If you want to create a sustainable business, knowing how to acquire customers won’t be enough — you will also need to learn how to retain them.
Customer retention is especially important when you are just starting out. But how can you build brand loyalty in the early business stages?
Here are seven practical steps that you can take…
- Step #1: Do Your Best to Offer a Great Product or Service
- Step #2: Don’t Engage in Sketchy Business Practices
- Step #3: Proactively Solicit Customer Feedback and Learn From It
- Step #4: Go Above and Beyond to Provide Excellent Customer Service
- Step #5: Add a Personal Touch With Handwritten Thank You Notes
- Step #6: Remind Your Customers About the Value That Your Product or Service Provides
- Step #7: Create a Brand That Resonates With Your Dream Customers
Step #1: Do Your Best to Offer a Great Product or Service

It can be difficult to compete with the established players in your niche as a new business, especially if you haven’t found your product-market fit yet.
It makes perfect sense to start with the minimum viable version of your product or service so that you can begin learning from customer feedback as soon as possible.
However, “minimum viable version” doesn’t mean launching a shoddy product or offering a poor-quality service, which is, unfortunately how it is sometimes interpreted.
Instead, it means identifying the problem that your dream customers are struggling with and figuring out how to provide a solution to it in the most straightforward way possible.
You need to do a good job at delivering this core value of your product or service if you want to build brand loyalty!
Step #2: Don’t Engage in Sketchy Business Practices

Some sketchy business practices have become so normalized that they are commonplace now:
Misleading Sales Messaging
When you are writing sales copy or having a sales call, there’s always a temptation to exaggerate the benefits of your product or service.
And it’s true that ethical considerations aside, doing so might increase your conversion rates. However, this approach to sales is disastrous for brand loyalty.
Once customers realize that you have misled them, not only will they stop doing business with you and ask for refunds, but they might also warn other people to stay away from your company.
That’s why it’s best to be honest to a fault: don’t be intentionally vague, don’t exaggerate, and certainly don’t lie. Present your product or service as accurately as possible.
You will probably close fewer sales that way, but those customers will be much more likely to stick around, leave positive reviews, and say good things about your company on social media.
Dark User Interface Patterns
If you are selling a software product, you want to avoid deceptive user interface patterns — also known as dark patterns — designed to make the user do something not in their best interest.
For example, some SaaS companies deliberately make it difficult to cancel their subscriptions with labyrinthine navigation, confusing user flows, and misleading design elements.
There’s no denying that dark patterns work: if you make the cancellation process arduous enough, some users will give up mid-way and stick around for longer than they would have had it been easy.
However, this will leave a bad taste in people’s mouths, so you can forget about brand loyalty if you do this, especially as a small business. Once these customers finally manage to cancel their subscriptions, they almost certainly won’t be coming back.
Sneaky Subscriptions
Finally, suppose you are selling a subscription of any kind. In that case, you need to remember that consumers are becoming increasingly sensitive to recurring fees — a phenomenon known as “subscription fatigue.”
That’s why you want to do everything you can to help your customers manage their subscriptions:
- It’s okay to have auto-renewal for a monthly subscription, but don’t use it for your annual plan.
- Set up an email sequence designed to remind the customer that their annual subscription is about to come to an end and encourage them to renew it.
- Set up an automated email sequence targeting customers who haven’t used your product or service for three months. Remind them that they have an active subscription, ask them if they need any help, and provide a link to cancel their subscription.
Yes, you will probably miss out on some revenue by doing all this, but that money would have come from people who don’t want to continue paying for your product or service. Helping customers like that cancel their subscriptions is the right thing to do, and they will appreciate it.
Always Put Your Customers’ Interests First!
Essentially, when it comes to sketchy business practices, you have to decide between these two options:
- Put your interests first and enjoy short-term gain, then suffer long-term pain.
- Put the customers’ interests first, endure short-term pain, and then enjoy long-term gain.
Choosing the latter path is the only way to build brand loyalty!
Step #3: Proactively Solicit Customer Feedback and Learn From it

Entrepreneurs often make the mistake of getting so emotionally invested in their initial vision for their business that they might as well be married to it.
This can make them unreceptive to feedback from their customers. And if you aren’t willing to listen to the people who are paying for your product or service, you won’t be able to meet, much less exceed, their expectations.
That’s why you want to take the opposite approach: instead of being stuck in your head daydreaming about your vision, start proactively soliciting customer feedback.
Here are some ideas on how to do that:
- Send every new customer a welcome email and ask them what is their biggest challenge regarding the problem that your product or service solves.
- Conduct a customer survey every three months. Send all your customers an email asking them to rate how happy they are with your product or service. Make it simple by providing three clickable options: a smiley face emoji, a neutral face emoji, and a frowny face emoji.
- Reach out to every customer who provides a rating and ask if it would be possible to talk to them on Zoom so that you could understand their experience better. Do this regardless of their rating.
- Regularly review your customer database, identify the customers who appear to be getting the most out of your product and service, and see if you can talk to them on Zoom.
- Reach out to every customer who cancels their subscription or asks for a refund and ask them what you could have done to improve their experience. If they reply, tell them you would like to learn more and ask for a Zoom call.
The more people you talk to, the more evident the patterns will become and the easier for you to improve your product or service.
Just make sure to set up a system for storing and organizing all customer feedback so that you can review it later. Notion or similar software might work well for this!
Step #4: Go Above and Beyond to Provide Excellent Customer Service

There’s absolutely no excuse for bad customer service.
First of all, make it clear how your customers can contact you and what response time they should expect once they do.
Unless your product or service has a critical function, it’s okay to only provide customer support from Monday to Friday during office hours.
However, if you don’t communicate that on your website, people might get upset if they don’t get a response immediately because you have failed to set clear expectations.
Secondly, do not use AI chatbots for customer support because large language models and the technology that’s powering them are too unreliable at this point in time.
You might want to check out this story where Chevy’s AI chatbot sold a Chevy Tahoe for $1 (fortunately for the company, the offer wasn’t legally binding).
You can use old-fashioned customer support bots that follow programmable “if/then” logic, but make sure always to provide the option to escalate the query to a human customer support agent.
Finally, implement a 30-day, no-questions-asked refund policy, and don’t be a stickler if you don’t have to. Someone bought your product 32 days ago and now wants a refund. Just give it to them.
Step #5: Add a Personal Touch With Handwritten Thank You Notes
In his now-classic essay “Do Things That Don’t Scale,” Paul Graham argued that startup founders should take extraordinary measures to delight their users.
One of the examples he gave was Wufoo, an online form-builder startup that SurveyMonkey later acquired.
According to Graham, Wufoo’s team sent each new user a hand-written thank you note for as long as they could, which was surprisingly long.
Once they reached a point where doing that wasn’t feasible anymore, they continued sending handwritten thank-you notes to a handful of customers every week, which they still do.
Interestingly, Wufoo has found that churn for the customers who have received these notes was 50% lower than for those who didn’t. Handwritten thank you notes are a surprisingly effective way to build brand loyalty!

Step #6: Remind Your Customers About the Value That Your Product or Service Provides
You want to draw your customers’ attention to the value that they have derived from your product or service as much as possible.
Here are some ideas on how to do that:
- Before and after photos – This can work well for businesses that provide a service where the value is visible, such as lawn mowing, house cleaning, personal training, etc.
- Progress reports – This can work well for businesses that provide a service where the value can be measured using specific metrics, such as video editing, copywriting, marketing, etc.
- Celebrating milestones – This can work well for businesses that sell a product or provide a service where the value can be measured with milestones, such as academic tutoring services and project-oriented online courses.
If you cannot come up with anything like this for your product or service, at least give the customer some information about its value (e.g., if you are a massage therapist, give your customers a brochure on the potential health benefits of getting regular massages).
Step #7: Create a Brand That Resonates With Your Dream Customers
If you take a closer look at the companies that have the most loyal customers, you will find that they tend also to have the strongest brands.
Apple is probably the best example here: its customers’ obsession with the company’s products is so notorious that they have been referred to as “fanatics”, “devotees” and “rabid fanboys” by the media. In fact, there’s even a 2008 documentary called “MacHEADS” dedicated to exploring this phenomenon!
There’s no denying that Apple has great products but there’s more to it than that: the company has managed to create an association between its products and the aspirational identity of its target audience.
Today, it appeals to people who want to see themselves as hip, tech-savvy, and upwardly mobile. You are going to look much cooler working on a laptop at Starbucks if that laptop is a MacBook Air as opposed to Asus, HP, or any other brand.
So take a page out of Apple’s playbook and ask yourself: how can you create a brand that resonates with your dream customers on a deep emotional level, aligns with their values, and affirms their aspirational identity?
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