Loyalty Marketing: Build Brand Engagement and Increase Sales

With so many competitors, how do you make sure that your most important shoppers stay with you long term? How can you ensure true brand loyalty? We believe that loyalty campaigns can play an important part in creating a long-term strategy to connect with what matters most to shoppers.

What is shopper loyalty?

Customer loyalty is a shopper’s commitment to shop with you above other retailers. It refers to their conscious choice of choosing your brand for various reasons such as your product selection, quality, customer service or brand. 

Long term Customer loyalty is the ultimate goal of every retailer as It costs less marketing spend to keep an existing customer than to recruit someone new. 

Why is shopper loyalty important?

Brand Loyalty is a reflection of shoppers rational and emotional attitudes towards a retailers brand. Connecting to what matters most to people while also offering quality products and a flawless shopping experience are the building blocks to a healthy brand.

True loyalty also leads to advocacy and referrals when shoppers actively recruit new customers on your behalf.

How do you maintain loyalty?

There are many ways you can reward shopper loyalty.

Ultimately, however, your loyalty marketing strategy depends on relevant shopper insights and a deep understanding of what is important to the consumer. The best loyalty strategies tend to span across a retailers business and truly reward shoppers in a meaningful way.

What is a loyalty strategy?

Most marketing strategies focus on acquiring new shoppers, from creating an optimised website and having active social media to sign-up calls to action and free trial promotions. But a truly sustainable marketing strategy includes activities that target existing shoppers.

A shopper retention strategy is designed to keep your existing clientele engaged with your brand. It also inspires previous shoppers to make a repeat purchase and stay loyal to your brand. The building blocks to an effective retention strategy include:

•    Track and analyse your sales metrics
•    Gather and act on shopper feedback
•    Communicate with shoppers online
•    Build trust through your product quality and customer service
•    Offer unique products or services that solve their pain points
•    Implement a loyalty scheme or reward system

How do loyalty campaigns work?

Shopper loyalty campaigns give your best customers rewards just for shopping with you. By providing a meaningful thank you to high spending shopper groups, loyalty rewards are an effective way to increase footfall, average basket size and advocacy.

In addition to establishing brand loyalty, shopper rewards campaigns can result in a YOY sales increase of 3% resulting in true business growth.

When should you add loyalty campaigns to your business?

Consumer rewards campaigns can link to key trading periods or important milestones in a marketing calendar. Themes such as food waste, community, recycling and back to school have particular importance to key shopper groups.

How does consumer loyalty affect your business?

It’s important for your business to invest in marketing campaigns that boost brand awareness and visibility. But it’s equally or arguably even more important for you to develop ways of creating customer loyalty.

Identify what you need to do to retain existing shoppers. Once they’re familiar with your products or services and happy with what you have to offer, they will willingly bring in business from their friends and family.

To successfully carry out a loyalty campaign, you need to understand the customer loyalty ladder. It plays an important part in identifying which strategies will work on the types of shoppers that do business with you.

What is the customer loyalty ladder?

The loyalty ladder is a systematic way of segmenting consumers based on their brand engagement. It helps you identify your prospects, first-time clients, repeat purchasers, business supporters and brand advocates.

The loyalty ladder gives you an accurate estimate of how much of your audience is likely to engage with and remain loyal to your brand. It helps you determine the best approach to increase purchase frequency.

Why is the loyalty ladder important?

The customer loyalty ladder matters to your business because it steadily transforms leads into loyal patrons. 

Overall, the concept of the loyalty ladder helps you come up with more effective marketing campaigns and brand management strategies. It helps you identify what attracts new consumers, what inspires them to explore the rest of your products or services, and what you can do to keep them engaged.

How do you move shoppers up the loyalty ladder?

There are three basic principles of the customer loyalty ladder. First, some prefer stable, long-term brand relationships. Second, some shoppers are more profitable than others. And third, some of them will be more responsive to specific business strengths or product specifications.

There’s no one way for shoppers to move up the loyalty ladder. Each level of brand loyalty requires a different approach — our team helps you determine your next logical step. With the right loyalty marketing strategy, you can move shoppers up the loyalty ladder and keep them engaged.

Wrap-up

New shopper acquisition can cost more than the efforts you put into keeping existing ones. Marketing to new shoppers would include letting them know your brand exists, telling them what products or services you provide, and explaining why they should choose you over the competitors.

With existing shoppers, however, they already know what you bring to the table. You can easily skip the marketing steps for new shoppers and proceed with a solid brand loyalty strategy. This could include loyalty points or referral awards.

Many retailers use shopper loyalty schemes to attract their target audience, retain existing clientele and maintain steady profitability. It’s also a helpful way of identifying shoppers as profitable or unprofitable. As a result, you can develop your products or services to become more relevant to profitable shoppers.