8 Top Tactics to Drive Customer Loyalty Through Your Website

If you want your business to be successful, increasing customer loyalty is a critical piece of the puzzle.

In fact, customer loyalty is the missing link that will help you turn a middle-of-the-road business into a household name. Customer loyalty can turn one-off buyers into brand evangelists who keep coming back again and again when done correctly.

As it turns out, though, there are no easy ways to create customer loyalty. It comes from good, old-fashioned hard work.

In this post, we’ll discuss a few of the top ways you can generate customer loyalty for your business and how to leverage it to help your brand grow.

Let’s dive in.

Customer Loyalty, Defined

Just to make sure we’re all on the same page, let’s take a look at what customer loyalty means.

Put simply: customer loyalty is what happens when a customer conducts a transaction with a brand on an ongoing basis.

Sounds simple, right? Sure, but there’s a lot that goes into creating it. Ultimately, loyalty comes in all different shapes and sizes, depending on the brand.

According to some brands, loyalty is more than just a customer’s buying behavior. These brands define loyalty as brand evangelism, as well. According to other companies, loyalty is what happens when a customer will only buy from a single brand, regardless of how much they share about that brand after a purchase.

No matter how you define it, brand loyalty is a critical part of a great company. Creating it is essential to long-term success and upward mobility.

After all, recent research suggests that it is 6-7x more expensive to acquire a new customer than to sell to an existing one.

With that in mind, it’s clear that customer loyalty matters and that it’s in your best interests to invest in it. Additionally, about 80% of a company’s future profits will come from just 20% of its customers.

Customer Loyalty by the Numbers

Not convinced that customer loyalty is that important? Here are some critical statistics to chew on:

• 65% of the average company’s business comes from existing customers
• 43% of customers are willing to spend more money with companies they’re loyal to
• Customers who are highly engaged with and loyal to a company make purchases 90% more often
• 84% of U.S. consumers report that they’re loyal to a few specific retailers
• Nearly 90% of buyers will pay more for a better customer service experience
• Companies that want to build long-term business relationships with new customers will spend 16 times more than they would to nurture the loyalty of existing customers

No matter what business you’re in, customer loyalty matters. Cultivating it will save your brand money and make it easier to scale your company in the long term.

8 Tips That Drive Customer Loyalty

Whether you’re a new brand or an established company, these tips can help you generate customer loyalty through your website.

1. Create a sales development process

What gets measured gets managed. That’s as true for a sales development process as it is with anything else.

To ensure your customers can move through your pipeline in a streamlined and simplified way, build a sales development process for your brand.

For best results, create a sales development process with the end goal in mind. Every CTA on your website (along with all your sales team’s interactions with customers via chatbot or other methods) should be working toward moving the customer to the end goal.

2. Focus on good communication with customers

Above all else, commit yourself to good communication with customers. Good service is what makes loyal customers. Ensure your customer service team is properly equipped and trained for good communication. This will provide positive customer interactions.

3. Conduct data center monitoring

Datacenter monitoring makes it easy for customers to get in touch with your sales team. Look at how this page for data center monitoring provides CTAs that stand out on the page. They encourage users to contact the sales team.

They have a process in place which has been set up as a result of continuous experimentation.

4. Build an engaged community

The web is becoming increasingly social. With that in mind, investing in social channels is a good way to cultivate customer loyalty for your company.

If you haven’t already, turn your content team into a social machine. Your team should create a stream of steady social media posts on-brand with your company’s mission, focus, and voice.

For example, VPNGuru creates a series of reviews for the top VPN services. They not only create articles to improve their search rankings and SEO, but they also create videos on YouTube to stay visible on platforms that their audience uses.

Source: VPNGuru

The result will be an engaged following that looks forward to what you post next.

5. Generate social proof

One great way to boost customer loyalty is to get people talking about their experiences and switch your brand.

Use a site like Yelp or G2 to collect customer reviews and testimonials or share user-generated content that focuses on telling the story of how and why people use your products.

When you showcase the content produced directly by your most loyal customers, you’ll get a head-start on boosting your customer loyalty across the board. For a brand that does it well, look no further than Swagbucks.

The brand is excellent at witty social commentary and interacting with customers on social media platforms.

Source: Twitter

6. Generate an unbeatable UX

UX (which stands for user experience) is a powerful tool for driving ongoing customer loyalty and engagement. While virtually every brand today has a website, not all of them offer a great UX.

As you establish and fine-tune your online presence, make sure you’re paying special attention to your UX. One of the best ways to do this is to collect website feedback as you grow and scale.

While you may think your site looks nice, your customers might not think it functions well. Heeding this feedback is a critical step in developing a functional, inviting, user-friendly website that makes your customers want to keep coming back.

While this is a time-consuming process, it pays dividends down the road. You can use a chatbot to take feedback from website visitors. You can even take interviews of your most valuable users to get honest feedback about your products and services.

For an example of a brand that dominates UX, turn to Amazon.

Amazon has won the UX game with a streamlined interface and convenient options, like one-click checkout.

Source: Amazon

7. Poll customers

Collecting customer feedback is an essential component of customer loyalty, but it's something many brands are simply afraid to do.

The more you talk to and listen to your customers, though, the better off you’ll be in the long run. As you seek to maximize your customer acquisition efforts, it's smart to invest in retaining your current customers.

Remember that customer churn is very expensive, and you want to keep your existing customer happy enough to keep coming back. It’s also important that they recommend your brand to friends, loved ones, and associates.

With that in mind, don’t stop learning. Keep polling your current customers to find out what they’re happy with, what they’re not, and what they do differently. It’s an excellent way to improve your offerings and keep customers coming back.

If you can keep your customers happy and satisfied with your products and services, they are more likely to recommend you to their friends and family.

8. Build your team

Build your network of in-house and outsourced team members so you have the right skills for the job. Building a hybrid team has advantages.

The more great people you can call on at any given moment, the better. Plus, having a large network of team members means you’ll have a strong culture and a network large enough to carry your company's mission forward.

Team building is one of the most important aspects of winning against your competitors. Focus on building a strong team that can take challenges head-on while staying innovative.

Building Your Customer Loyalty Starts With Baby Steps

Apple-like customer loyalty doesn't happen overnight. Instead, you’ve got to build it through a series of focused, dedicated efforts.

When you commit yourself to your brand and growing your network, you can quickly start to reap the benefits of customer loyalty.

Even a few simple changes to your website can go a long way toward building your brand and encouraging more customers to visit your site each day.