What Is Customer Loyalty? Upselling Strategies That Build Loyalty Across the Customer Journey

Did you know acquiring a new customer costs five times as much as retaining an existing one? Brands naturally want to grow their pool of prospects and stand out from the competition. But as engagement channels multiply and grow more complex, and prospect behavior becomes fragmented and harder to read, keeping existing customers and raising their customer lifetime value is a priority no brand can ignore. Customer loyalty is a key strategy for understanding your existing customers and sustaining those relationships.

What is customer loyalty?

According to HubSpot, customer loyalty is a customer’s willingness to keep buying a brand’s products or services because of positive past interactions with the brand and good experiences using what it offers.

Why customer loyalty matters more than ever

A growing share of brands now offer subscription services such as SaaS, across both B2B and B2C. For customers, subscriptions deliver—at minimal cost—services that once required a large upfront investment of money and people, lowering the risk of solving their business problems.

Subscriptions help brands win new customers quickly, but they also make it easier for customers to leave. That’s why using the customer journey to raise loyalty and extend how long and how deeply customers use your product or service has become a critical business metric.

Highly loyal customers are likely to carry greater business value and give brands steady subscription growth. Because they want to keep using your product or service to reach their business goals, they’re willing to build more touchpoints with your brand and even offer feedback on their own—compared with entry-level customers.

Creating upselling opportunities

Loyal existing customers convert at 60–70% (CTR). — Paul Farris, author of Marketing Metrics

Brands with a high share of loyal customers can significantly cut what their marketing and sales teams spend acquiring leads at the top of the funnel (TOFU). The information gathered from existing customers can immediately inform changes to sales strategy and sharpen targeting. Most importantly, it opens the door to upselling.

Upselling means offering existing customers the option to upgrade, enhance, or unlock a premium plan, helping them keep reaching their business goals on top of the product or service they already use. Because upselling targets existing customers, brands skip much of the groundwork—prospecting, scenario planning, and solution building—and go straight to selling, with higher conversion rates.

Three common customer loyalty metrics

1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a satisfaction metric that measures customer loyalty by how likely customers are to recommend your product or service.

A high NPS means customers are willing to recommend your product or service to others, a sign that they trust you to a high or moderate degree. Scores usually run from 0 to 10; customers who give 9 or 10 are promoters, and they’re good candidates for further business together.

2. Touchpoints

Every interaction between a company and a customer—from pre-sales marketing and business development to post-sales customer success—counts as a customer touchpoint. When a brand has more touchpoints with a particular customer, it usually signals better interaction quality and a stronger working rapport, and that customer tends to be more loyal.

3. Upselling

Today, the sales relationship doesn’t end once a product ships or a service is delivered. Market shifts or changes in a customer’s business strategy can create new needs. That makes the number of upsells after the first sale another useful measure of customer loyalty.

Launching a customer loyalty program through the customer journey

Use the three common metrics above alongside your own customer journey to start planning a customer loyalty program.

1. Build a customer-centric sales process

To maximize collaboration across marketing and sales, product development, and post-sales customer success, you need a clear picture of customer behavior at each lifecycle stage and a customer-centric journey. Only then can you deliver the right information at every touchpoint and get your loyalty program moving.

2. Segmentation

Once your customer journey runs reliably, use first-party data tools such as a CRM to analyze customer interests and preferences at each lifecycle stage in depth, and use those insights to shape your strategy at each touchpoint.

3. Build a customer success mindset

Brands can only keep customers—and succeed themselves—when customers succeed with their products or services. Brands need to build a customer success mindset and actively learn how each customer defines success, so they can clarify business needs and offer the right support.

Setting up a customer success team is the first concrete step toward building and executing that mindset. By setting goals together with customers, holding regular weekly meetings, running Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs), and reviewing performance on a regular cadence, brands create opportunities to raise customer loyalty.