Why is it time to advance your customer loyalty approach? customer loyalty

Why is it time to advance your customer loyalty approach?

Improve Customer Loyalty with Voxco

The Voxco guide to customer loyalty gives you an all around view of customer loyalty – from its significance, ways to measure it,  to the strategies to enhance it

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In today’s competitive market, earning and maintaining customer loyalty can be tough. Treating it as a discrete program or a mere tactic won’t help you reach anywhere. To achieve customer loyalty, businesses need to focus on factors like strategic alignment, conscious planning, and financial & cultural commitments. But, how to redefine your customer loyalty strategy and make it impactful for driving deeper engagement? Let’s find out: 

Don’t rely on a single program for winning customers’ loyalty

Most brands think that they need to only implement a loyalty program for winning their customers. There’s no doubt that loyalty programs play an indispensable role in reinforcing retention and gathering actionable customer insights, but they aren’t the quintessential element of developing effective customer relationships. Here are some difficulties that marketing pros face with structured loyalty:

Loyalty programs are admired but lack differentiation

In today’s time, customers love to join loyalty programs. According to Forrester, 89% of US individuals are a part of at least one type of loyalty program. Moreover, 66% of customers who join a loyalty program actively participate in it too. In spite of such ubiquity, marketers strive to deliver differentiation in their respective brand loyalty programs. In fact, 43% of marketers find it difficult to personalize content and offers in their loyalty programs.

Customers desire a unique value

Customers crave emotionally satisfying experiences and they don’t prefer to associate with brands that don’t deliver the same. So, businesses that focus on addressing transactional loyalty only or locking in their customers won’t be able to achieve success. To boost loyalty, making your customers feel happy, appreciated, and valued has become more important than ever. Be it any industry, customers expect special treatment from the loyalty program they become a part of.  

Customer Lifetime Value

Assess your existing loyalty strategy

Always remember that improving customer loyalty is a continuous process and to excel at it, you need to first document your current state. Here’s a list of the core competencies that will help you determine the maturity of your enterprise’s loyalty initiatives:

  • Strategy: To successfully nurture customer loyalty, a combined effort from multiple departments is needed, including, marketing & customer service. An organization’s loyalty strategy should be well-grounded in customer insights and aligned with the corporate business goals.

  • Research: The groundwork required for the customer loyalty initiatives is based on the existing customer data as well as the loyalty-specific data for clearly understanding customers and their motivations. The customer data can be gathered from sources like the point of sale, social media platforms, web analytics, loyalty platforms, etc.

  • Process: Don’t consider boosting customer loyalty as a marketing initiative only. There are multiple teams involved in planning, managing, and measuring the loyalty strategy. So, it’s important to define a process that makes it easy to manage customer data and privacy.

  • Technology: With an aim to create consistent experiences across both loyalty and non-loyalty-based touchpoints, marketers need to make sure that the current marketing tech stacks are integrated with the right set of loyalty-related technology and tools.
  • Measurement: Without the use of metrics, determining the impact of loyalty initiatives on customer behavior isn’t possible. Developing a framework for effective loyalty measurement empowers marketers to seamlessly track how loyalty initiatives affect the overall business outcomes.

  • People: It’s essential for marketers to check if employees are enriched with the right tools and knowledge for boosting customer loyalty. To ensure a loyalty-focused employee mindset, effective training and development programs are required for ensuring all stakeholders resonate with the brand’s loyalty vision.
Why is it time to advance your customer loyalty approach? customer loyalty

After successfully assessing your current loyalty strategy, you can create an actionable plan based on the following stages of maturity:

Beginner 

In this stage, companies are primarily focused on increasing transactional loyalty. Their strategy is based on limited market research and doesn’t align with the overall business objectives. It’s important for such companies to involve key stakeholders across marketing, customer service, and CX in their loyalty efforts.  

Intermediate 

In this stage, firms start to address the required emotional and behavioral aspects of loyalty. They make use of both loyalty and non-loyalty-specific customer data for crafting the loyalty strategy and leverage advanced analytics for improving performance. These firms should integrate their loyalty strategies more into the enterprise for delivering a relevant experience. 

Advanced 

In this stage, companies have an in-depth understanding of what makes customers loyal and how to develop healthy customer relationships. This detailed understanding of customers plays a pivotal role in data collection, management, as well as analysis. Also, these companies make optimum use of a contextual measurement framework for gauging emotional loyalty measures and behavioral loyalty measures.

Why is it time to advance your customer loyalty approach? customer loyalty

Making the most of your loyalty initiatives

Take the assessment

 Get in touch with the stakeholders from different teams such as marketing, customer service, customer loyalty, and customer experience to assess your organization’s existing customer loyalty approach. As the perspective of one department may be different from another, it helps to bring everyone on the same page. This plays a key role in aligning your goals for customer loyalty.

Discussion is mandatory 

After successfully assessing your loyalty approach, dig deeper to uncover the key issues responsible for limiting your maturity. Create a strategic plan for identifying the areas where improvement is needed and build a targeted roadmap to revamp your loyalty strategy. 

Take relevant action 

Leaving a programmatic mindset is certainly difficult and takes time. With the help of this assessment, you can take small steps to evolve your customer loyalty strategy. It’s important to track progress in each competency for improving your loyalty initiatives.

Brands are striving hard to build customer loyalty and deliver innovative customer experiences nowadays. Voxco offers omnichannel CX solutions that empower organizations to gain actionable insights into customer journeys for tailoring an impactful loyalty strategy. 

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