Measure the commitment of your customers to your brand. Find out if your customers return and recommend your brand to others.
This article is useful for:
marketing specialists,
product owners,
company management.
Create a survey for free
Learn why to care about loyalty
Get an overview of the basic metrics related to loyalty
Be inspired by specific survey questions
Get to know Survio’s features that save tons of your time
Six months ago, I got a trial version of a project management software. I was pretty amazed by the in-app messages that guided me through the software. I found everything quickly and the software met our needs in full. I decided to subscribe for one year. However, to implement the software into our workflow wasn’t such a piece of cake. I turned to the support. Daniel, our dedicated success manager, took us through the onboarding and patiently helped us overcome the issues we had encountered. After all, this project management software saves us tons of time and we are still improving ourselves in using it. Every month we are getting information about new features, invitations to workshops and tips to read some useful use cases. I am excited about this content! I have already told my friends from other companies about this software and guess what! They subscribed to the software, too! Now we can share the experience together. Next year our company is going to subscribe again and we won’t think about switching to any other software for a long time.
— Miriam, loyal customer
Maybe you don't sell SaaS projects, but would you also like to have customers as loyal as Miriam? First, let’s dive into customer loyalty to understand the concept. Then you will get top-notch tips on how to create a customer loyalty survey, so it can be monitored and measured. You will also get a clear explanation of why to do it.
What is customer loyalty?
Don’t mix it up with customer satisfaction. Miriam had to be satisfied in the past so she could be loyal in the future. It is all about how ready your customer base is for the future to drive your revenue.
Why is Miriam a perfect example of a loyal customer?
She wants to return to the brand and make other purchases (Purchasing power).
She evangelizes her friends and motivates them to make a purchase, too (customer advocacy, using Word of Mouth).
She doesn’t even have the need to try products from other manufacturers (customer retention).
To sum up, customers are loyal when they are continually committed to a brand because of positive customer experience and high level of customer satisfaction.
Why measuring customer loyalty? Who is it useful for?
Honestly, everyone who is interested in the growth of a company should be interested in customer loyalty. Why? If you think about it, it's the revenue and costs that have the final say. We need to generate revenue in the future and have sustainable costs (which means we optimize our costs to infinity).
If you haven’t done it before, compare your costs of acquiring a new customer and the costs of persuading an existing customer to make another purchase. We bet that the latter option won't get as expensive as the first one. Therefore, if you manage to turn the newcomers into returning customers, you optimize costs of customer acquisition. And if you manage to turn your customers into customers like Miriam, they will acquire new customers for you on their own. And it is free of charge. It sounds great, doesn’t it?
That’s why customer loyalty is a very important value for marketers, product owners or managers. When talking about retaining customers, we prepared for you another usecase How to Reduce Customer Churn in SaaS Business? where you’ll gain even more insights on this topic.
Learn how you and your organization can benefit from using Survio.
What metrics provide information about customer loyalty?
Share of the wallet
How much is your customer able to spend for your product in comparison to his whole expenditure in your business category? Knowing this figure will help you presume how loyal your customers are. It will also show you if a specific company (your customer) could increase its expenditure according to the average share of the wallet of other companies.
A question to ask in a survey: How much do you spend in (our business category) every year/month? Offer intervals as answers so the respondent does not have to struggle with the exact answer.
You don’t need to ask your respondent for their name, nor for their product expenditures as you already have this information in your database. If you use Survio e-mail invitations, you will get a report with an email address on each line, followed by individual responses next to it. Thus, you can easily identify the respondent's reply. Connect these data with your database via API and find out how much the respondent spends on your product over a period of time.
Then you can easily calculate the share of the wallet = customer spend/customer category spend.
Customer lifetime value
How long will your customer patronize your business before churning? How much in total will they spend on your products within a particular time interval? This figure is extremely useful when you are thinking about acquisition costs. Acquisition costs are very often higher than the first payment from your customer. The customer only pays you back with the second or third purchase, for example. Therefore, you have to know how much and how many times you will get paid to be able to set up the acquisition and other costs right.
You can figure this out from your own data. However, it is useful to ask some additional questions in a survey to get a bigger picture.
How many purchases of our products have you already made?
How many purchases are you planning to do next year?
How much do you spend per one purchase on the average?
(Use intervals as answers or a text response limited as a number)
Data from your database and from the survey will enable you to calculate your Customer Lifetime Value = (Average transaction value * average number of transactions from one customer before churning) - your cost per acquisition (CPA).
Recency and visit frequency
When was the last time your customer made a purchase? How often does your customer return? This information is pretty useful if your company sells fast moving consumer goods or provides everyday services (such as online retail or e-commerce organizations).
Questions to ask in a survey:
How often do you buy this product in general?
How often do you buy our product?
How often do you purchase from our brand?
How recently did you make a purchase on our e-shop/in our shop?
(Offer time intervals as answers)
If you find out how often people buy a product in general and how often they come to you, you can uncover another aspect of their loyalty. Remember that returning customers drive your revenue. If their recency decreases, you need to react promptly.
Net Promoter Score®
Also known as Customer Loyalty Indext that invites customers to answe the following question:
How likely would you recommend our product/service to your friends?
This is a great and telling metric that will show you a lot about customer loyalty. Feel free to read more on what the NPS is and how to conduct an NPS survey. When you ask the NPS question, you will find out how many detractors, passives and promoters you have. The calculation of the NPS is steeper than you probably expect. Read the use case about NPS and discover the benefits of the NPS implementation in your customer research.
Survio has a specific question type for NPS, which enables you to have your NPS survey ready in a minute. Watch the video!
Other questions you can ask in a customer loyalty survey
How likely are you to try some other product of ours?
This question shows if the customer cares only about your product or about the entire brand of yours.
Would you continue to buy our products if the price increased?
This question reveals a lot about loyalty - you will see if your customers buy your products because of its affordable price or because of the value they see in it.
How to create the survey
Now you know what customer loyalty is and what questions you can ask in a survey. Let’s look at the survey creation. With Survio you can either choose from 100+ ready-made survey templates or create your own survey. Customize the design, add your logo, add pictures and videos, make it perfect for your purpose.
Why to carry out surveys? What to do with collected data?
Remember that surveying doesn’t end after collecting responses. That is the very beginning of new impulses and great changes! The results you get from your customer loyalty survey should build a proper foundation to make data-driven decisions. That is why we discussed all metrics and survey questions. Ask your customers about loyalty and find new ways to improve your attitude towards them. The following steps can be an output of the whole survey:
Increase the quality, function and features of your product
Create new customer loyalty programs
Begin to create high quality content
Improve your PR
Improve your post-purchase customer care
Offer discount codes
Organize workshops and webinars
Improve your delivery services
Make your e-shop attractive and user friendly
Build a better education system of using your product