The Power of Loyalty. Roger Brooks B.

spending. The world is your personal selection of oysters, and you only open those which you feel most loyal to and where you feel you’ll continue to find that shiny pearl you’re always eager to uncover.

      Understanding the intricacies of customer loyalty and the fundamental steps needed to build a successful customer loyalty strategy is an ongoing process. It cannot be learned overnight, nor can it be taught in its entirety in this book. Understanding loyalty and what creates customer loyalty is repetition, replication, recurrence, and reiteration.

      Loyalty is constantly reminding your customers that they are valued. Loyalty is repeating your message as often as you can. There is no such thing as overemphasizing the recurrence and reiteration of your loyalty message to your customers. It is in that repetition where your message is reinforced.

      You have to be creative in molding the information from this book into your own business. Your customer loyalty strategy will look much different if you are in the insurance industry versus retail. You know your business best, and you’ll need to develop a strategy that fits best for your customers.

      You will see later in the book that identifying your customers is the first step toward understanding who your customers are. Your industry, and to some extent the sophistication level of your systems, will dictate the ease of being able to identify your customers and in turn carry out your strategy. If you operate an online business, identifying your customers is much easier than if you operate a convenience store. Online businesses have an advantage because every customer provides an e-mail address that can be used as the loyalty identifier.

      So, if you are in real estate or retail, fitness or finance, auto sales or antiques, there are basic steps you should follow to build a successful loyalty strategy. My commitment is to provide you with as much information as I can through this book series (and through my website), and save you time and money in the process.

Learn from the BEST

      Throughout the book, you’ll see various loyalty profiles featuring companies across multiple industries. You will recognize most of these companies, but some you will not. I carefully chose the companies included in order to demonstrate the vastness and diversity of loyalty programs currently in the marketplace. Some of the featured programs are pure rewards programs while others focus on unique loyalty strategies. Each of the programs has its own personal twist that makes it distinct. Learn from these programs, study them, and find ways to make your own loyalty strategy distinct.

Loyalty Is Reciprocal

      The root of loyalty understands that loyalty is reciprocal. Loyalty is not one-sided. There is give and take with loyalty. You first have to demonstrate your loyalty to your customers before they will reciprocate by giving their loyalty in return. You have to prove that through each part of your business you are sincere about earning their trust. Practice consistency in everything you do, and you’ll be on your way to earning the trust of your customers.

      Encouraging your customers to choose you repeatedly over the competition is a marketing challenge that many organizations face. Differentiating yourself by enhancing your customers’ buying experience can go a long way toward winning their long-term loyalty.

      Typically, loyalty strategies are designed to identify who your customers are in order to track their activity and aim to change their purchasing behavior so they become more profitable to your bottom line.

      Loyalty strategies can have many shapes, sizes, and meanings, but there are FIVE main principles of the loyalty cycle, which always remain constant. It is indeed a cycle as the process of each principle is never-ending.

      1. Identify Customers

      2. Track Spending

      3. Motivate Behavior

      4. Reward Performance

      5. Measure Results

      Sophisticated customers today watch their spending closely and expect more in return. Given a choice, they would rather spend their hard-earned dollars with a company that values their business while having an opportunity to earn rewards and benefits over time.

      So what’s your company doing to improve the complete buying experience? What’s your strategy for acquiring new customers and retaining existing ones? How can you increase the profitability of your customers’ transactions? The short answer to these questions is this: Initiate a loyalty strategy.

      If you follow the basic principles of the loyalty cycle, the success of your loyalty program will speak for itself. Your loyal customers will frequent you more often and increase spending, which will lead to greater profitability. And you’re never too large or too small to launch a loyalty program. Whether you have three stores or 300, a bakery or a bank, you can design a loyalty program that complements your current business strategy.

      Below is a brief description of each principle within the loyalty cycle. An expanded version of each principle is found in Essential Steps 6 through 10.

       1. Identify Customers

      All loyalty programs must have a means of identifying customers. Initiate a process to identify your customers, and assign a unique identifier to each (i.e., loyalty card, payment instrument, e-mail address, etc.). The loyalty program identifier is the linchpin to your program.

       2. Track Spending

      Once an identifier is in place, you now have the means to track spending. Numerous loyalty applications can do this. Talk to your point-of-sale provider, credit card processor, or IT department to research and implement reliable and stable loyalty tracking software.

       3. Motivate Behavior

      Identifying your customers and tracking their spending provide an ideal platform for motivating customer behavior. After compiling a minimum of two to three months of historical data, you can start to analyze the data, market directly to your loyal customers, and aim to change their purchasing behavior.

       4. Reward Performance

      People like to be rewarded for their performance. If the reward has a high perceived value, then your customer will more likely take action.

       5. Measure Results

      All of the previous steps are irrelevant if you can’t measure results. Loyalty programs evolve based on the success of individual promotions and campaigns within your strategy. Once you can measure the results of each promotion, you can measure the success of your loyalty strategy.

      Over time, a well-thought-out loyalty strategy can pay itself back and provide a true return on investment (ROI). Once you put the tools in place to initiate the five principles of the loyalty cycle, your loyalty program will provide the basic foundation for you to nurture customers, build the program, and reap the benefits.

      The 1st ESSENTIAL STEP to Build a Successful Customer Loyalty Strategy is to RECOGNIZE THAT LOYALTY IS ALL AROUND YOU; IT’S EVERYWHERE LOYALTY!

      Everywhere Loyalty describes the consumer-driven world you live in. If you look close enough, loyalty is visible everywhere you go and part of everything you do.

      Everywhere