4 powerful ways you can build brand loyalty

Shoppers have countless options when looking for new things to buy online. A simple search can lead to thousands of businesses that are all offering similar products. If you want your online store to thrive in the digital world, you have to build brand loyalty.

Consumers are likely to commit to a brand if they have a stellar experience from start to finish. The result is these people will become advocates and tell others about your company, which builds brand awareness. At the same time, they will come back to your store for repeat purchases and spend more than the average first-time customer!

You have to develop a detailed strategy to ensure as many people as possible stay loyal to your company after their first purchase. Today, we will explore several ways you can build stronger connections with your customers and strengthen brand loyalty. Our tips will cover understanding your audience, incentivizing first-time customers, building communities, and more.

Let’s dive in!

Research Your Target Audience

It’s impossible to build loyalty if you don’t know what your audience expects from your product or service. There are far too many examples of business owners doing what they think their customers need instead of actually listening to their pain points and goals.

We suggest researching your customers by using your Google Analytics data. You can learn about where users spend their time, how they found your website, and where they left your website. Use this data to figure out why people are landing on your site and bolster those elements.

For instance, if you own a marketing publication, and almost 80% of your readers go to the email marketing posts, you would know a significant pain point for your readers. Similarly, a SaaS with a company blog can use this information to uncover prominent pain points and resolve them through feature updates.

You should also put polls on your website and email registration forms that ask specific questions. If we used our previous example, you could ask new subscribers what kind of marketing they want to know more about. Not only can you use this information to personalize your email offers, but you can also learn more about your audience as a whole.

Go Above and Beyond with Incentives

Once someone buys a product from your store, you have to take steps to ensure that they come back again. The best way to keep users engaged is by asking them to subscribe to one of your marketing lists. In many cases, this will be an email or push notification list.

Both options give you the freedom and flexibility to incentivize customers by sending personalized offers and content. Research shows that customized offers result in 20% more sales. So, if you have an online pet store, and a customer buys cat products and signs up for your email list, you can build their loyalty by sending them relevant offers featuring products for cats.

Push notifications are equally helpful for businesses that want to go above and beyond. These types of alerts have a 10.53% subscription rate in the United States, which means you have a one in ten chance of getting a new visitor subscribed to your brand by offering a push alert option.

A rewards program will also keep existing customers loyal to your company. We are all familiar with these systems to a degree. Some businesses offer cashback on purchases in the form of store credit, while others offer a free product after a specific number of purchases. Both strategies effectively get people to come back to your store for repeat sales and engagement.

Build and Foster Communities

Another big part of loyalty is a sense of community. You don’t want your customers to feel separated from each other. The result is people will not connect with your brand because there are not enough interactions to forge a bond.

One powerful way you can bring people together is by creating a Facebook group. An astounding 2.74 billion people log in to Facebook every month. You can bet that your target audience is spending their time on this platform and willing to contribute to the community.

Your group doesn’t have to necessarily have to focus on just your product. The fact that you’re willing to bring everyone together to talk about your industry as a whole will attract new followers. If those people have never visited your website, they may end up clicking through and becoming a customer. That’s the best part about groups on Facebook. Sometimes, people will find your group before they ever discover your website.

YouTube is another excellent platform to build a community. When you consider that 1.9 billion people log in to this social media site every month, it’s easy to see why business owners and marketing teams start communities on YouTube.

You can create videos that show behind-the-scenes footage at your company, answer common questions, hold live events, and much more, all from your YouTube channel. These seemingly small interactions add up and hold together the community that you want to stay loyal to your brand.

Look for Opportunities to Help

Finally, our best advice is to look for ways to offer visitors and existing customers free help. In other words, what can you do to improve the lives of your prospects and turn them into customers?

You can use some of the tips we’ve mentioned above with industry-specific techniques to get more people committed to your company. For instance, you could collect feedback on your most popular YouTube video and create a blog post plus a follow-up video to address some of the recurring points.

As people begin to see that you genuinely want to help them overcome problems or reach goals with your product, they will start to look at what you’re offering. You need to prove that you’re willing to provide value, even before money exchanges hands.

If you decide to create forums on your website or social media groups, make sure to spend plenty of time chatting with users when they ask questions. People are more likely to commit to your brand if you’re there to help them every time they have questions or concerns.

Conclusion

Brand loyalty is an essential factor that all businesses need for success. As you grow your audience and the same people keep coming back to your site, you’ll begin to see an increase in sales and engagement. You have to keep impressing these folks if you want to continuously grow your list of current customers.

The thing is, building brand loyalty doesn’t happen overnight. You have to develop a robust strategy across multiple marketing platforms and put your target audience’s needs front and center.