It should go without saying that customers are the fire behind the roaring success of a given business. Growth and logistics are key ancillary factors, but any failure to properly engage a customer base is an existential one – and especially so in a market of reduced spending.
Not only does a business need to foster healthy sales figures, but also healthy long-term customer relationships. Customer loyalty is vital to securing long-term income streams, and also a signifier that your business is doing something right.
Typically, businesses engender loyalty in customers through the offering of tangible rewards, whether in the form of free items or future discounts. The loyalty program is a time-tested method for boosting repeat customers and is useful for tracking consumer behaviours alongside incentivising long-term customer-business relationships.
But consumer loyalty goes much deeper than the offering of additional provisions. There are different kinds of loyalty, which have their impacts and benefits on your business and can be encouraged in their ways. What are they?
Four Types of Brand Loyalty – How They Help Your Business?
1. Transactional Loyalty
Transactional loyalty is the simplest form of loyalty, and also the most fickle. It is the loyalty displayed by customers that regularly crop up to take advantage of any sales and offers you advertise. They enjoy your product, but not enough to buy at full price – and if you minimise your discounts and offers, they may dwindle. Conversely, though, shrewd limited-time offers can bring them out in force and up your sales volume at crucial moments.
2. Behavioural Loyalty
Behavioural loyalty is a demographic concern, describing the purchasing habits of those at the core of your sales and marketing strategy. This kind of loyalty can be used to reverse-engineer your sales information, and figure out your true demographic for more targeted marketing.
3. Social Loyalty
Social loyalty is attributed to the behaviour of committed customers concerning your business’s social media presence. Customers that engage with and respond to your social media posts are loyal to the point of active engagement, and particularly prone to engage with more targeted, specific kinds of social media marketing.
These loyal customers are digital champions for your brand, fuelling organic increases to reach. Their loyalty can be inexpensively rewarded through a higher likelihood of winning any social media competitions you run.
4. Emotional Loyalty
Emotional loyalty describes the visceral attachment certain customers may feel to a product or service. This usually emerges from a long-term pattern of consistent repeat purchases, as they get invested in the various tiers and rewards of your loyalty program or exclusive mailing list.
Emotional loyalty can also breed another form of loyalty, in the form of advocacy. A consumer that feels strongly about your product or service, whether as a recipient of exclusive perks or simply as a regularly engaged core customer, is much more likely to spread that enthusiasm with their direct network.
This kind of direct, word-of-mouth marketing costs you very little as a business – and yet it is extremely effective for organic growth. Incentive marketing ideas can boost this behaviour, where loyal customers get discounts for referring friends or family.