Are you ready to make the loyalty leap?

Loyalty… the biggest marketing buzzword as there is no shortage of articles and sentiments on this topic. The goal of a loyalty programme is to create barriers to switching which can either be psychological (Virgin Atlantic’s Flying Club membership) or economical (Clicks cash rewards) for the members. But, loyalty programmes have simply become the cost of doing business as they are increasing the cost of serving a price sensitive and sometimes non-loyal customer group. In the end, the goal of loyalty is to drive commitment and faithful behaviour of profitable customers, therefore we need to engage with our customers, make it easy for them to communicate with us, create exclusivity for them and earn their trust.

The silver bullet here is data. Customer data can inform decisions throughout your business that can create the transformation between retaining your customers at present along with developing lasting emotional loyalty. The PicknPays and the Clicks’ of our country are already committed to using data for this purpose, but many businesses are still casual about the application of customer data across all facets of their business – they have yet to take the business-wide leap committing to put the customer at the centre of their purpose.

Customer data items include demographical data, lifestyle information, and transactional data along with the customer experience which ranges from customer complaints to opinion polls. This wealth of customer data allows us to transform the data into a customer intelligence tool. The customer intelligence tool allows us to calculate the customer lifetime value which is an indication of the value (future or current) to a business which differs from business to business.

Most importantly is how this information is fed back to where it is actually required into the business – the marketing department. But it is what the marketing managers do with the data once it is collected that matters most. Unfortunately many businesses still don’t understand how use those customer insights profitably and responsibility to make the customer happy, oftentimes with damaging results to performance, reputation or both. Businesses are reluctant to use the data they have due to the following major reasons:

1. They are concerned about the volume and how to cope with data overload.
2. They struggle to fully integrate the data into the decision-making tools available.

Important to note, this valuable information will assist the marketing team in the creation of new marketing campaigns, provide the right information to the right people at the right time, thereby solving the customers’ needs the first time around.

Easy as pie! So… are you ready to make the loyalty leap?