How can you measure brand loyalty across different channels?

Yes, understanding what brand loyalty entails and what you want to achieve before beginning any measurement is important. Every time customers interact with your brand - online, in-store or with customer support, it should reflect what your brand stands for.. It's important to track several measures, including repeat purchase rate, customer life time value, Net Promoter score, customer retention and churn rate.

Measuring brand loyalty across different channels requires a strategic approach. One effective method is tracking repeat purchases, which indicates a customer's preference for a brand over time. Social media engagement, such as likes, shares, and comments, reveals how connected and involved customers are with the brand online. Additionally, analyzing customer feedback and reviews provides insights into their satisfaction and likelihood of recommending the brand to others.

Customer surveys and Net Promoter Score (NPS) are valuable tools for assessing brand loyalty. Surveys can gather direct feedback on various aspects of the brand experience, while NPS measures the willingness of customers to recommend the brand to others. Loyalty programs, offering rewards for repeat purchases, can also be an effective way to encourage and measure customer loyalty.

Retention and purchase frequency are usually reliable tools - but again, it’s important to recognise benchmarks. Cars do build loyalty, but if frequency is once in ten years, you might have a revenue problem!

You also need to measure annual purchase volume as in different channels behaviour can be totally different (frequent small orders or rare large orders). Also behaviour varies by customer profile

You also need to remember aboyé capture rate for each type of data. CRM system integrated with the till is a great source for B2C and D2C brands. However you nee to understand how often the customer doesn’t share his details and the data remains uncuptured.

Lastly, analyzing website analytics and email marketing metrics can provide insights into customer behavior and engagement. Metrics such as website traffic, time spent on site, and email open rates can indicate the level of interest and involvement customers have with the brand. By monitoring these metrics across different channels, businesses can gain a comprehensive understanding of brand loyalty and identify areas for improvement.

You need to be mindful using this method. It helps to understand the brand perception. However it doesn’t help you to identify the actual loyalty. Ideally you select your loyal customers and ask them the questions and do the same with non-loyal customers to understand difference in perception and behaviour and tailor your strategy

Ideally you need to do it on the regular basis and compare the data for the same periods. This will help you to avoid making false conclusions

At the end of the day the Board is most concerned about revenue and so customer loyalty simply means 2 things: are we retaining existing customers better AND are they spending more with us. All other metrics like NPS, brand preference scores, social engagement rates etc don't reveal incremental revenue directly and so I won't recommend including them in the final report. However they still are important trackers to help you measure your efforts along the way. For example, CSAT measures customers satisfaction with the brand's customer service. Though no revenue generating, being one of the most direct touch points between brand and customer, a low CSAT almost guarantees churned customers.

In ideal world you need to have an opportunity to see single customer profile across multiple channels. Only this will give you true picture. Unfortunately it’s not always feasible, particularly if you have wholesale and international presence