Customer Loyalty Tactics and Examples for Marketers
By Heike Young
Ask a marketer what their top priorities are. Chances are they’ll say something about acquiring new customers or filling the sales funnel.
New priorities like improving the customer experience are making headway, but the majority of marketers are still going all-in on customer acquisition all day, every day.
What if we’ve got it all wrong? Noah Fleming thinks so.
In the latest episode of the Marketing Cloudcast, the marketing podcast from Salesforce, Joel and I talk with Noah Fleming, author of the #1 Amazon bestselling book Evergreen: Cultivate the Enduring Customer Loyalty That Keeps Your Business Thriving.
According to Noah, loyal customers are the heart of every business. So why do many marketers chase new customers instead of sustaining relationships with those they already have?
In this podcast episode, Noah shares helpful examples and practical steps to help businesses create an engaged foundation of customers that stay loyal and remain evergreen. He also explains how you can gauge the current state of your customer loyalty.
You can download the episode for free now on iTunes or Stitcher.
Check out a preview of the episode here:
Here’s what Seth Godin had to say about this book: “Noah has woven together memorable examples, detailed common sense, and an innate understanding of what makes a business thrive. Hunting for new customers wherever you can find them doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
Here are a few highlights from our conversation with Noah.
The problem: A brief spike in metrics and an ongoing revenue drain, as one-time customers fail to return. Too many companies act like adrenalin junkies, chasing after new customers at the expense of alienating current customers. Customer acquisition at any cost is the wrong priority.
The solution: To shift resources from attracting new customers to engaging the base — the path to stable growth, season after season. Adding more products rarely helps, but restructuring content does.
In our hyperconnected world, bad experiences spread like wildfire. Noah shared the example of an airline who recently refused a free candy bar to a doctor who helped save a patient’s life onboard a flight. Even after his initial emails and complaints, they held their ground. “Would somebody in your company do the right thing before it spiraled out of control?” Noah asked. The answer to that can be a looking-glass into the state of your customer loyalty.
You can’t improve attrition if you don’t know your baseline. If somebody doesn’t buy from you in two months, they may still be a customer. If they don’t buy from you in two years, they’re probably not a customer. You can’t be sure your customer loyalty efforts are working if you don’t establish a baseline and measure against it. Then you can decide if you want more frequent store visits, more engagement online, more visits to the website, or other KPIs.
Real loyalty isn’t about the constant freebies. It’s not sustainable to train your customers to constantly expect freebies. In this example, Noah shares an experience where a frozen yogurt employee told him to join the program for coupons.
“Loyalty programs and loyalty cards — even the very concept of customer loyalty — needs to be less about the discounts you give and more about the relationship you can create. When we continue to condition our customers to be on the lookout for the next way to save a buck, we’re missing the essence of what loyalty is all about.”
Ready to improve your customer loyalty in ways that genuinely strengthen your brand-to-customer relationship? Get the full episode now on iTunes or Stitcher.
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Tweet @youngheike with marketing questions or topics you’d like to see covered next on the Marketing Cloudcast.
