Blueprint
Blueprint:
There are many roads to build customer engagement and loyalty that result in meaningful relationships with your customers. Here you can find a comprehensive guide to make it happen, a guide I crafted for over 15 years of my work in retail. This blueprint consists of six steps to follow in your brand transformation to becoming loyal to your customers.
Blueprint: Six steps in building a brand loyal to its customers
The role of loyalty is one of a gateway that connects more data and insights about your customers in one single view and enables you to drive meaningful value exchange for both your brand and your customers. It is a place, be it physical or metaphorical, where customers are more important than the products you offer. The gateway gives you direct and instant access to the most valuable customers through your own channels and creates a better experience, building an emotional bond to your brand. It also fuels your organisation with fact-based, actionable insights to drive a customer-centric culture in the company and use owned data as a competitive advantage.
1. Build a single view of the customer
2. Place humans above your products
3. Propose value exchange that is meaningful for your customers
4. Always start with your members
5. Track the performance
6. Enable data-driven decisions by fueling your organisation with customer data
Collect all customer interaction data in one profile and recognise them as the same person regardless of the channel they decide to engage with (mobile, online or physical store) or moment in their customer journey.
The value of data comes from its volume, quality, and completeness. Over time people change their home addresses, emails, or mobile numbers. And you are probably the last person that they notify about these changes. People continuously switch web browsers or mobile phones—their entry points to your brand. A single view of the customer allows you to recognise the same person in different touchpoints throughout time. It is the prerequisite to building relationships with your customer.
Shift your thinking from “what I want to tell” or “what I have to sell” to “what my customers want to get from me” and “what problem I can solve”.
Brands often focus on the products they offer, trying to fit them into the market. This limits the brand potential and reduces the marketing efficiency. When you focus on humans and the wealth of data and insights you collected, you can truly understand the customer’s problems (barriers) towards your brand and category. It enables you to adjust the offer and your communication to customers and then go beyond your marketing, improving services, ways of working and, at some point, creating new products or services that your customers will love.
Provide meaningful and relevant benefits for consumers to join, reward customers for their engagement and incentivise them to identify and leave their traces in all touchpoints.
By joining your brand, customers sign a contract with you with the data as a currency—information about who they are and what they like. In reverse, they should have a good understanding of what value they can get back from you. Giving your Members important and relevant reasons to engage with your brand will boost your customer lifetime value as well.
Build the integrated engagement by starting from your own media channels to secure the right message in the right touchpoint at the right time and scale, ensuring high media budget efficiency.
Instead of paying for reach and relying on external partners, it is better to operate in the areas you are already present. This is why it is important to focus first and foremost on the customers about whom we know the most. In many cases, your loyalty (CRM) communication and external media are like two paths in one forest, which sometimes intersect. Still, when you continue to run along one of them, you may easily overlook what is happening on the other one. It is a missed opportunity. By not planning your media activity in an integrated way, you reduce the effectiveness of your marketing budget. Some members are underinvested, some overinvested, but you are unable to determine which is which.
Measure the commercial impact of all your actions and track your customer behaviour looking for the business potential.
In your company P&L, all costs related to your customer engagement and loyalty activities are clearly stated, while the visibility of benefits to the business may be blurry. Therefore it is in your vital interest to build commercial models, prove ROI, and show all costs as an investment with high returns. Connect the Customer Lifetime Value with the value of your company. And by detailed tracking of customers’ data, you will recognise the new business potential that will boost your performance.
Build central customer knowledge and reports repository & tools to provide fact-based, actionable insights to drive a customer-centric culture in the organisation and use owned data as a competitive advantage.
Data leads you to the insights you can generate by working with them. All your customers’ data and insights are based on the Loyalty (CRM) databases. At the same time, it is one of the biggest assets your company owns—information and direct access to the customers. It is a huge responsibility. It is your single point of truth and your role is to provide your partners with relevant tools and competencies to enable a customer-centric culture in your organisation.
1. Build a single view of the customer
The value of data comes from its volume, quality, and completeness. Over time people change their home addresses, emails, or mobile numbers. And you are probably the last person that they notify about these changes. People continuously switch web browsers or mobile phones—their entry points to your brand. A single view of the customer allows you to recognise the same person in different touchpoints throughout time. It is the prerequisite to building relationships with your customer. Go to the article »
2. Place humans above your products
Brands often focus on the products they offer, trying to fit them into the market. This limits the brand potential and reduces the marketing efficiency. When you focus on humans and the wealth of data and insights you collected, you can truly understand the customer’s problems (barriers) towards your brand and category. It enables you to adjust the offer and your communication to customers and then go beyond your marketing, improving services, ways of working and, at some point, creating new products or services that your customers will love. Go to the article »
3. Propose value exchange that is meaningful for your customers
By joining your brand, customers sign a contract with you with the data as a currency — information about who they are and what they like. In reverse, they should have a good understanding of what value they can get back from you.
Giving your Members important and relevant reasons to engage with your brand will boost your customer lifetime value as well. Go to the article »
4. Always start with your members
Instead of paying for reach and relying on external partners, it is better to operate in the areas you are already present. This is why it is important to focus first and foremost on the customers about whom we know the most. In many cases, your loyalty (CRM) communication and external media are like two paths in one forest, which sometimes intersect. Still, when you continue to run along one of them, you may easily overlook what is happening on the other one. It is a missed opportunity. By not planning your media activity in an integrated way, you reduce the effectiveness of your marketing budget. Some members are underinvested, some overinvested, but you are unable to determine which is which. Go to the article »
5. Track the performance
In your company P&L, all costs related to your customer engagement and loyalty activities are clearly stated, while the visibility of benefits to the business may be blurry. Therefore it is in your vital interest to build commercial models, prove ROI, and show all costs as an investment with high returns. Connect the Customer Lifetime Value with the value of your company. And by detailed tracking of customers’ data, you will recognise the new business potential that will boost your performance. Go to the article »
6. Enable data-driven decisions by fueling your organisation with customer data
Data leads you to the insights you can generate by working with them. All your customers’ data and insights are based on the Loyalty (CRM) databases. At the same time, it is one of the biggest assets your company owns—information and direct access to the customers. It is a huge responsibility. It is your single point of truth and your role is to provide your partners with relevant tools and competencies to enable a customer-centric culture in your organisation. Go to the article »