Tips to building your own powerful loyalty programs and retention strategies

To grow your business sustainably it’s important to not only gain new customers, but retain your old ones too. On this page, we explore actionable tips tailored specifically for founders to help them build their own effective loyalty programs and retention strategies.

Books:

1. The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits, and Lasting Value by Frederick F. Reichheld – This book examines the link between customer loyalty, profitability, and business growth. It offers actionable insights for building and maintaining customer loyalty over time.
2. The Membership Economy: Find Your Super Users, Master the Forever Transaction, and Build Recurring Revenue by Robbie Kellman Baxter – In this book, Baxter examines how successful companies are using radically new membership models, subscription-based formats, and freemium pricing structures to grow their customer base.
3. The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty by Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick DeLisi – This book offers insights into how companies can improve their customer service by implementing changes to reduce customer effort.

Articles and guides:

1. 22 Examples of Customer Retention Strategies That Actually Work by Hubspot – This article by Hubspot reviews some of the most useful customer retention strategies that the biggest brands currently use to inspire loyalty.
2. 14 Customer Retention Strategies That Work In 2024 by Forbes – Forbes shares 14 must-know customer retention strategies that will work in 2024, from feedback to gamification.
3. 16 customer loyalty programmes of 2024 + how they work by Zendesk – This article by Zendesk highlights everything you need to know about customer loyalty programmes, including what they are, how they work and examples of some of the best ones out there.
4. The Beginner’s Guide to Building a Customer Loyalty Program by Hubspot – This guide breaks down step by step how to build a successful loyalty program. It also links to a downloadable, actionable guide for your perusal.
5. Why Customers Leave Platforms — and How to Retain Them by Harvard Business Review – Discover exactly what causes customers to leave platforms, and the six factors you should consider to avoid this happening.

Podcasts:

1. The Loyalty Minute by Rob Gallo – Hosted by customer loyalty expert Rob Gallo, this podcast explores loyalty marketing strategies, customer retention tactics and insights into building successful loyalty programs.
2. Loyalty Discussions by White Label Loyalty – Brought to you by White Label Loyalty, Loyalty Discussions is a podcast all about customer loyalty, retention and rewards. They interview top industry experts to give you a roadmap on how to create customer loyalty, so you can keep your customers coming back for more.

Tools:

There are a variety of tools out there that can help businesses build powerful loyalty programs. These tools are built specifically to grow with your business, so you can start with the basics and seamlessly expand your program as your business develops.

1. io – Smile.io is self-proclaimed to be the world’s largest reward program provider. It allows businesses to create customized loyalty programs, reward customers for purchases and referrals, and track loyalty program performance.
2. LoyaltyLion – LoyaltyLion is a data-driven loyalty and engagement platform. They offer features for incentivising customer actions, segmenting customers and analysing program effectiveness to improve retention.
3. Yotpo Loyalty & Referrals – Yotpo provides the most advanced solutions for email and SMS marketing, loyalty and referrals, subscriptions, reviews and visual UGC.

Tools for improving customer loyalty can be extremely powerful, but also expensive – especially if you’re a small business owner. So, before you invest in any tool, it’s worth weighing up how much the tool will actually help you, or whether your money is better spent elsewhere.

The above resources outline some of the best ways that founders can keep their customers, whether it be by encouraging loyalty, improving their customers’ experience or reducing customer effort.