What Best of London winners say about turning loyalty into real money

What is customer loyalty actually worth in dollars? The answer might surprise you

LONDON INC.’S BEST of London awards aren’t judged by a panel sitting in a boardroom somewhere – they’re decided by readers, full stop. This year’s list of winners, rolling out one profile at a time, was pulled from thousands of nominations and votes cast over an eight-week voting window, with the magazine going as far as restricting attempts by one person to submit multiple forms and reviewing the results more than once to make sure the count actually reflected the community. That process matters more than it might seem, because it means a ‘Best of London’ title isn’t really an award for having the nicest storefront or the cleverest ad campaign. It’s a measurement of loyalty, tallied one vote at a time by people who liked a business enough to go online and say so.

The awards themselves are organized into a dozen broad categories covering where Londoners eat, drink, shop and spend their downtime, which means the businesses that place well aren’t competing on a single metric like foot traffic or ad spend – they’re competing on whether enough regular customers bothered to show up and vote for them by name, rather than just clicking past the nomination email.

That distinction shows up clearly once you look at who’s actually winning. This year’s honourees range from Wright Hair & Co., run by stylist Dorothy Wright and consistently recognized among the city’s top salons, to Big Daddy Bacon, the food business helmed by Sean Hickey, a MasterChef Canada top 12 finalist, alongside names like The Tricar Group, ArtVenture Art Studio and Ventri Door Technologies. None of these are businesses that win a popular vote by accident. A salon or a specialty food shop earns repeat votes the same way it earns repeat business: by giving the same customers a reason to come back often enough that, months later, they still remember to click ‘vote’ when the nomination window opens.

The harder question is what that loyalty is actually worth in dollars, and the research on that is surprisingly consistent. Bain & Company’s long-running work on customer retention, popularized through Harvard Business Review, found that a five percent improvement in customer retention can lift profits anywhere from 25 to 95 percent depending on the industry – a gap wide enough that even the conservative end of that range represents a serious return for a small local business. Separate loyalty-industry research backs that up from a different angle: loyal customers reliably spend significantly more per visit than new customers, and even a modest bump in retention compounds fast once a business isn’t constantly spending on ads to replace customers who never come back.

The catch is that loyalty only turns into real money if it’s actually redeemed and acted on, not just felt. The average Canadian now belongs to more than fifteen different loyalty or rewards programs but is only active in fewer than ten of them, and a striking eighty percent of old-fashioned paper punch cards are lost before a single reward is ever claimed. In practice, that means a loyalty program is really just a printing expense unless the business does the harder work of keeping people engaged, which is exactly the kind of unglamorous, ongoing effort a Best of London win tends to reward after the fact rather than cause.

It’s worth noting that ‘turning loyalty into real money’ looks a little different depending on the industry. A salon or a specialty grocer converts loyalty into repeat visits and referrals over months and years, and the payoff shows up slowly, in retained revenue rather than a redeemable balance. Plenty of other reward systems, including the ones built into online gambling platforms, are structured to convert loyalty into actual cash value almost immediately, through tiered VIP status, cashback percentages and bonus credits that behave more like a running account balance than a punch card sitting in a drawer. For readers curious what that looks like in practice, it’s worth taking a look at real money online casinos in Canada and comparing how their loyalty tiers actually pay out against a typical small-business rewards program.

Whatever form the reward takes, the underlying math is the same one Bain’s research points to: keeping an existing customer happy is consistently cheaper, and more profitable, than chasing a new one. London Inc.’s Best of London 2025 issue is a useful reminder of that in its own right – a list built entirely from repeat customers who cared enough to vote, which is about as honest a measure of loyalty as a ‘best of’ list can offer.