Are you ready to increase customer retention rates? Are you looking to use loyalty marketing as a way to increase customer loyalty to your brand? What started out as the loyalty cards that have filled up our wallets for over a decade has turned into a revitalization of the customer experience via mobile marketing.
In this article, we explain the definition of customer loyalty, highlight what’s new in the industry, and offer you all the loyalty marketing best practices you can handle.
How Do You Define Customer Loyalty?
From your business’s perspective, this could vary from how often customers visit your store or website, how regularly they make a purchase, or if they tend to steer away from your competition. According to PR Loyalty Solutions, “Customer loyalty is both an attitudinal and behavioural tendency to favor one brand over all others, whether due to satisfaction with the product or service, its convenience or performance, or simply familiarity with the brand.”
Plain and simple, customer loyalty means repeat customers. This not only brings in steady revenue, but saves you money, since a new customer can cost anywhere between three and 30 times more to acquire than keeping your current ones.
What Motivates Customer Loyalty?
Customer loyalty is surely an intrinsic motivator. If people keep buying your product or service because it’s the cheapest, that loyalty will dry up as soon as your prices go up or your competition bottoms out.
It can absolutely come from customer satisfaction with your product or service, especially if you are offering good customer service. (Customer service can’t be automated yet, but it sure is important.)
Customer fidelity can also arise when customers are lazy and are accustomed to buying from you, because it’s geographically simple to buy from you, or because they simply don’t know about the competition. Any of these reasons means you're safe—for now.What we are going to focus on is how to increase customer motivation and influence buying behaviour in a way that nurtures customer loyalty over time.
What’s New in the World of Loyalty Marketing?
Loyalty cards worked for awhile, but today, people simply have too many cards, so they are getting lost—as does their impact. Just like we are using Google Wallet or Apple Pay to move our credit and debit cards into our smartphones, this should also be the case with loyalty marketing. (And this is good, because with mobile marketing, it is logistically easier to set up and get going.)
Beacons and indoor location-based marketing:
If you’ve had your eye on recent tech news, you couldn’t have missed Google’s premiere of Eddystone, an open source rival to Apple’s iBeacon. Bluetooth beacons are a hot Internet of Things trend allowing you to do all the cool things that GPS does but inside. All you have to do is place beacons in strategic places around your store, event, mall, airport, etc,. and then use the phones already being lugged around to start offering reactive campaigns based on where people go in your store.
You can take it even further with automated big data analytics like the MOCA Platform which combines how customers move around your indoor location with user profiles and other open source data to create detailed customer personas. With this information, you can create customizable marketing campaigns that trigger at just the right moment. The idea is to eradicate mobile spam by creating meaningful, personalized push notifications that influence customer behaviour.
Mobile marketing partnerships multiply impact:
You certainly can put your efforts into creating your own individual mobile marketing campaign, but isn’t it always better to play with others too? Especially if you are in a shopping center, airport, strip mall or place with multiple non-competing players, why not work with other businesses for the common good?
You can build on the loyalty marketing just mentioned by offering an “If this, then that” marketing strategy. For example, if folks spend $100 at your fancy shoe store, then they get invited to have a margarita at X bar or they get a discounted cover charge. You have aligning interests with the local bar: you're getting people ready to go out dancing, and together you can help each other bring in business and establish regular clientele.
This strategy also works well for chambers of commerce or even entire towns. Oliva Card is a neat tool that allows you to build a cross-city network customer loyalty campaign.
Selfies sell:
Yes, it seems like we are all a bunch of lemmings, but, with 71 percent of people more likely to buy based on social media referrals, you’d be crazy not to hop right on that bandwagon.
Offer deals for people showing off your brand (with appropriate hashtags so you can find them). Ask for selfies of people wearing or using your product, of people eating at your restaurant, flying your airline, or visiting your amusement park; in exchange, offer special discounts and deals. Customer loyalty is intrinsically motivated, and helping customers feel accepted and “cool” is certainly one of the strongest intrinsic motivations.
Measuring it all:
OK, this isn’t new. If you can’t measure it, it’s not successful marketing. Big data analytics allows us to dig deeper in how we create customized marketing campaigns, even as we go into extreme customer segmentation.
Then we need to A/B test everything; we do this with the proper messaging. And, if you bring in partnerships of with other forward-thinking, customer-minded businesses, try to manage it all together, bringing all the analytics together in one platform so you can create even more complex customer personas.
How Do You Increase Customer Retention Rates?
Is loyalty marketing a part of your whole marketing strategy? How does your team do it? Now, go ahead and share your own loyalty marketing best practices below!
