Building Customer Loyalty in 5 Simple Steps

From collecting better data to speaking to your customers in ways that resonate, there are many different steps businesses can take to build loyalty among their customer base.

Thanx teamed up with Main Street Hub to bring merchants more information on ways they can build customer loyalty — combining our expertise in loyalty, data, and social media, we covered a ton of ground in the 45-minute webinar. Here’s a recap for those of you who missed it.

5 Simple Steps — Simplified!

Loyalty is necessary for a successful business.

Customer loyalty, at its core, is a simple prospect: keep your customers happy, and they’ll continue to give you their business. However, in practice, things aren’t always so cut and dry: 70% of customers visit a business only once and never return (we like to refer to these customers as “promiscuous”), and earning loyalty is getting harder and harder.

A common misconception about loyalty is that it’s synonymous with “rewards.” Rewards can be one element of a loyalty strategy, but building loyalty isn’t just about giving things away for free. Here are a few ways companies can go above and beyond the “buy 5, get the 6th free!” campaign to keep customers coming back.

1. Gather Customer Data

Data is the hot topic for brands who are looking to advance their operations in some way. Starting with Amazon and moving into brands like Starbucks, companies are starting to leverage customer data in really creative ways in order to better communicate with their customers — and ultimately, to drive more sales. One of the best cases for gathering customer data is simply understanding who your customers are: Your top customers drive the vast majority of your sales; the top 25% of your customers are responsible for nearly 70% of your revenue in most cases.

But beyond VIPs, it’s important to understand how to tailor your messages to your different types of customers. Behavioral data comes in handy here — understanding the unique cadence of each of your customers can help you deliver the right messages and offers to the right people at the right time. That level of personalization is only possible when you collect complete customer data.

2. Use Data to Drive ROI

The reason that we implement loyalty programs isn’t solely to delight customers (although that does help) — it’s because customer loyalty, well-executed, is incredibly profitable. is maybe the sexiest part of gathering customer data, because it means you’re making money from your data. And, since we’re all running businesses here, making money is kind of the objective. There are endless ways to put your data can work for you, but ULTIMATELY the goal is to keep your customers coming back.

At Thanx, we use customer data to fuel our automated marketing programs like Winback and VIP — these programs automatically engage customers based on their past behavior (frequency and spend) with targeted offers that drive real, measurable results. Your customer data is only as good as what you do with it, so make sure it’s not gathering dust within your POS.

3. Use Data to Drive Better Experiences

A great loyalty program enables one-to-one conversations via powerful feedback channels such as Net Promoter Score, and contextualizes feedback with complete customer data profiles, so you know who you’re responding to and can see that customer’s complete history.

We’ve found that just asking a customer about their experience after a purchase increases their likelihood to return by 7%. Receiving a reply from the business doubles that increase to 14%. So whether or not you’re evaluating the results of your NPS and feedback data, simply asking your customers how their experience was can drive results (that’s something you can implement today!).

4. Respond to All of Your Reviews

At Thanx, we encourage our merchants to have their general managers responding to the reviews left on Thanx at their locations. But even beyond direct NPS and feedback, it’s key to pay attention to the questions you’re receiving over other channels. Main Street Hub breaks this into 3 key tips:

1. Address people directly. Use their name! Make it personal.

2. Say thank you (or say “thanx”, as we say around here)!

3. Keep an open line of communication

5. Stay Connected with Your Customers

Make sure that when you open up your brand to customer engagement via social platforms, you’re not neglecting these channels. Keep posting engaging content, asking your customers for feedback, and participating on these channels.