The holiday season presents the perfect opportunity for businesses to boost customer loyalty. According the National Retail Federation, an estimated 617 Billion dollars in US holiday sales is expected this year (NRF). This sales forecast proves optimistic for engaging new customers to transform into loyal patrons.
Emotional Loyalty
How does your business measure customer loyalty? Many define loyalty by transactional metrics or program enrollment. Yet, loyalty is much more complex than a simple evaluation of purchase behavior or membership registration. Building and understanding the business-to-customer relationship is fundamental to developing and nurturing loyalty. Emotional and rational logics are also intertwined in loyalty which is further complicated by analyzing the unique characteristics of each customer. Emotional loyalty can be deciphered by measuring a customer’s social engagement, recency, and affinities with a brand. This type of emotional investment is a much better indicator of a customer’s loyalty and attitude towards your brand than purchase behavior is.
What Does your Strategy Say?
Establishing a reliable loyalty program requires some strategic thought. Here are a few key questions to ask:
- What are my businesses desired goals and outcomes?
- What key steps must I take to reach those goals?
- What processes and technologies are needed to execute those key steps?
Driving loyalty with points and rewards is no longer good enough. The critical objective today is gaining unique customer insights. Customer analytics are the backbone to understanding emotional loyalty and inciting brand engagement. A streamlined process must be in place for interpreting customer needs and motivations in order to adequately engage with your audience and promote brand enthusiasts and loyal patrons. Prepare your loyalty marketing strategy for quick adjustments and opportunities for improvement based on customer engagement results. Once a reliable and scalable loyalty program is executed then the intelligent customer insights will help to target specific marketing strategies to engage your holiday audience and greatly impact the success of your loyalty program.
Revamp your Loyalty Program to Understand your Holiday Audience!
Convert your holiday shoppers into year-round brand enthusiasts and loyal patrons. Initiate the business-to-customer relationship using digital marketing techniques to engage your on-premise holiday audience. Understand unique customer analytics to provide your businesses loyalty program with the opportunity to focus on developing the customer relationship, promoting advocacy and initiating engagement. Use direct individualized marketing strategies to nurture new connections this holiday and increase customer engagement. Make new customers feel special and valued by adopting personalized messaging strategies which will encourage emotional loyalty with your brand. As the holidays deliver a rush of seasonal shoppers, revamp your loyalty program to understand your holiday audience, accommodate the influx of new business and improve methods of serving your customers.
