Becoming a loyalty oriented business (how to do it and why)

There's been a widespread realization of the importance of customer loyalty over recent years. Businesses now understand that it should be treated as much more than a side-project.

When it comes to loyalty programs, customers are only interested in the best.

It now takes more effort to bring together the components needed to run an advanced loyalty program. This is because they're typically spread throughout a business.

Advanced loyalty programs require input from different departments and collaboration on data and processes. As a result, businesses need to focus on becoming loyalty-oriented from the very top.

For a company to become fully loyalty-oriented, top-level management needs to believe in the project.

They need to understand:

From the perspective of top-level management, relevant metrics are key here. They'll want to see metrics that they can use to evaluate the success of the customer loyalty operation.

You should determine these metrics at the very start of the project to ensure everyone is on the same page. They can always be updated later if needed.

There are a number of separate elements to customer loyalty. You need to address as many as possible to create truly loyal customers.

The two key types of customer loyalty are behavioral loyal and emotional loyalty.

The problem with behavioral loyalty is the lack of context to explain customers' behavior. Often it's simply a result of convenience or circumstance, meaning the customer would readily switch to a rival brand if it was cheaper or easier to access.

The concept of emotional loyalty, on the other hand, attempts to explain the deeper reasoning behind a customer’s behavior. They may feel a connection to a brand’s identity or mission, they may feel the brand is very trustworthy, or they may have an emotional attachment to the product.

These different factors can give rise to different types of customer profiles depending on the type of loyalty they hold. Bearing in mind these two types of customer loyalty, it’s possible to describe four common customer personas.

A loyalty-first approach requires alignment across all sections of the business. This means that teams and individuals need to be on the same page. This includes objectives, data, and, in the case of customer-facing employees, behavior.

Outside of raw sales figures, emotional loyalty is key. You need to consider how you foster it in:

Because these factors are so diverse, the transition towards becoming a loyalty-oriented company should be seen more as an organizational culture shift.

Making a change in one team without a corresponding change in others reduces the likelihood of achieving results.

Running an advanced customer loyalty operation requires a company-wide approach in order to get real results. But, as far as the backend solution is concerned, Talon.One’s Promotion Engine can support any loyalty campaign you'll ever need. Download our exclusive Loyalty Playbook for more information.