Brand Loyalty: Is it Important?

This week I’m going to answer the question in the title right away; the answer is yes, brand loyalty is incredibly important. It allows you to create a more sustainable customer base than hoping for new customers all the time, which gives you a steadier income stream, and allows for you to succeed more as a business. With that out of the way, let’s take a look at how to increase brand loyalty and keep those customers coming back.

Customer Experience

I’m not going to bother burying the lede here at all, the most important thing for customer retention is the customer experience. Pretty obvious stuff, really. How do you make sure the customer experience is something that will keep people coming back over and over again, though? Everything that you can do boils down to treating your customers like they are people instead of means to your end of wanting money. Make sure that your customer service is top notch. If you see potential problems before you launch your service make sure you address them before you launch, not after you get enough complaints. Generally, and I have no statistics to back this up, just experience, for every complaint you have there will be others who just decided to go somewhere else to fill the need or want that you were filling. It is of the utmost importance in a world where there are countless competitors for everything you do for you to place a premium on the experience of your customers.

Brand Presence

Next up is the presence that your brand has. Not everyone can be a Coca-Cola and basically invent holidays through their presence, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make sure that your brand is out there. This can be as simple as regular social media posts or as complex as graphic design and video production to highlight what it is you’re trying to do with your brand. Brand presence is an entirely creative endeavor, so the sky's the limit in what you can do with the right people.

Product Quality

Product quality is the most obvious of the things that will bring customers back to you. If you produce a good product that leads to no complaints on the customer’s end, they will be more likely to come back to you for other things. It’s the most straightforward thing in marketing and customer retention. If your product is good your customers will return because you have built trust between your brand and the customer.

Conclusion

Creating brand loyalty is among the most important things you can do in order to survive as a brand. The ways of creating loyal customers have not really changed at any point, but they are often forgotten in pursuit of new customers. The problem when you pursue new customers at the expense of your previous customers is that if you fail to entice the new people and lose the old people you are left with absolutely nothing. It is my personal belief that customer retention should be placed above bringing in new customers, because if you keep your customers they will bring in new customers due to appreciating what you do. So in closing, my advice is to be sure you keep your customers happy and loyal and allow yourself to grow from that base.