5 Ways Surveys Help You With Measuring Brand Loyalty

In today’s crowded marketplace it can be a challenge to cut through the noise and keep one step ahead of your competitors, which is why building a strong, recognisable brand and a growing, loyal customer base who regularly buys from you is so important.

However, you will not even be able to begin moving to this stage unless you have first measured how your brand is perceived in comparison to that of your competitors. This is crucial, because if your brand is viewed to be of lower value than your competitors, your customers are less likely to be loyal and more susceptible to buying a more convenient or better priced, or better perceived quality or value product elsewhere whenever the opportunity arises.

Fortunately, with an online survey you’re able to do something about this. When you ask the right questions, you can measure your customers’ perception of your brand and use this insight to improve and nurture their brand loyalty, helping you develop a core customer base who will repurchase from you again and again.

Five metrics that can assist brand loyalty measurement

When you consider that your most loyal customers are those most interested in your brand, these highly engaged customers are  six times more likely to try a new product or service from you as soon as it becomes available, it makes sense to create as many of these customer types as you can.

By using the following metrics, you’ll be much better placed to identify how many brand loyal customers you have, as well as knowing what improvement are needed to help create more of them.

1. Trust:

In our digital age, we are continually probing our customers with questions to find out as much as we can about them, from the date of their birthday to their shopping habits. Yet, over 70% of consumers are suspicious about how their data is used, particularly personal data.

When it comes to brand development the way you handle personal and other sensitive information, will have a major bearing on how well you’re perceived. It’s important to know your audience trusts you, while also being aware of what you need to do to improve that trust.

To get the insights you need, you may like to consider questions such as:

How well do you trust our brand? Rate on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is not at all and 10 means you trust us completely.

What can we improve to keep your trust?

You would then add multiple choice options referring to the specific services you provide, e.g. –

– Our communication via the website

– Our communication via our social media

– Our customer support

2. Customer satisfaction:

Customer satisfaction is also essential to brand building, as you need to know what you’re doing is working, and if it’s meeting or even exceeding your audiences’ expectations.

For this metric, think about questions such as:

How happy were you with your purchase? Rate from 1 to 5, where 1 is really unhappy and 5 is extremely satisfied.

How likely are you to purchase one of our products in the next 30 days?

How likely are you to recommend us to family or friends?

3. Goodwill:

While people may be very aware of your brand, knowing how much it is revered is much more closely linked to brand loyalty. For example, if a brand is well known, but for all the wrong reasons, it’s clear this won’t improve brand loyalty.

It’s therefore helpful to focus on goodwill within your survey questions. When measuring this, keep in mind that you’re trying to find out how a respondent feels towards your brand.

Using similar questions to the following can help you with this:

Would you prefer our brand over that of a competitor?

If you think of our brand, how positive do you feel towards it?

4. Perceived quality:

Quality is also critical, as it offers an effective barometer for measuring how well a product or service is fulfilling your customers’ expectations.

Focus on rating style questions that make it easier to identify where you’re doing well and where you need to improve such as:

How was the quality of our service today? Rate from 1 to 5, where 1 is unsatisfactory and 5 is extremely satisfied.

How reliable do you feel our brand is?

(This last question is very similar to the trust-question we asked earlier. While these questions overlap, asked in the right context they can still offer fresh insights)

5. Brand value:

It’s also useful to measure perception of your brand’s value. This is important, because even if your perceived quality is healthy, it won’t automatically mean that customers rate your brand as valuable to them, if a better alternative became available or your product’s price was perceived as too high.

Perceived value can be measured through questions such as:

How likely would you be to switch to another brand if this alternative was cheaper?

How likely are you to choose our brand compared to another, if they were both sold in the same location?

Further tipsfor measuring brand loyalty

• Be short and concise : Try to limit your survey to no more than 5 to 7 questions. The shorter and more direct it is, the better it will be for respondents to find the time to reply to it and give honest answers, rather than a longer survey that risks them either abandoning it half-way through, or not completing it thoroughly.
• Only ask one thing per question: While it can be tough to keep your survey short, when there’s so much information you want to know, resist that temptation by only focusing on what really matters. You can always send additional follow-up survey questions to your most active survey respondents.
• Keep respondents’ effort to a minimum: While the right mix of questions helps keep your respondents interested and engaged, it can also ensure it’s as easy as possible to complete. When measuring brand loyalty, simple Yes or No questions reduce potential confusion, helping you to get the insights you need. And if you want to go deeper into the personal opinions of your respondents, you could consider applying skip logic to help personalise their experience and ensure they are not presented with any questions that are not relevant to them.

For more information about different questions types and their benefits, why not take look at  our question types and customisation features.

Why a survey is crucial to measure brand loyalty

Given today’s competitive marketplace your customer relationships have never been more important to your ongoing success, with their perception of your brand fundamental to this. If perception of your brand is negative, you’ll struggle to generate and accurately forecast sales, in contrast to a positive brand perception, where you’ll start generating a loyal customer base that regularly buys from you and offers greater confidence for sales and forecasting. However, you won’t know what your brand perception levels are and how they compare with your competitors unless you have measured them with a survey.

So, if you haven’t been regularly using customer surveys to measure and manage perception of and loyalty to your brand, now is the time to get started.