What Is at the Heart of a Successful Customer Loyalty Program?

Have you ever felt like a wallet, not a person when dealing with some customer loyalty programs? Yet others work extra ordinarily well. So, what is at the heart of a successful customer loyalty program?

Successful customer loyalty programs are built on caring, in other words, on a golden heart.

Interestingly, it’s heart. It’s a matter of caring more about the people who are your customers than about getting the immediate sale. Show that you care, really care. Show that you really listen. Avoid rushing to close a sale. Build the relationship – this can be a matter of a few minutes in some cases, weeks or months in others. But get that connection. Understand your customers’ wants and what their problems are, what the solution looks like in their minds. Deal with the person first. The wallet will follow when they are ready.

Before you can build your ideal customer loyalty programs, recognize that customer loyalty programs are part of relationship marketing. That’s where you need your strategic approach. What is your overall goal for your customers? Who are your ideal customers? What kind of customer relationships do you want with them? Focus on building that connection. If you know your ideal customer profile, you should know their issues well enough to speak to them about what they are looking for.

Most of the techniques being taught for Internet marketing as well as for sales are focused on tactics. These are the tools you use to close a sale or to attract traffic. You know them as the different steps in the sales process, like presentation, handling objections, asking closing questions. Or, in Internet marketing, they are blogging, email marketing, pay-per-click advertising, and so many others.

The point here is that in order to use these tools or tactics effectively, you need to first know where you are going and what it will look like when you get there. Then you can focus the right tool on the task followed by the correct tool to improve the effectiveness of the first. Done right, you develop a synergy amongst all the actions you are taking.

What Is at the Heart of a Successful Customer Loyalty Program? It’s actually putting heart into your business. You need to care first about your prospects and customers. You need to apply relationship marketing. Paradoxically, that is the fastest way to continually grow profits. You can develop a strategy for building profits through strong relationships. If you would like to get a more in-depth, solid understanding of how to create the strategy and then selecting the tactics to achieve these strong relationships, check out this free offer from Gina Gaudio-Graves and Directions University for the 30-Day IM Challenge

Building profits through strong relationships,

John

John R. Aberle, Aberle Enterprises

Related articles

• How Effective Is Your Customer Loyalty Program? (customerthink.com)