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LOYALTY IS MORE THAN A PROGRAM
Your Business Needs a Loyalty Model
How to elevate the strategic role of loyalty to boost competitive advantage
A few months ago, when we first started sharing research findings on social media, we looked into the popularity of marketing and loyalty content. What we saw surprised us.
Below are a few LinkedIn hashtags and their current follower counts:
#marketing 20,306,589
vs.
#loyalty 3,107; #customerloyalty 1,022; #brandloyalty 680
These numbers mean that, on LinkedIn, for every 10,000 users that follow the marketing hashtag, only 2.4 users follow one of the loyalty tags!
Why are interests in marketing vs. loyalty so lopsided? There are two possibilities:
- There is much less good content on loyalty to keep people interested; and
- Few marketers see loyalty as their area of responsibility.
Although the first reason is certainly possible, the second one is probably equally if not more responsible for the disparity.
Proof of this can be found in marketing job descriptions. We often see keywords such as “content marketing”, “search engine marketing”, “social media marketing”, “advertising”, and “analytics”. But rarely do we see loyalty mentioned, especially for marketing jobs at B2C companies.
Why is Loyalty Undervalued?
The ironic thing is that many marketers actually recognize the importance of customer loyalty and retention to a business. But why are not more marketers being given an explicit charge to build loyalty? There are three main reasons.
Reason #1: Growth is sexier than retention
The financial market is all about growth. Quarter after quarter, companies’ sales and profits are compared to the previous quarter or to the same time last year. The favorite child is always the one who beats expectations and shows consistent growth over time.
Customer loyalty and retention? Not so much. The fact that a company consistently retains its customers at 90%+ rate is considered “nice”. But without…
