same brand or company. 💰 This reflects not only a buyer’s conscious or unconscious preference over a competitor’s offering, but also their attachment to your brand.

Customer retention is more than just a loyalty program, it’s about building lasting relationships with customers across multiple acquisition channels.

A successful loyalty process has many positive effects!

What are other Synonyms for Customer Loyalty?

You can simply say “Customer Loyalty”, or you can use other synonyms of this term like “Loyalty of customers”, “Loyalty of clients”, “Retaining customers”, “Build customer loyalty”, etc. 😎

There you go, ✨ now you know how to make your customer loyalty strategy successful!