Customer Centric Loyalty

All of retail has been abuzz with how to build better customer centric loyalty. This is going to be the topic of this article in #marketingtrends. I am finding there aren't enough articles that link Retail with marketing in a way that emphasizes the real-life importance of customer experience and customer service in the customer journey.

Loyalty marketing must embody the customer experience and embed contemporary best practices of digital touch points in the journey. 

The Digital Native Audience

To be customer centric in today's world means a few new things that aren't always common sense for some Retailers: 

• They are content seeking
• They are peer oriented (word-of-mouth, UGC, CGC) 
• They are advertising and brand disloyal 
• They are responsive to Corporate Social Responsibility 
• They want a brand to represent a new value system or sustainable lifestyle

Consumer Demands of the Digitally Native

• Seamless experience
• Quick transition of brick and click and click and brick 
• Mobile orientated
• Choice at every touch point to customize their own buying journey 
• The opportunity to contribute to good causes
• The ability to visually interact with your brand (Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, Video)
• Video content that's entertaining, inspiring or educational 
• Brands that are trend setters and demonstrate a unique corporate culture 

Digitally Native Loyalty Paradigms 

How digital natives will respond to brand loyalty and investing themselves in brand is different today then it was in the past. Understanding this is important for CMOs, marketers and Retail store owners. 

• The Brand is now a consumer interaction (not a static thing) 
• A Brand is a value-system that must mirror the consumer (not a stand alone ideology) 
• A brand evolves with its customers not "at" it. 
• A brand is a digital relationship, not an offline signpost or amplified message. 
• A brand must offer different customer journeys and integrate with new technologies: wearable tech, augmented reality, IoT, Cloud POS software, etc...
• A brand must be emotionally salient to the customer, not simply a place to buy good and transaction with. I recently wrote an article on this on how brands must onboard customers from trust to reciprocity and reciprocity to commitment. 

Loyalty Reward Programs

A brand that wants to do loyalty reward programs that are customer-centric, must be white-label. 

• The relationship must occur between the brand with the consumer on a 1:1 level. 
• A loyalty network that offers a card or an app, is generic, not authentic. 
• Customers care about the privacy of their data, so when as a retailer your give your customer data over to a 3rd party, you are unnecessarily risking their private information. 
• A loyalty program must be integrated with loyalty marketing automation that delivers ROI. With data-augmented retail now in place, store owners must see the conversion of their campaigns in $ dollar signs, not marketing metrics (since they are not marketers). 

Goals of Loyalty 

The goals of loyalty are to get customer data integrated with your store analytics in such way as to build data-sets that will one day be used for predictive analytics. The end-game is better customer relationships via better marketing that's personalized with the help of machine learning and improved data science.

• To move away from a transactional (just another loyalty card!) to a more personalized high value brand relationship.  
• To generate ROI. If you loyalty rewards program isn't doing this, you have a problem. 
• To increase retention, reduce churn and decrease % of customers who are one-time buyers. 
• To increase average transaction size. 
• To improve average transaction time in days per customer. 
• To improve number of store visits per year per a customer. 
• To reduce churn by targeting recency and at-risk segments of customers with powerfully converting campaigns. 
• To generate customer profile data where the relationship with each customers can be improved, where engagement with your brand can be increased. 
• Generate campaigns that create incentives for customers to come back to the store, which drives sales. 

Meta-Goals 

From a more philosophical point of view, Loyalty should: 

1- Increase the perceived brand value (unique, memorable, special) 

2- Leverage Actionable Offers: gamify purchasing, cross-selling, upsetting. 

3- Create a customer experience with customer service that's so delightful, they have social cues that make them want to return. (H2H)

4- Boost the unique value proposition of your brand to your target audiences, specifically targeting campaigns that match different personas of your audience.

5- Create opportunities for customers to recognize and be matched with products that best suit them that increase sales.

Impacting Customer Behaviour 

1. Word of mouth referrals 
2. Friend referrals 
3. Online advocacy or content (UGC, CGC)
4. Campaigns that touch community (CSR) 
5. Campaigns that celebrate a cause (CSR) 
6. Customer review sites, interactive feedback 
7. That embody Sustainable, Altruistic or Positive Values (CSR) 
8. That stimulate customer investment online (UGC , CGC) 
9. That leverage customer influencers and viral marketing  
10. Loyalty incentives and gamification strategies that create long-term and short-term specific rewards that are reciprocal in nature 

To read more of my articles on loyalty marketing, go here. 

Do you have creative ideas on customer-centric loyalty for independent retailers and small business entrepreneurs?