Evergreen: Cultivate the Enduring Customer Loyalty That Keeps Your Business Thriving by Noah Fleming

Author:Noah Fleming
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780814434444
Publisher: AMACOM
Published: 2015-01-06T14:00:00+00:00

DESIGNING YOUR CUSTOMER LOYALTY ACTION PLAN

Customers can be fascinating. There’s no doubt about it. But your customers aren’t going to keep the conversation going. A loyalty program can help, but it should be just one aspect of your broader attempts to build meaningful and long-lasting relationships with your customers. A loyalty program is also not the be-all and end-all to increased profits and organizational growth, but it can offer a tremendous opportunity to gain knowledge and understanding of your customer base, and increase the profitability of your current customers. If we are being really honest, customer loyalty is created through consistent and regular marketing and actions, not just a single program.

Nevertheless, with a properly structured loyalty plan in place, your existing customers will continually move up the rungs of a carefully designed ladder of loyalty. This, in turn, should allow you to increase the revenues from your best customers, and increase loyalty and revenue from your less-profitable customers. Don’t waste this opportunity by providing cheap points and lousy rewards. Consider this a golden opportunity to learn more about your customers and what makes them tick. An effective loyalty program combines customer data and behaviors so that you can offer a more personalized and specific experience for that customer or specific segment of customers. Remember your different archetypes? You can (and should) create specific levels of loyalty for each group.

You can’t buy customer loyalty, but if you are not paying attention to it, you’re missing a massive opportunity to increase customer retention, referrals, and customer value. The key to an effective loyalty program is that it allows you to identify your most valuable customers and (as we saw in the Starbucks example) your lower-value customers, and to design programs and initiatives to create the type of behaviors you want from both groups. Let me provide a commonsense approach to properly structuring your loyalty program for maximum effectiveness. I’ve helped organizations design loyalty programs that allow them to identify both their best customers and (more important) those who offer opportunity for massive growth. Figure 7-1 shows what the traditional model of customer loyalty looks like.

FIGURE 7-1

Traditional Loyalty Programs

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