7 Things the Most Loyal Brands Do Differently
Written by Tom Peace, CEO & Founder of Sway Outcomes
Tom Peace is the CEO and founder of Sway Outcomes, a global customer engagement consultancy, and the former leader of The Loyalty People. He has advised brands including Sally Beauty, Wingstop, Vans, The North Face and Saudi German Health.
Every brand wants customers who stay, spend more and bring their friends. Very few get there, and it’s rarely down to budget. Here are the seven habits that set the top performers apart and how to start building them in your own business.
What does loyalty look like at the top?
Over the last few weeks, I’ve walked through Sway’s Customer Engagement Maturity Model, which has six levels, from the foundations to the mistakes that keep brands stuck in the middle. This week is about the top of the staircase.
Levels 5 and 6 are where loyalty and advocacy meet retention and reengagement. Customers choose you, tell others about you and come back when they drift. It’s also where we score hardest because it’s the easiest place to overrate yourself.
The brands up here don’t have a magic mechanic. They have habits that compound over time. That fits a principle we hold at Sway: loyalty is an outcome, not a mechanic.
Here are the seven habits we see again and again. Curious which of these your brand already has? Email me at tom@swayoutcomes.com and we’ll run a free Customer Engagement Accelerator (CEA) report that scores you against all seven.
The 7 habits of loyal brands
They recognise people, not just purchases: Rewards are transactional. Spend this, get that. Recognition is emotional. It tells a customer, “We know you, and you matter to us.”
The best programmes blend both. Sephora’s Beauty Insider programme in the United States has three tiers: Insider, Very Important Beauty Insider (VIB) and Rouge. Benefits include exclusive samples, a birthday gift and access to events, with some benefits varying by tier.
Notice what tiers really do. They give customers a status worth keeping.
The practical test is simple. Pick your top 100 customers. Would any of them notice if they were treated exactly like someone buying from you for the first time? If the answer is no, you’ve built a rewards scheme, not a loyalty strategy.
They build a community around the brand: The most loyal customers don’t just have a relationship with the brand. They have one with each other. That might be a running club, an owners’ group, a members’ forum or a regular event in the store.
The format matters less than the feeling of belonging. People leave a brand. They’re much slower to leave a group of people they like. Start small. One event, one group, one host. Then listen to what members actually want before you scale it.
They let customers create with them: Creating together is the step beyond community. Customers help shape products, test ideas, write reviews, share photos and produce content the brand could never make on its own. It gives you better products and more authentic content. People value what they’ve helped to build.
The mistake we see is treating content created by customers as free advertising. Customers can tell when they’re being used. The brands that get this right give genuine credit, show what changed because of the feedback and make contributing easy.
If you ask for ideas, close the loop. “You said, we did” is one of the most underused sentences in marketing.
They charge for membership and earn it: Paid membership is the clearest test of loyalty there is. Customers are telling you, with their own money, that the relationship is worth it.
The upside is significant. McKinsey’s 2020 survey found that members of paid loyalty programmes were 60 percent more likely to increase their spending with the brand after subscribing. Free programmes increased that likelihood by 30 percent.
But done badly, it’s just a subscription people forget to cancel. Then remember to cancel.
The paid programmes that work share three traits:
The value is obvious within the first month, so members feel they’ve earned the fee back early.
The benefits are things customers already want, like free delivery, a daily drink or early access, rather than points.
The brand keeps adding value over time, so renewing feels like an easy decision.
If you can’t explain why a customer is better off paying you every month, strengthen the free experience first.
They spot drift before it becomes churn: This is the heart of level 6. Most brands notice a customer has gone when it’s too late. A report on lapsed customers lands three months late, and a generic “We miss you” email goes out.
The most mature brands watch for early signals. Visits getting less frequent. Basket sizes shrinking. App opens dropping. A complaint that wasn’t fully resolved. Predictive models and artificial intelligence (AI) can flag these patterns in real time, so the brand can act while the customer is still listening.
A drifting customer doesn’t always need a discount. Sometimes they need a fix, an apology or a reminder of what they liked about you. You don’t need a data science team to start. Pick two or three behaviours that come before churn in your business and set up a simple trigger for each.
They feel the same everywhere: Loyal customers don’t think in channels. They think in experiences. If the app knows your preferences but the store team doesn’t, or if the website offers one price and the contact centre offers another, trust leaks away. Not dramatically. Just a little, every time.
The best brands make sure what a customer sees, hears and gets is consistent across every touchpoint. Same recognition, same tone, same offer, same memory of who you are. In our Customer Engagement Accelerator (CEA) work, this is one of the most common gaps between a brand’s level 5 ambition and its level 3 reality.
For a quick check, walk through your own customer journey in three different channels this week. Note every moment when the brand forgets who you are.
They make the customer a boardroom job: This is the habit that makes the other six possible. In the most loyal brands, responsibility for the customer relationship goes beyond marketing, customer relationship management (CRM) and the loyalty team. It’s owned at the top. Leaders know the retention numbers as well as the sales numbers.
Without that, every function optimises its own patch. Marketing chases acquisition. Finance cuts the programme that looks like a cost. Nobody owns the whole relationship.
If you’re a leader reading this, ask one question at your next meeting. Who here is accountable for whether our best customers stay?
How to start building these habits
You don’t need all seven at once. Nobody builds them in a single year. Here’s how I’d approach it:
Score yourself honestly against each habit, based on what customers can experience today, not what’s on the roadmap.
Pick the one or two habits closest to your current strengths. A brand with great stores might start with community. A brand with rich data might start with predicting drift.
Check the foundations. Most of these habits rely on a shared view of the customer across teams. If that’s missing, fix it first.
The good news is that none of this depends on size. We regularly see smaller brands outperform much bigger ones at levels 5 and 6, simply because they use what they have well. In my interview, I talk more about why customers really stay and what brands often get wrong.
Frequently asked questions
What makes customers loyal to a brand? Customers stay loyal when they feel recognised, get consistent value and trust the brand to treat them well every time. Rewards help, but emotional connection, community and a great experience usually matter more.
Are paid loyalty programmes worth it? They can be if the value is clear and immediate. McKinsey found that members of paid loyalty programmes were 60 percent more likely to increase their spending with the brand after subscribing. But a paid programme only works on top of a strong free experience.
How do you measure customer loyalty? Look beyond membership numbers. Track retention, repeat purchase rate, customer lifetime value and how many customers recommend you. The most useful signal is often how many of your best customers are still active a year later.
Build your loyalty habits
The most loyal brands aren’t the biggest spenders. They’re the ones that recognise people, earn their place every day and make the customer everyone’s job. Pick one habit this month and do it properly. Then pick the next.
If you’d like an outside view, my team at Sway Outcomes runs a free Customer Engagement Accelerator. We’ll score your brand across all six levels, show how close you are to building the habits of the most loyal brands and highlight your quickest wins. To get your free CEA report, email me at tom@swayoutcomes.com or message me on LinkedIn.
Read more from Tom Peace
Tom Peace, CEO & Founder of Sway Outcomes
Tom Peace is a customer engagement strategist who helps brands turn transactions into lasting relationships. Under his leadership, The Loyalty People became a globally recognised brand within the loyalty industry, with a rapidly growing and highly engaged following. He went on to found Sway Outcomes, a consultancy that goes beyond loyalty programme strategy to cover every aspect of customer engagement. Its maturity model has six levels and shows brands exactly where they stand and what to do next. By combining deep sector expertise with diagnostics enabled by artificial intelligence (AI), Tom delivers strategic clarity in weeks rather than months for brands such as Sally Beauty, Wingstop, Vans, The North Face and Saudi German Health.
