Are Your Customers Loyal Enough?

Kate Supino

May 07, 2015

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Cultivating customer loyalty is a proven method to ensure repeat business.

But finding new and innovating ways to instill customer loyalty is a challenging proposition.

An excess of competition and cutthroat business practices can make it challenging to instill customer loyalty in an ever-changing market landscape.

Here are three ways to build and maintain customer loyalty in your online or brick and mortar business.

1. Build Your Brand

Before you can think about instilling customer loyalty, you have to give your customers something solid to be loyal to.

Build your brand identity. Make sure you have an effective logo. Use that logo everywhere you publish. Use the logo verbally if you use video or television to advertise your brand.

Customers are happy to be loyal to brands when they are evident and seen. Make sure your brand can be recognized by giving it the visibility it deserves.

2. Build a Club

People like to belong to clubs and organizations.

For a long time, people loved to say they were a "card-carrying member" of this or that organization, like the Elks Club or the Lions Club, etc.

As the following article looks at, this is one of the main reasons why loyalty card programs really took off in terms of popularity.

Most national retail brands have already taken advantage of loyalty cards.

Whenever you check out at Walgreens, Winn Dixie or CVS, to name just three, you're asked if you have your store brand card with you to scan. If you don't have your brand customer loyalty card with you, you won't be able to enjoy the discounted prices displayed throughout the store.

Loyalty cards are powerful incentives to shop at particular stores because of the savings they represent.

3. Make it Worthwhile

No one can pass up on savings.

If you make your customer loyalty plan profitable to consumers and worthwhile to them, you'll have customers coming back for more with little or no effort on your part.

Consider the recent promotion that Winn Dixie offered to their customers.

Gather enough points on the customer loyalty card, and customers could receive a free kitchen appliance. Points were based on dollars spent on groceries. Qualified customers could choose from a coffee maker, blender, slow cooker, electric griddle or toaster oven, all at no additional charge.

The popularity of the promotion was so great that supplies ran out, and Winn Dixie had to backorder thousands of prizes.

The point is that the frenzied spending that ensued to rack up points was unexpected and worth whatever it took to construct the giveaway.

Trying to build customer loyalty may be no more difficult than the concept of "build it and they will come."

But you have to have something built.

Either have an incentive program; a brand name to identify with or a place to belong.

If you have all three, you will hit it out of the ballpark.