Shift menu iconBook a demo
Log-In

How You Should Be Doing Loyalty Marketing

IN 2018, THE QUESTION IS NOT IF YOU SHOULD BE DOING LOYALTY MARKETING... BUT HOW YOU SHOULD BE DOING LOYALTY MARKETING.

After years of educating the marketplace on the value of loyalty marketing, it is now no secret that the easiest and most profitable customers are found in your customer database. These prospects are the low hanging fruit you should be contacting regularly to bring them back to the store before your competitors do.

With multiple vendors and in-house techniques, you now have options for helping you capture these customers. After working with and educating dealers and manufacturers around the world, I’ve compiled a short list that should help you get the most out of your database. Analyze your database and select prospects using statistics.

There are a substantial number of factors that impact the quality of a prospect in your database. Humans are not capable, across time, of consistently ranking these prospects using parameters that are statistically significant. In many cases, leaving it to your in-house team to hand select prospects will result in missed prospects, and/or wasted time, money and effort on disinterested customers. In today’s noisy marketing environment, the spray and pray approach won’t work either.

The correlation between the variables associated with each prospect cannot be estimated by hand or by looking at one or two variables independently (like equity position, for example). Today, algorithms have been created based on thousands of records of historical purchases that optimize prospect selection. For your efforts, you should find a marketing process that is helping you select statistically relevant prospects and you should then focus your attention on those customers.

Following a data driven process for prospect selection will help you maximize your response rate, save you money by avoiding statistically disinterested customers and, as a result, contribute to maximizing your marketing ROI.

Maximize lead generation with conversion rate optimization.

Once you have managed to select only statistically significant prospects, you want to obtain every single possible lead from these prospects. 

Have you ever been on a page that didn’t load properly, dropped off an online form because it was taking too long to complete, been curious if what you completed online actually gets received, or thought that what you were filling out looked like a potential scam? Over thousands of prospects, these customer experience frustrations add up very quickly and cost you money.

Pleasing, user-friendly design is a hallmark of customer engagement in the digital age, regardless of the age or demographic of your customers. Moreover, testing the user experience rigorously using techniques such as A/B testing to maximize conversions of those prospects to leads is a must-have in 2018. One lost lead is one lost potential customer.

Beautiful design to strengthen your brand. 

In addition to the practicality of maximizing lead generation, your brand is reflected at every touch point with the customer. When communicating with customers, make sure you are being represented in a way that improves your customer’s perception of you and your business. 

Have a transparent marketing and sales process.

Transparency breeds accountability and accountability breeds results. Proper oversight of your team will help you boost their performance.

Your team may have told you they followed up with the customer, but as most managers know, it is difficult to be sure every customer received a follow up in a timely fashion. That is why tools to ensure proper management and oversight of your loyalty marketing is crucial to your success. If your team knows they are being held accountable, they will put in the extra effort to ensure your high standards are met.

Measure results to gauge performance and to apply learnings for future marketing efforts.

As marketers, we need to know if what we are doing is working. It is simple, but its importance cannot be overstated - If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

Analytics will help you grade performance and apply learnings to future efforts. Don’t use data and you are bound to repeat the mistakes of the past. Your loyalty marketing efforts should be measured because being an informed marketer will result in better outcomes.

These four factors have played a significant role in guiding us in advising our clients at Shift and they continue to be integral to our marketing campaigns. I hope this will help you shape some of your decisions in 2018. Good luck!

This article was previously published in Shift Marketing Insider Magazine, Spring 2018.
July 28, 2022
Back arrow
Back to all posts