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Your Customer's Emotional Experience
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We talk a good deal about customer loyalty nowadays, but do we really understand it and know how to gain it?

The “1 to 1” gurus, Peppers & Rogers, define three sorts of Customer Loyalty:

  • Emotional Loyalty – this is about how customers feel about your brand;
  • Behavioural Loyalty – the way customers respond, and whether they actively seek to do business with you;
  • Profitable Loyalty – those customers that help you to make money.

Emotional Loyalty was the first level of understanding of the concept of customer loyalty, with early marketing designed to appeal to the emotions and build a bond with customers in this way. However, it became apparent that while customers might feel emotionally close to your brand, that didn’t necessarily mean they would buy from you, or do so on a regular basis.

This led to the concept of Behavioural Loyalty where marketers sought to find ways of bringing the customer to them to do business, and do so regularly. Of course, in many cases Emotional Loyalty was ignored as the focus was on getting the customer to purchase from you.

More recently, with the advent of tools to analyse customer purchases and overall costs more accurately, companies are discovering that on average only around 20% of customers are profitable for a business, with 60% being around break-even and a further 20% losing the company money, so they then focused on trying to find ways to increase the percentage of profitable customers and either remove the unprofitable ones or make them profitable.

However, isn’t the key really to do the first two well and use this to leverage the third? It really is not about focusing on just one aspect of loyalty, but rather about understanding how all three interact and driving your business accordingly.

On the emotional level, you need to be clear about what your brand stands for and ensure that you deliver what you say you will do – never over-promise and under-deliver as that is the quickest way to kill your brand’s emotional loyalty.

To keep your customers coming back – and we all know that repeat customers are best – your marketing must understand their buying behaviour and ensure that you continue to interact with them to capture the maximum share of their wallets. The Lifetime Value concept is key here.

But, of course, you must ensure you do so profitably – and this is not just about margin, but about the total costs of doing business with each customer. A high margin customer can still result in a loss for you if, for example, they are consistently returning items for credit, needing expensive support resources, paying late, and so on, while a low-margin customer who pays cash and never needs support can be nicely profitable. Be clear about where the costs are for each customer.

A great example of a company that does all three well is Amazon: just look at the brand recognition, the fact that you know they it’s a reliable supplier of books, DVDs, etc., at good prices, with a no-quibble replacement policy, and then see how it constantly offers you new items based on your buying behaviour. Amazon’s systems are not only providing its marketing engine with ongoing offers tailored to your likes, but make purchasing easy, so its internal costs are low as there is minimal need for support.

But, after all, if you really think about it, isn’t this what business is all about anyway: getting customers who feel good about doing business with you as you provide a consistently great customer experience, coming back over and over again to make purchases that are profitable for you?

So, to answer the question as to whether there is a Right Kind of Customer Loyalty, the answer is clearly, “No.” To be successful you need to ensure you are focusing your business on all three – Emotional, Behavioural and Profitable. And, in the famous words of a song first made popular in the mid 60s, “Do What You Do, Do Well.”

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