How to Create Brand Loyalists: 9 Strategies for 2026

Brands are investing more in loyalty than ever before, and the stakes are rising. In Q2 2025, ecommerce made up 16.3% of US retail sales—up 5.3% year over year—intensifying the pressure to retain customers, not just acquire them.

But retention can be fragile. While enhancements like personalization and gamification are essential, they’re only valuable if they help create true brand loyalists. Having a loyalty program alone doesn't create brand loyalists.

With acquisition costs climbing, brands need strategies that turn first-time buyers into advocates who return and recommend.

Ahead, you’ll learn how to identify brand loyalists—and how to create them for your company. 

What is a brand loyalist (and how does it differ from loyalty)?

A brand loyalist is a customer who repeatedly chooses your brand because it aligns with their identity, values, and sense of trust. 

For example, a casual customer might buy a Patagonia fleece because it’s on sale and they need a warm jacket. Perhaps they’ve heard that the quality is good from others — the purchase is influenced by price and features. 

A brand loyalist operates differently. They buy jackets, pants, shirts, and accessories because they believe in Patagonia’s mission of environmentalism and corporate sustainability. They trust the company and what it stands for. 

Brand loyalist versus loyalty program member

As 77% of brands plan to maintain or increase their loyalty program investment, it’s essential to understand the distinction between a loyalty program member and a brand loyalist. 

• A loyalty program member participates in a program. Discounts and points influence whether they buy or not.
• A brand loyalist buys because they love the brand. They are less swayed by price. They make repeat purchases and recommend your brand to friends and family.

The table below breaks down the differences:

The typical cycle for a consumer is going from program to passion. When done well, brands can use their loyalty program as the on-ramp, becoming a starting point for deeper relationships. It’s used to gather customer data, test personalization tactics, and use gamification to keep customers engaged.

The end goal is brand loyalty, where customers stay with you beyond discounts and perks. Use that on-ramp to design memorable experiences, such as exclusive communities and special recognition, to cultivate loyalty and build repeat purchasing behavior long after a promotion ends. 

Five behaviors of a true brand loyalist 

So, what does a loyalist look like in real life? Here are five behaviors to look for:

1. They recommend your brand unprompted and actively refer friends.
2. They use your products in unique ways, integrating them into their own creative routines or content. 
3. They know your brand deeply, recalling product details, drop dates, or heritage more than the average consumer. 
4. They incorporate your brand into everyday rituals, like a nighttime skincare routine anchored around a specific product.
5. They publicly identify with your brand’s community—through collecting merch or participating in brand events. 

These behaviors also appear in your data—through reviews, UGC activity, and repeat-purchase patterns—which is why identifying the right KPIs matters.

How to identify brand loyalists: Signals and KPIs

Spotting a brand loyalist in your data means knowing what to look for. It's easy to mistake any repeat buyer for one, but some are just responding to your last promotion.

Here are some metrics that point to higher engagement and loyalty from loyalists:

• Repeat purchase rate (RPR): Don’t just track your website’s RPR. Use Shopify's Customer cohort analysis to see which groups (like "Customers from January" or "Black Friday Shoppers") stick around and keep buying without a heavy discount push. That's how you separate durable loyalty from a promo-driven spike.
• Average order value (AOV) growth by segment or cohort: Loyalists trust you enough to trade up, add more to their cart, and try new product lines. When you see AOV growing within a specific cohort over time, that's a strong sign of loyalty.
• Referral Rate and Net Promoter Score (NPS): This is your advocacy metric. Are brand loyal customers recommending you for free? Loyalists are your best salespeople. Tracking referrals alongside your NPS score gives you a clear picture of who is actively helping you grow.
• Cross-channel engagement: Do they just buy, or do they want to hear from you? Loyalists opt into your email, SMS, and social channels, and they actually open, click, and interact, even when they're not in a buying cycle.
• UGC and creator activity: Look at who leaves detailed reviews, tags your brand in social posts, joins creator or affiliate programs, and consistently participates in community challenges. High UGC output from those same customers is a strong loyalist signal.

Make it a ritual to check your cohort analysis and measure brand loyalty. Review the groups that have the best retention, AOV, strongest advocacy, and UGC signals. You can even build custom dashboards in Shopify Analytics to track your metrics. 

If you want to go deeper, use ShopifyQL to request and retrieve data to gain insights into your business. For example, using Shopify’s AI co-pilot, Sidekick, you could ask it to “Create a ShopifyQL query for my repeat purchase rate by monthly cohort.” 

The query would scan your database to find all customers who made their first-ever purchase and then group them by the month they were acquired. It would then track only those customers over the following months to determine the percentage of them who came back to make a second purchase.

How to create brand loyalists

1. Embrace authentic storytelling

Consumers look to engage with and purchase from brands that they connect with, whether it's because of their values or storytelling. Talk about your brand with authenticity—who you are, what you stand for, and why it matters—in a way that reflects your core customers’ values. 

According to EY, only 33% of consumers feel emotionally connected to the loyalty programs they join—highlighting how transactional most loyalty relationships still are. That emotional gap is where storytelling becomes a powerful differentiator: it helps customers see themselves in your brand, not just your promotions.

Engage customers with a consistent narrative throughout the path to purchase. Educate them about your products and sustainability practices, give them sourcing information, use user-generated content to build a sense of community around your brand. 

Fashion retailer Princess Polly does a great job of maintaining their chic narrative voice across all channels. The brand’s TikTok, for example, is filled with always-on creator content, including try-ons, fit checks, and humorous, relatable content that feels native to the platform. This steady stream of creator content builds credibility with consumers and helps customers identify with the brand’s story.

2. Create values-aligned campaigns

Loyalty is built over time and through campaigns that connect. You’re not going to gain brand loyalists by newsjacking a cultural moment. Take a hard look at your brand and ask how you can do better. 

A helpful example comes from beauty brand Ilia, whose CEO, Lynda Berkowitz, led a values-driven shift during a period of cultural scrutiny around representation.

1. First, they brought in shoppers and people unfamiliar with the brand to get an objective view of their shortcomings.
2. That reflection led them to examine their product line and expand their shade extensions to be more inclusive.
3. Only after doing that internal and product level work did they launch their "Between Us" campaign.

The Between Us campaign used real people—not models—and focused on human connections and representation. Instead of reacting to a moment, it centered on belonging and authenticity—showing customers that the brand saw and included them.

“For us, it was the perfect opportunity to visually talk about what's between us right now, whether it's space or race or distance. It's just an amazing time to be able to communicate our own stories,” Lynda says.

💡Pro tip: Use Shopify Launchpad to build excitement for limited drops or early access to these capsule collections.

3. Leverage your community for user-generated content

Brands regularly turn to UGC to tell their stories and strengthen their customer relationships. According to Pew Research Center, YouTube and Facebook remain the most widely used social platforms in the US, and about half of adults use Instagram, with smaller but growing shares on TikTok and others—making UGC a powerful way to meet customers where they already spend time. 

The workout apparel brand Gymshark is a good example of this. In 2024, the brand ran a 66-day habits challenge that invited fans to post daily progress check-ins, mini-wins, and transformations. 

The customers became the storytellers. Participants documented their personal journeys online, which feels authentic and community-led. As of May 2024, according to MarketingWeek, the hashtag #gymshark66 had amassed 45.5 million views, 1.9 million likes, and 12,600 comments. 

Make UGC part of your brand. Create a campaign that invites customers to participate or actively prompt customers for it post-purchase with apps like Okendo or Judge.me. Kickstart the conversation by partnering with creators who align with your products. Tools like UpPromote help you find the right creators and work with them for ad placements. 

UGC is both a signal of loyalty and a tool for amplifying it—your most engaged customers create content because they see your brand as part of their identity.

4. Use customer feedback to inform your strategy

With the proliferation of social media platforms, customers are now more vocal than ever about their likes and dislikes. This creates a valuable feedback loop and a new culture of accountability for brands. 

While this comes with certain pitfalls, it also gives brands an invaluable opportunity to intimately understand their customers’ needs and use their feedback to improve their products and services. 

However, in an environment where feedback spreads quickly and public scrutiny is high, it can be challenging to sort through all this feedback and apply it in real ways that transform your business, according to Lynda from Ilia. She says it’s important to slow down and talk to your customers, followers, and community to gather a diverse range of perspectives. 

Use a system to effectively apply customer feedback:

• Log: Centralize all that feedback, from social media comments, reviews, return reasons, support tags, and post-purchase surveys.
• Cluster: Group the feedback by common themes, like fit, materials, sizing, shipping, and content clarity.
• Prioritize: Score each theme based on its frequency and impact on your conversion or return rate.
• Act: Use those insights to make changes, like updating PDP content, sizing charts, or product bundles.

💡Pro tip: Use survey apps like Fairing or Zigpoll to collect responses and add them to unified customer profiles in your Shopify admin. You can view a customer's order history, AOV, and lifetime value right next to their survey answers to understand their full story and provide exceptional customer service anywhere. 

When customers see you listen and respond, you build trust—and trust is what turns vocal buyers into long-term brand loyalists.

5. Use technology to bridge the gap between in-store and online 

Technological innovations are making it easier for brands to distinguish their content online and pull consumers into the conversion journey. Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) give brands the opportunity to recreate that in-person ability to touch, feel, and connect. 

Just look at Gunner Kennels, a brand that makes heavy-duty dog kennels. The company had a classic online selling problem—how do you know if a crate will actually fit your dog if you can't see it in person?

Guesswork was the number one reason for returns, and as you could imagine, for a product with high shipping costs, returns were expensive. So, Gunner Kennels used Shopify's built-in 3D and AR tools. 

Customers could just pull out their phone, use the AR feature, and virtually place the crate beside their dog to see the fit right in their living room. The added feature helped the brand realize a 40% increase in order conversion rate and 5% drop in returns. That extra confidence reinforced trust in the brand and made it easier to come back and refer friends.

Fashion brand Rebecca Minkoff saw similar results when they added 3D and AR to product pages. Shoppers who interacted with a 3D model were more likely to add items to their cart, and visitors who viewed a product in AR were 65% more likely to place an order—showing how immersive experiences can deepen both purchase confidence and loyalty over time.

But retail technology isn’t just for creating a good experience online. With the right unified commerce platform, you can provide that same personalized insight to your physical stores. 

Take the Western-wear brand Tecovas. The entire brand is built on a concept of “Radical Hospitality.” To deliver on that promise, they use custom UI extensions in Shopify POS for clienteling. When a customer is at the checkout in one of their more that 30 retail locations, the store associate can see their information in real time.

This helps them build brand loyalty by:

• Providing personalized recommendations based on that customer's past purchase history
• Effectively upselling or cross-selling related items, like shoe care kits for a pair of boots they bought online last month

Highly personalized, memorable, and authentic experiences are the name of the game for retailers today. Shopify provides unified commerce capabilities that connect online and in-store experiences while helping lower total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to competitors. 

6. Make checkout feel VIP-fast

Loyalty is won or lost in the final clicks—a slow, clunky checkout process kills momentum and makes a returning customer feel like a stranger. Reward that loyalty by making the experience feel effortless.

Automatically authenticate your returning shoppers and enable one-tap pay with Shop Pay. Princess Polly A/B tested this and saw a 4.1% conversion increase and a 7.6% faster median checkout time. For brand loyalists, being recognized and checked out in a tap signals that the brand values their time and history.

And don't forget flexibility—offering options like Shop Pay Installments can lift order value. Dr. Squatch saw a 15% increase in mobile conversion rate with Shop Pay and a massive 60% uptick in AOV on orders placed using Installments. For your best customers, that flexibility makes it easier to continue choosing you over competitors, even as their budgets and routines change.

7. Turn your best customers into subscribers

Even your most dedicated fans are busy. They haven't fallen out of love with your brand—sometimes, they just forget to reorder, or perhaps their daily routine has changed. It’s just life.

Subscriptions are the perfect way to reward this loyalty by taking the pressure off them to remember. Customers can automatically replenish their favorite items so they are never without your products. For loyalists, subscriptions reduce the mental load of staying stocked, so choosing your brand becomes the default—not another item on their to-do list.

Take BARK, the dog lifestyle empire that felt pulled away from their mission and towards being a tech company by their clunky, custom-built platform, which stifled innovation. Migrating to Shopify, the brand used tools like OrderGroove to support their complex, flexible subscription model and Shop Pay to make checkout seamless.

As a result, BARK saw a 6% increase in conversions during the first four weeks, an 8% rise in subscription rates during Black Friday, and 43% of new customers opted for Shop Pay, creating a powerful retention flywheel.

8. Localize the experience for international visitors

You can't build loyalty if your international customers feel like outsiders. A surprise duty and tax fee, or being forced to calculate the conversion from US dollars, creates friction and breaks trust.

To build a global brand, you want to meet customers where they are. Using a tool like Shopify Managed Markets lets you price in the browser’s local currency, show landed costs up front, and offer localized payment methods they trust. When shoppers see accurate local pricing and familiar payment options from the start, it signals respect and reliability—key ingredients for long-term loyalty.

Watch-strap brand Delugs utilized Managed Markets to expand across Asia, the Middle East, and the US, resulting in a 58% year-over-year increase in checkout conversions and a 14% boost in returning customers.

With a single dashboard, you can sell in more than 150 different countries, automate currency conversion, collect duties up front, and tap prenegotiated carrier rates. The next trillion dollars in cross-border spend is only a few clicks away.

9. Create fan moments 

As mentioned, the strongest brands understand that loyalty is as much a real-life feeling as it is a digital points card. Finding new and innovative ways to connect digital communities and physical activations is key to developing brand loyalists. 

Pair an IRL event with a digital reward, like Shop Cash or app-only surprises. It gives your community a reason to show up in person and keeps that energy after the event is over. 

A perfect example is the Mejuri × Shop activation before the US Open. It drove a 5.7x sales bump on the Shop app and pulled in thousands of in-person visits, with half of those visitors discovering the brand for the first time. 

The campaign was built around Mejuri's PLAY campaign, which featured tennis player Emma Navarro. At the brand’s Spring Street store in NYC, attendees were given scratch-and-win cards for Shop Cash. Then, select fans got to tap their phones on a customized tennis racquet held by tennis stars, which instantly unlocked exclusive gifts from Mejuri in the Shop app.

To make sure every fan had the chance to score, online shoppers were also given extra Shop Cash back on any Mejuri purchases they made through the Shop app. By tying a memorable in-person moment to ongoing Shop Cash rewards, Mejuri extended the relationship beyond the event and encouraged repeat purchases from newly won loyalists.

“We're built on the intersection of jewelry, culture, and community—and Shop helped us take that vision to the next level,” says Noura Sakkijha, cofounder of Mejuri. That's the exact kind of community sentiment that builds real, lasting customer loyalty.