Loyalty is one of the top goals and desires of brands, retailers and everyone else on the sell side of retail and ecommerce. And for good measure, loyalty bring no only additional revenues from the same customers but impacts brand value and Word-of-Mouth (WOM) marketing, the best kind of marketing.
But what is loyalty in retail? In order to achieve the goal we need to first have a better understanding of the definition of loyalty, from all sides of the equation.
Here’s a good definition “Customer loyalty describes an ongoing emotional relationship between you and your customer, manifesting itself by how willing a customer is to engage with and repeatedly purchase from you versus your competitors. Loyalty is the byproduct of a customer’s positive experience with you and works to create trust.”
In order to measure loyalty we need some metrics to measure, such as:
Purchase frequency: loyal customers purchase or patronize repeatedly.
Product usage: loyal customers use the products (more) often
Engagement and communication: Interact with you through a variety of different channels
Spread the word: Are your biggest proponents, sending others to you and providing proactive (and reactive) positive feedback
The other part of measurement is product and the associated consumer habits and demographics with that product. Not every product is purchased or used at the same frequency. We drink coffee or tea every day but buy mattresses every X years. So a loyal mattress customer has vastly different behavior than a coffee customer, or apparel, or furniture etc.
For example:
gen z females might purchase 1 clothing item per week at at $10-20 range, buy male gen z customers might buy a pair of pants every 3 months, but they might buy a tee shirt every month. These are all averages of course.
And there is a difference between online and physical store relationships. If I walk by your store every day or 4 times ad week the relationship os different than if I drive by it or if it’s not on any of my transportation paths and i have to make a separate trip to come to your store.
Online there are millions of options and increasingly more difficult and expensive to get customers' attention, and engagement.
The beauty of loyalty is when lowly customers need products you sell they “remember” to check your store, website, channels etc. That’s where the habit is formed, and we all have our own habits.
So as you build all your different loyalty levers remember to measure and understand each feature or program’s impact to the 4 metrics mentioned above, customized for you specific store and products.
Contact us if you are interested to partner or contribute to this topic.