The ecommerce industry has been growing steadily for many years, but since the pandemic, the quantity of online shopping options has exploded. With brick-and-mortar stores around the world having to close their doors, and many people only able to shop from home, brands have been forced to expedite their digital offerings to reach their customers.

Competition in the online sphere has subsequently grown. Customer retention is more challenging than ever, with hundreds, or even thousands, of other options just one click away . It’s no secret that building a loyal customer base is what’s needed for steady, long-term growth.

But, while things like targeted ads and SEO make marketing online easier, one thing that has proven more difficult is building customer loyalty. How can a brand create a high-touch digital experience?

Here are a few ways brands are building customer loyalty in 2021:

Create personalized customer rewards

Today, brands aren’t just competing with a similar store down the street. With the growth of online shopping, brands are competing with products across the country, and even across borders. Success can no longer simply be attributed to putting in the time and effort to develop a high quality product and a great customer experience.

Most consumers do extensive online research before making their purchases, often carrying out comparisons on platforms that offer products from multiple brands.

To some extent, the brands become commodities, when people are just comparison shopping and looking for the best deals,” Mike Ross Kane, Co-Founder and CEO of Hydrogen tells us. Providing white labeled debit card platforms to businesses, the company’s solutions are focused on optimizing customer loyalty. Kane continues:

Customer loyalty programs have been around for a long time. Almost everyone has been on an email list for loyal customers that pushes out periodic product discounts. But, just like hyper-personalization is becoming the dominant trend in attracting customers, some companies are now experimenting with personalized rewards to retain loyal customers.

Hydrogen offers ecommerce retailers branded loyalty cards that enable customers to receive discounts, cashback, and other personalized rewards based on their spending habits, actions they’ve taken, and their account balance. Companies using these cards also receive data on spending habits, making it easier to offer broader rewards based on individual buyer personas.

Embrace the ratings economy

Everyone knows that loyal customers are not just valuable for their own individual purchases but also in their ability to attract other loyal customers via word of mouth. There’s nothing stronger than a recommendation from a customer, so why keep those recommendations behind the screen?

Leverage your existing loyal customer base by incentivizing them to share feedback on your products and services. Even if you already have feedback sharing enabled on your website, you may not be taking full advantage of it.

First, make sure your best customer feedback is front and center and easy to find. In an overcrowded market of similar products, shoppers will be looking to see what others are saying about their experience with your brand.

Second, make it easy for your loyal customers to share feedback; if it takes more than two clicks to get to a feedback page, it’s unlikely they’ll make the effort.

Finally, show your appreciation by offering special rewards. For example, offer a 10% discount for new customers when they use your branded loyalty card.

Sustainability is key

Consumers are much more socially and environmentally conscious than ever before, and they’re more likely to be loyal to brands that share their values. It pays off in both customer retention and ROI: almost 80% of respondents in a 2020 IBM survey said sustainability was important to them, 70% of whom said they are willing to pay socially responsible and ethically committed brands a premium of around 35%.

It’s essential that companies look at the entire supply chain, not just from the production and manufacturing phase, but also how their products are packaged. For example, many ecommerce brands are switching over to sustainable packaging methods that are either reusable or recyclable.

Many forward-thinking businesses are also finding ways to support customers on their own journeys to living more sustainably. “It’s about incentivizing customers to make better decisions, and not just with your brand, but holistically across all of their purchases,” explains Kane.

For example, more and more ecommerce brands are giving customers the option to choose sustainable delivery options. Budbee is one delivery service that’s teamed up with a number of ecommerce brands. The company has a fleet of completely energy efficient electric vehicles, powered by energy from solar panels mounted on the roof of their terminal.

As many consumers are willing to pay a premium for brands that have initiatives to reduce their carbon footprint, they will be more likely to remain loyal to brands that partner with sustainable service providers.

Want to scale fast? Make developer productivity your top priority

One of the hardest processes for business leaders to control, encountered by every growing organization, is how to scale successfully. I’ve found this is even harder when scaling tech teams. Investing in the right places at the right time can be pivotal to the future of the business, as time and again these teams are the nucleus of value creation.

I’ve heard it said — seen it attempted — that building larger teams is an easy fix, but for every order of magnitude increase, a new layer of management needs to be designed to operate the system. This becomes even more difficult if your team isn’t equipped with the right tech.

In my experience working with leading European tech companies, the most successful have flourished when their leaders do a resource balancing act. To support this, it is important that they empower their developers and engineering teams with both freedom to work in the best way for them, and well-suited tooling early in the lifecycle.

Building an effective team with a well-matched stack is the stuff of startup CEO dreams, but not all manage to achieve it.

Productive developers make your dreams come true

The performance level of a software engineering team has become a key indicator of a company’s future success. It may sound obvious, but if you’re a startup founder or working for a startup that’s looking to scale confidently, having highly productive engineering teams goes a long way in bringing your products to market faster.

If you find you have more limited resources than you hoped for, being deliberate and efficient with funds and operations is key to drive that growth. Using your developers’ time in the most effective way possible is just as important as having the right product to begin with.

For context, the cost of a developer minute is roughly $1.65, and the cost of a compute minute for automating an otherwise manual process is only around $0.006. Your developer efficiency can have a huge impact on the profitability.

Team structure and insights can be a vehicle for increased growth

When you take a step back and consider how to facilitate positive communication by design you help contribute to your business’ growth environment. A lightbulb goes off when you realize that team size is an important factor in your operational efficiency.

I’ve always found groups of between four and eight people are optimal, but when the number exceeds 10, it becomes challenging to communicate well enough on a weekly basis to get everything done on time.

So it’s crucial to empower your developers to make decisions and implement changes on their own, using timely platform data and insights — and that’s where the business leader makes their mark.

When operating at scale, your empowered and efficient engineering team will be the difference between hitting a plateau in growth and reaching clear market leadership.

Make sure you scale effectively with the right tech

While empowering your teams with the right mindset is one part of the puzzle, doing the same with the tools they want to use to get the job done is the other.

As a leader, a key part of building a positive environment for your engineers is enabling them to work in their own way so they are happy and productive.

As the people on the front-line of the tech teams, they are equipped with the unique combination of business and technical information for what tool will work best for the job at hand. They often know what works better than you! T his empowerment not only contributes to their output but also their talent retention and in attracting more top talent.

Working with technologies that scale well, rather than always adopting the newest up and coming solutions, provides the stability you want. With this, the tools can become a competitive differentiator and create success throughout the business.

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), for example, is used to better understand the software development requirements and expected strain on the growing team.

When scaling at speed, priorities can change daily, so having a clear view of what is required and being able to automate as much as possible can allow teams to be flexible in their approach and adapt to shifting demands.

As you grow, keep an eye on these factors, and look ahead to when strains may become fractures, and ensure your teams and your technologies will adapt before that time comes around.

No more excuses — ‘now’ is always the right time to become a founder

Right now, a large proportion of people are grateful for simply having a job, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are content with their current career situations. When my team looked at the aspirations of young people in the UK last year, we discovered that only 20% feel intellectually stimulated or challenged by their current role.

This likely hasn’t changed as a result of the pandemic; in fact, career disillusionment may even be worse in the current climate as uncertainty continues to grow, and progression is frozen in line with difficult economic conditions.

But the general dissatisfaction with careers felt by young people arguably begins when they leave school or graduate from university. Despite having the talent and potential to start a company, the majority will follow a more traditional path of a stable occupation and dependable income — even if it means missing out on fulfilling their ambition.

So why don’t more people choose to pursue a more impactful career path, like founding a company? Global pandemic aside, it’s usually because there’s never an ‘ideal’ time to start up — and even if you have decided to take the plunge, the path to success is not clear.

If not now, when?

There will always be questions and doubts regardless of economic conditions and other factors that come into play when making life-changing decisions. Even if you are certain that giving up your job and creating a company is what you want to do, or you believe you have found a solution to a problem that could change the world for the better, a lack of confidence or a lack of overall stability can hold back even the most ambitious of individuals.

However, if would-be entrepreneurs can find excuses about why they shouldn’t get started right now, the truth is that they will probably come up with the same excuses in six to twelve months’ time — by which point, someone else will have likely got there first.

Facing fears head on is key, as is understanding that entrepreneurship is about taking risks and embracing the journey — whether this involves failure or not. The perfect time unfortunately doesn’t exist; there will always be a reason not to.

Failure, new problems, and new opportunities

Even with this being true, the fear of failure is often the main reason that an individual doesn’t pursue entrepreneurship in the first place. But it’s important to overcome this fear and realize that the best entrepreneurs learn as much from failure as they do success.

Along the journey to success, founders will get told time and time again that their ideas won’t work. They will also make far more mistakes than they will good decisions, and they will partner with the wrong people. But the best founders will use these experiences to learn and to inform future decisions.

Rather than seeing failure as the end and a reason to give up hope, they will see setbacks as part of the journey towards creating a better company in time. It will probably take making and breaking several co-founder partnerships — trialing working relationships with a few different people before you finally find the right one.

Again, this will be based on learning more about what you need to make your business work; the exact skills you need from another person to bring your idea to life and finding the right kind of support in a co-founder. These may be people you never thought you’d work with but widening your horizons and seeking out diversity of experience and skillset has significant positive consequences.

New future

Over the past few months, the world has been forced into a mass experiment in remote working — something that would have been nearly impossible just a decade or two ago. Whilst the pandemic has been devastating for a lot of people and a lot of companies, it has also created new opportunities for solving new problems.

Across many different industries, there is now a need for companies that wouldn’t have existed a year ago, thanks to mass change within both consumer and business behaviour, some of which will last way beyond the pandemic.

It’s understandable to think that starting a company from within the depths of a global pandemic and during recession is extremely risky; in many ways it is, and it’s true that we’re living in exceptionally complicated times. But with talented people finding their opportunities more restricted than ever, the question should arguably be ‘why not’ as opposed to ‘why now.’

The world needs entrepreneurs — those people who can design and build a new future. A world where we operate more online can even widen existing networks and make cross-continental partnerships a reality.

Starting a technology company is one of the most impactful things a person can do with their career, especially at this point in human history; the scale that can be achieved to improve people’s lives is unprecedented.

Looking for inspiration? Then join our online event, TNW2020 , where you’ll hear how the most successful founders kickstarted and grew their companies.