Discounts bring shoppers in. Something else brings them back. Examples of brand loyalty in retail show what that something looks like: Loeffler Randall showcases the people who wear its products, Casper ran a YouTube creator campaign, Mizzen + Main partners with athletes and Tarte guides shoppers with online quizzes.

Shoppers can buy from nearly anywhere now, thanks to omnichannel brands, social shopping and new online retailers. They also weigh more than price when they decide what and where to buy, which gives brands big and small a real chance to attract loyal customers and keep them.

Your strategy for holding onto a customer shouldn’t revolve solely around staying competitively priced or offering discounts. Focusing only on monetary appeal may be unsustainable, and it may attract customers who are only looking for a bargain.

Instead, turn your attention to how you can cultivate brand loyalty.

What is Brand Loyalty?

Brand loyalty is a customer’s willingness to make repeat purchases from you because of associations the customer makes with your brand (as opposed to special offers or discounts you extend).

In other words, brand loyalty comes from a cohesive brand identity: the way you communicate, the services you provide, your marketing and even your company name, mission and overall reputation. When all of these work together, customers feel aligned with your brand and want to come back to you for your products and services.

Brand loyalty matters to a business beyond repeat sales, too. Investing in customer retention is often more cost efficient than continuously marketing to new customers, and loyal customers tend to be more valuable over time.

How Do You Develop Brand Loyalty in Retail?

Brand loyalty can be harder for competitors to undermine than loyalty built on price alone. In retail, it’s what keeps customers who have purchased from you once supporting you as a business.

If you’re a retailer interested in building brand loyalty, there are a few key areas of your business and your customer’s experience to focus on. But first, take stock of what you’re already doing to earn customer loyalty.

Learn About Your Customers

The first step to a strong brand loyalty strategy is to understand why your customers are drawn to you in the first place. Ask loyal customers what they love about your brand (not just your products) and double down on the aspects they already respond to.

Asking what they liked most about shopping on your website, or how often they’d like to receive emails, also helps build their willingness to rely on your brand for what they need.

You should also research your loyal customer base. How often are they moving between your channels, and how do they choose to engage with you? Do a lot of your customers message you on social media, or are they more likely to want to speak to someone on the phone? A unified CRM like Endear’s can help you answer these questions, because shopping patterns online and in-store are streamlined into one client profile.

Customize Your Program

A brand loyalty program can have a lot of different components, depending on what part of your brand appeals to current and potential customers. If you’re just starting out, go with the offering most likely to appeal to the largest segment of your audience.

As you grow, target different programs to the audience that will care most, rather than expecting everyone to participate in everything. The more you tailor how you market your brand to a customer, the more likely that customer is to engage.

Types of Retail Brand Loyalty Programs

1. Personalized Attention

There’s a lot of room for loyalty-building right after a customer makes their first purchase. The post-purchase experience is a good opportunity to get to know your customers and learn what brought them to you in the first place.

Personalizing your outreach with more than a traditional “thank you for your purchase” email helps create a customer experience to remember. It also gives you a chance to share other ways for them to connect with you, such as joining a community of fans or following you on Instagram.

The more touch points you can loop customers into, the more platforms you’ll have to promote your brand. This type of personal outreach also makes it clearer to customers how best to get in touch with you.

2. Customer Communities

A key way to build brand loyalty is to make your customers feel like they’re part of the brand. You can involve customers by inviting them to give feedback on prototypes, hosting events or creating permanent virtual spaces for them to meet, such as a Slack channel or Facebook group.

Giving your customers a say in decisions may make them feel more loyal, and it gives you a better read on what they’ll like next.

3. Collaborations

As much as we wish it were the case, your customers aren’t just shopping from you. Even if they were, they’re also consuming content in a ton of different ways. To emphasize what kind of brand you are and earn loyalty, consider working with other brands that target a similar audience.

A partner can be another person, place or service, or even a company in a different product category, which shows how well you understand what else is on your customers’ minds. Together, you and this partner can create a new kind of brand experience, product or activation that heightens your customer’s impression of you.

4. Gamification

Many rewards programs are driven by customer spending. Brand loyalty goes beyond spend, and gamification is one way to get there. Gamification means creating opportunities for customers to compete, complete challenges or reach certain statuses by taking actions that reinforce your goals as a brand.

A popular way to use gamification for brand loyalty is to reward customers who advocate for your brand. Recommendations from friends and family are the biggest influence for 50% of US customers, compared with 22% for online reviews, according to BigCommerce, which cites McKinsey’s 2025 State of the Consumer survey. That’s one reason some brands reward customers who share their thoughts on products. If you do, keep any incentive clearly disclosed.

5. Tutorials

Another modern way to grow brand loyalty is to teach customers how to use your products in a variety of contexts. Educational content, from an internal content team or from user generated content (UGC), can make customers more likely to buy from you, because they see you helping them get the most value from what they bought.

That can mean showing unique ways to pair an item of clothing through a styling program, creating tutorials on how to apply a beauty product or simply teaching customers how to repair their purchase after an accident.

4 Examples of Retail Brand Loyalty Strategies

These four brands each take a different approach to building loyalty, and each one has something you can borrow. None of the sources below measures loyalty itself, so read them as tactics worth testing, not proven results.

Loeffler Randall

Loeffler Randall is known for women’s footwear and accessories. The company also showcases community members on a dedicated Community page, a gallery of named people wearing its products.

Source

Your website is a good place (aside from your store) for customers to learn what you stand for and connect with you over shared values, so think about what your branded digital experience says about you.

Casper

Mattress brand Casper, which began as a direct-to-consumer company, might seem like an unlikely candidate for influencer marketing, yet it ran a YouTube creator campaign documented in a NeoReach case study. The campaign was aimed at younger, tech-oriented customers who would appreciate the promise of buying a mattress easily over the internet.

Working with creators that those customers already followed and trusted is a smart way to earn attention from an audience that’s hard to reach through traditional ads. The creators also shared discount codes with their subscribers, so the campaign was built to drive sales, not just goodwill. Treat it as an example of earning trust through creators, and pair it with the retention tactics above if repeat purchase is your goal.

Mizzen + Main

Athlete partnerships can lend credibility to a brand’s claims. Performance menswear brand Mizzen + Main pairs a playful brand voice with partnerships with athletes, such as golfer Phil Mickelson, who joined as a brand ambassador and equity holder in 2018 (Mizzen+Main on YouTube). The brand ended that partnership in 2021, and Retail Dive reports that Mickelson remains an investor.

Partnerships like this let a credible name demonstrate what a product promises, in this case stretch and comfort.

Source

Tarte Cosmetics

Beauty brand Tarte Cosmetics makes it easy for customers to find the right products, thanks to online tools like its foundation quiz, which recommends a foundation based on skin type and other preferences.

The more helpful, relevant guidance a brand creates for its customers, the more reason they have to return whenever they need a new product. That’s our read of Tarte’s approach, and it’s a useful principle for any retailer.

If you’re just getting started or want to improve an already-successful brand loyalty program, Endear is a great way to add an extra layer of personalization into the mix. With our messaging platform, you can make sure customers always have a way to get in touch with the right person and your sales team has the full history of everyone they chat with. Book a demo to see how it works.