So just how loyal are your customers?

Without brand awareness and loyalty, catalogues would be thrown away, direct mail would be utterly useless, trade shows a waste of time and efforts to harness the power of the internet elusively fruitless. Right? We all instinctively know that the image of our brand is vital but how do we establish a meaningful way of evaluating what’s important to our clients without ending up with a collection of ‘thoughts and feelings’ that whilst interesting do little to help move our business forward?

The starting point is a asking the right questions to establish just how loyal our customers really are …..:

Every business should have a way of measuring which clients are truly loyal compared to those that are neutral, or worse still, disaffected. Yet uncertainty about how to define customer loyalty makes it easier to adopt mass marketing strategies that are not focussed on building customer relationships.

Unless we know exactly why clients choose competitor products and services over our own, or which customers are susceptible to switching, marketing expenditure could be wasted and made for all the wrong reasons.

What is required is a marketing approach that combines a customer centric way of acquiring, developing and retaining loyal customers that is more than just a promotional programme in disguise.

It is those companies that manage to unlock an accurate insight of their customers with a range of strategies designed to win customer loyalty that are widely predicted to achieve the highest growth rates.

But how is this achieved? Here are some of the steps that you should consider when developing a marketing plan that is focussed on building customer loyalty.

• Segment objectives. With targets for segment growth, cross selling ratios, revenue and retention rates
• Contact management. A messaging and offer strategy that is tailored to each segment.
• Offer eligibility rules. Entitlements to promotional offers become based upon past activity, recent events or sharp variances in normal purchasing patterns.
• Feedback management. A pro-active system is established that collects, codes and streamlines customer information.
• Evaluation. Attitudinal ratings and observable customer behaviour.