5 key metrics for measuring brand loyalty

Brand loyalty: It’s the biggest factor of your brand’s success.

If you don’t have a loyal customer base that purchases from you time and time again, you have to compete with other brands on factors like price and convenience.

And when consumers choose your brand based on how accessible you are—or how low your price is—your brand has become a commodity. You’re faced with slashing prices and focusing on the next gimmick, plus you’re always at risk of losing customers to brands that can offer a better deal.

In order to avoid becoming a commodity, you need to build and nurture brand loyalty. And when you’re part of a marketing or brand team, it’s important to understand what inspires brand loyalty (or lack thereof) so you can make smarter decisions about your brand strategy.

Brand loyalty is just one part of your overall brand equity, which is the extent of your brand’s power as determined by consumers’ positive or negative knowledge, perceptions, and experiences with your brand.

Brand loyalty definition: When your customers have the opportunity and good reason to choose another brand and yet they continue to choose yours—that’s brand loyalty.

And although there are other factors that contribute to your brand equity, like brand awareness and brand attributes, brand loyalty is hugely important because it’s a measurement of how likely consumers are to continue to give you their business.

The best way to measure brand loyalty is through surveys. When you collect feedback from consumers in your target market (especially those who have purchased from your brand in the past), you can assess how good your brand is at inspiring loyalty—and retaining customers.

Surveys can be a useful tool for assessing loyalty based on 5 key metrics: customer affinity, trust, esteem, reliability, and identification.

Good measures of these aspects of your brand can help you identify areas of competition, evaluate the stickiness of established customer bases in different markets, and understand the strengths and weaknesses of specific product lines. Read on for sample brand loyalty survey questions and examples, or get started with the NPS and Brand Loyalty Survey Template.

First, asking about overall customer satisfaction helps you understand how, in general, your products and services are meeting or (better yet) exceeding customer expectations.

You might ask questions like:

Loyalty builds when customers become committed to your brand and make repeat purchases over time. You want to understand what is inspiring that commitment on their part.

All brands must earn and retain the trust of their customers to ensure loyalty, but trust is especially important for brands that handle sensitive information, such as banks, online retailers, or healthcare providers.

If your brand handles sensitive information, assess the level of trust your customers feel for your brand. Ask questions like:

Use responses to questions about trust to inform the products you offer–and target your brand messaging accordingly.

Brand esteem or goodwill is customers’ respect for and attraction to a particular brand. It’s not to be confused with brand awareness or familiarity, which is the level of recognition of a brand. While a brand might be well known (a good thing), it may not in fact be well regarded (not a good thing). Brand esteem is about the favorable sentiment toward a brand.

You can use a series of questions to distinguish brand awareness from brand esteem:

A customer’s perceived quality of a brand is their opinion of a particular product’s, service’s or brand’s ability to fulfill his or her expectations:

Closely related is perceived value, which is a consumer’s opinion of a product’s value to him or her specifically.

For example, a person might view Tesla Motors as a brand that produces innovative, attractive electric vehicles that amaze and delight and would rate perceived quality quite high. However, if that same person considers the price tag to be a bit too steep, the perceived value might be low for her or him specifically.

Here are some brand loyalty survey question examples that measure perceived value:

Finding out how loyal customers feel toward your brand is important, but digging deeper for insights on what specifically contributes to that loyalty is important too. Read more about managing and strengthening your brand on our branding resource page, and access expert-certified branding survey templates.