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background marketing theory, the latest research, and the kind of practical knowhow, facts and figures necessary to make the right decisions about customer loyalty
and marketing campaigns in today's harsh economic climate.
Readers will benefit from more than 100 highly detailed case studies of the world's
best loyalty programs, finding out not only what their strategic purpose is but also
what they've achieved since launching, how they did it, what worked and what
didn't work, how competitors responded, and how well the programs are
performing.
The report goes on to detail hundreds of new and existing trends affecting
marketers in all sectors and geographies around the world, as well as dozens of
business critical insights, trend reports, and market forecasts from 2016 to 2020
and beyond.
Learn from two dozen of the world's leading loyalty gurus and most experienced
marketing professionals, and benefit from their opinions on what the industry is
doing right, doing wrong, doing too much or too little. Our panel of independent
experts offer page after page of completely practical advice and sheer hard data
that every marketer needs for well informed decisions and forward-looking
strategies.
This executive summary provides a brief overview of The Loyalty Guide 7, and will
help you quickly identify the aspects of loyalty marketing that are most relevant to
you, both now and later on. Each section below summarizes one chapter of the
report, making it easy to see at a glance which parts of the report you'll need to
refer to as you build and develop your loyalty marketing strategy. You can use this
chapter to quickly navigate the report's hundreds of pages of research, market data,
guidelines and advice, illustrations, charts, tables and graphs.
We welcome you to what has been built up over more than a decade into the
world's fullest and most complete report on customer loyalty, customer
relationships, marketing techniques and best practices, cost effective business
strategies, and their associated metrics, operations and management.
Loyalty Strategies
There are two basic points of view to be considered when discussing the business
case for introducing - or keeping - a customer loyalty programs: Some industry
observers have argued that a loyalty program is often unnecessary because it's just
a way of spending money rewarding customers who would probably have been loyal
anyway.
Others, however, have recognized that the real benefit of a loyalty program is not
necessarily felt first by the customer; rather that it is the merchant that gains the
necessary insight (from detailed analysis of its loyalty program and transactional
data, for example) to be able to improve the way it communicates with and deals
with its customers. The customer is actually the secondary (but still the most
important) recipient of the benefits of a true loyalty program.
To say that a loyalty program is not useful, or is a waste of marketing budget, is to
have misunderstood the real purpose of the program. Rather than offering a
simplistic discount or rebate program, a real loyalty program offers the customer
any number of incentives to allow the program operator to collect accurate and
useful data about their lifestyle, purchase choices, motivations, interests,
circumstances, and in many cases even about their household and immediate
family. The reason for gathering this data is not - as a very small minority of
consumers seem to fear - to create some kind of 'Big Brother' database of peoples'
personal habits, but to gain practical insights into ways in which the merchant could
serve each customer more effectively, more easily, and more satisfyingly.
Most marketers have heard by now that "it costs five times more to gain a new
customer than to retain an existing one", and most would love to gather together a
community of like-minded brand devotees who hang on their every word, respond
to every promotion, and talk to their friends about how great the brand is. Long
term customer loyalty isn't always a case of 'love at first sight' - not often, anyway.
Instant revenue is almost guaranteed from margin-slashing sales, promising buy
one get one free, and 75% off. But is this sustainable for your brand in the long
term? Of course not. And what does this approach do to your brand image and your
bottom line? Why do so many brands go after the coupon-clipping vultures when it
is actually their most loyal customers they should be looking after with exclusive
benefits?
A loyalty strategy is not a short-term sales fix: it takes time to get it right, for both
you and your customers. To make loyalty a success, you need to get to know your
customers as individuals so that you can cultivate a community of brand advocates
by offering really personal community, benefits and rewards. Once you have a wellestablished group of customers who are engaged with you and your brand, the
figures will speak for themselves.
How loyalty adds value to your business and brand...
The business case for a customer loyalty program isn't limited to customer insights.
In fact, the following is just a small subset of the benefits you can gain from a wellplanned loyalty program:
1. Focusing on acquiring insight, not just repeat visits
2. Targeting customer acquisition campaigns more accurately
3. Moving existing customers up through your 'spend bands'
4. Intelligent de selection of your least profitable customers
5. Winning back profitable customers who have already defected
6. Identifying patterns that show when customers are about to defect
people worldwide of social apps on their smart phones and tablet devices, almost all
of which have GPS location services built-in, these three technologies naturally
came together to add real-time relevance, unparalleled personalization,
convenience, and even fun to what otherwise would have been three disparate
elements of the marketer's toolbox.
Social media marketing is a relatively new field, driven by the widespread
popularization among consumers of social networking web sites and services such
as Face book, Google+, Twitter, Foursquare and others. These services don't only
hold true to the original vision of sites such as Face book (i.e. connecting people in a
safe and personal way) but they now also include other services and technologies
that augment that goal, such as location-based services which allow people to
'check in' just about anywhere - whether it be a popular club, restaurant, or their
own home, or any other venue - usually thanks to the GPS that's built into their
mobile phone handset. This allows people to 'be seen' in all the right places but,
more importantly, it has important implications for brands that they choose to
associate with in their social network.
Social media: the 'So' part...
When it comes to social media, one of the most common misconceptions among
marketers is that social marketing is as easy as putting up a page on Face book, or
setting up a Twitter account. Of course those are the basic building blocks, but
there's a whole world of detail that needs to be considered first. As in any other
marketing or advertising discipline, you first need to identify and clarify a host of
factors (such as the brand identity, brand message, brand values, target audiences,
value proposition, referral and advocacy benefits, social gaming elements, social
commerce and currency, messaging strategy, creative elements and imagery, and
of course how - if at all - the social marketing initiative will link up with any existing
marketing initiatives - for example your loyalty program, or perhaps even an
external loyalty initiative or coalition program).
Generally, unless your brand already has 'top of mind' presence in most households,
it is not enough to simply set up a social marketing program and hope for the best.
Like its cousin, web marketing, social marketing requires a great deal of advertising,
exposure, reinforcement in every consumer-facing message, ever-present reminders
in every communication channel, and even partnerships with external organizations
that are also likely to deal with your own target audiences.
Another issue that many marketers seem to wrestle with when they're planning
their level of involvement in social media is the degree to which they're willing to
surrender control of the brand/consumer conversation. The problem is that, once
you have made your brand available for public comment on one or more social
platforms, it is impossible to control what is said by others. A number of ill-advised
attempts have been made in the past to have posts, pages, and even whole user
profiles withdrawn from social media sites, but the outrage and public fury
associated with those actions have, in every case, damaged the brand even further.
It may be a leap of faith for the marketer - perhaps more so for the C-level
executives who need to vote to fund a social marketing campaign - but the
consumer is generally a fair-minded individual and most will ignore (or even 'flame'
- a form of internet put-down) those who are too extreme or excessive in their
negative comments. However, genuine consumers saying genuinely good things
about a brand are worth the leap of faith. That kind of advocacy can spread rapidly
among social networks, even leaping from site to site as it is re-posted or retweeted.
Location-based: the 'Lo' part...
The ongoing trend toward location-based services is something that consumers
were initially afraid of, with many worrying excessively about 'big brother' tracking
their every movement, but times have changed and many people now appear to be
more interested in the positives that a location-aware device can bring to their
everyday lives - improved relevance in mobile search results, or more accurate
localized recommendations from mobile loyalty or retail apps, for example.
The mobile channel: the 'Mo' part...
The mobile device is now, in most countries at least, a fully developed personal
organiser, social hub, communication device (note that we didn't list that first),
portable office, entertainment console, navigation system, and a host of other
things - with billions of apps available (many for free) it seems there is no limit to
the device's capabilities or usefulness in everyday life. And this is good news for the
marketer, because a device which commands that much attention is a potential
friend not only for brand messaging but for the almost-viral spread of word of mouth
brand advocacy.
For example, did you know that the average SMS text message is read within 30
seconds, while most email goes unread for several hours (if at all)? We cannot
overstate the importance of the adoption of the mobile channel in all its glory (the
mobile web, mobile apps, geo-location services, text messaging, mobile payments,
NFC contactless chips, QR Codes, and so on) if marketers are reach their target
audiences in a timely, relevant, and trusted way.
In The Loyalty Guide, we use real world examples to explain in detail:
The pros and cons of integrating social media into loyalty and marketing
efforts
The tangible and subtle benefits of social loyalty marketing campaigns
The dangers of falling behind your competitors in the social media race
How the social channel helps you reach your target market ('So')
How to plan a mobile/social strategy that gets Word of Mouth flowing ('Mo')
The financial case for overlaying Best Customer Marketing on your loyalty
scheme
When to use short term, long term and mixed term BCM strategies
How the loyalty program interlinks with BCM to drive new revenues
How to identify best customers, and what makes them 'better' than the rest
them. For example, the art of examining web site visitor behavior and drawing
meaningful conclusions about their possible purchase intentions is no longer an art:
it's a very precise science. As more and more data is collected about customers and
the way they interact digitally with their chosen suppliers, increasingly refined
models can be built to help predict the intentions of other unknown consumers
when they make first contact with a brand, regardless of which channel they choose
to use. As a result, those parts of the organization that collect, handle, process,
analyze and use data are becoming more instrumental in the success of loyalty and
marketing initiatives, turning from back-room IT geeks into modern front-line
heroes.
Identify the trends and forecasts that matter most...
In The Loyalty Guide, we examine the latest trends and forecasts involving
customer loyalty (from both a strategy-driven and a consumer-driven perspective),
retail marketing, social and digital marketing, mobile marketing, multichannel
marketing, and brand marketing, including:
what made their loyalty marketing initiatives successful where others failed, what
would you ask first?
We've done exactly that for you. For this edition of The Loyalty Guide, we asked
international loyalty consultant, Brian Woolf - who is widely and affectionately
known as the 'Godfather of Loyalty Marketing' - to bring together his fifteen most
insightful articles and speeches from his vast database of customer loyalty and
marketing expertise spanning the last 20 years: the fifteen topics and pieces of
wisdom that should be passed on to every marketer, every practitioner of customer
loyalty, and in fact every professional who's in business to make a profit.
In this goldmine of a chapter, Woolf shares the following articles with you, our
reader:
1. The 3-Question Marketing Plan - Three simple questions to help you grow
customers and sales...
2. How Good Is Your Produce Department - Really? - How can you find out
what your regular customers really think of you?
3. The Best Type of Promotions - The best type of promotions are those that
customers actively remember...
4. The Intelligent Loss of Business - What we do well, and what we don't do
at all, are two of the most important elements of strategy...
5. The Most Important Number in Marketing - Imagine your new CEO
asking you to provide him with the most important customer number every 4
weeks. You respond "no problem", and then tell him what the number will be
and why...
6. The Single Best Way to Increase Sales - One of the greatest insights I
have gained from analysing customer data over the past two decades is that
there is one best way to increase sales...
7. The Customer 5% Reward Program - vA common practice of card-based
food retailers is giving benefits (discounts, gifts, etc) to their regular (ie,
'better') customers. But how much should be given? How? And to whom?
8. Shop kick: A Unique Approach to Loyalty - This article explains why Shop
kick is a loyalty program worthy of our attention as marketing professionals...
9. A High-Octane Supermarket Loyalty Program - What is it about gas
prices that make people switch from a more convenient gas station on their
side of the street to one on the other where the posted gas price is 1-2
gallon cheaper?
10.Loyalty Marketing: The Next 20 Years - Twenty years ago I had the
privilege of spending 6 months researching one question: Why, in those early
days of Loyalty Marketing, were a few pioneers experiencing success, many
more were failing (losing money), and the rest had ambiguous results?