Creating Customer Loyalty for Your Business

Strategize and Plan For Loyalty!

These four factors will greatly affect your ability to build a loyal customer base:

1. Products that are highly differentiated from those of the competition.

2. Higher-end products where price is not the primary buying factor.

3. Products with a high service component.

4. Multiple products for the same customer.

1. Market To Your Own Customers

Giving a lot of thought to your marketing programs aimed at current customers is one aspect of building customer loyalty.

When you buy a new car, many dealers will within minutes try to sell you an extended warranty, an alarm system, and maybe rust proofing. It’s often a very easy sale and costs the dealer almost nothing to make. Are there additional products or services you can sell your customers? Three years ago my house was painted, and it’s now due for another coat. Why hasn’t the painter called or at least sent a card? It would be a lot less expensive than getting new customers through his newspaper ad, and since I was happy with his work I won’t get four competing bids this time. Keep all the information you can on your customers and don’t hesitate to ask for the next sale.

2. Use Complaints To Build Business!

When customers aren’t happy with your business they usually won’t complain to you – instead, they’ll probably complain to just about everyone else they know – and take their business to your competition next time. That’s why an increasing number of businesses are making follow-up calls or mailing satisfaction questionnaires after the sale is made. They find that if they promptly follow up and resolve a customer’s complaint, the customer might be even more likely to do business than the average customer who didn’t have a complaint.

“Success is a state of mind. If you want success, start thinking of yourself as a success.” – Dr. Joyce Brothers

Have you ever noticed that some people seem to attract success like a magnet? While others can’t catch a break no matter how hard they seem to try?

Few places is this more prevalent than in the online business world. With more than 97% of all business owners never making a dime from their ventures, it seems that lady luck is calling the shots. But maybe there is more to it than random chance.

After all, success rarely happens by accident. It’s actually our own failure that many of us plan.

Those who succeed at anything in life – in particular business – know what they want to achieve, visualize themselves achieving it and then make it a reality. They have a success mindset that goes beyond just the idea of wanting something; it becomes a part of who they are until they have no choice but to make it a reality.

In the early 20th century, multimillionaire Andrew Carnegie hired Napoleon Hill to study the world’s most successful people. Hill spent 20 years interviewing, learning from, and understanding more than 500 of the most successful people to ever live. Among them were the super wealthy Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller and Thomas Edison.

Using his research, Hill published Think and Grow Rich in 1937. Today it is still one of the most read books of it’s kind. It has stood the test of time because his principles for success can be applied by anyone at any time. In fact, many of his ideas have since been substantiated through scientific studies. One of which is the idea that people possess the power to think their way to success.

Key in Hill’s research was the discovery that successful people think differently. They have adopted a set of beliefs that enable them to be successful.

All I have to say is WOW. I haven’t seen this kind of vitriol since the last Democratic Convention, and all directed toward Chitika, a startup ad company that was supposed to be the Google killer. Their crime? Cutting people’s revenue checks after they’ve earned the money. Not a great PR move. And it looks like there are more problems with what, on the surface, looks like a great idea. I have to admit I don’t understand how anyone (including Chitika) makes any money with their revenue model.

Darren Rouse of problogger.net, who I respect immensely (and who makes a couple hundred grand a year blogging), has really flogged the heck out of Chitika. Right from the start I had trouble understanding how they were going to make any money.

Chitika Mini Malls allow you to sell specific products (merchandise) within the pages of your website or blog. The ads boast the best price for a specific product, and then allow the user to click to (supposedly) buy the product. They also include tabs for search and other functionality built right into the banner-like ad.

Publishers can choose to show ads by keyword (they pick the words), or by page context like Google (having both ads in contextual mode on your site violates Google’s terms of service).

Apparently Chitika has deals with companies like Shopping.com, Ubid and others to share in clickthroughs. Or they may just go through channeladvisor.com, a syndicator of content for the major shopping sites (which explains why they all have the same content).

From my comfortable chair I can see where the trouble begins. When someone comes to Shopping.com they’re looking for something, whether it is duck boots from L.L. Bean or a battery charger from Sears, and they’re looking for the best price, presumably so they can buy the product (it’s not called just looking around.com. It’s shopping.com.

So Bean or Sears doesn’t mind paying Shopping.com fifteen cents or a quarter or whatever to get the person to press the buy button, because they know the person is ready to put down the credit card number.

I’m not sure moving that model out to my web site is going to pay off in a pay-per-click model. Back when we did CASIE-award winning (5 awards actually) campaigns for John Hancock, the goal was to capture someone having a specific life event such as having a baby, marriage, graduation, etc., and get them to Hancock. The presumption was that they would be ready to buy. Chances are if they saw a banner that said Ready to tie the knot? Are you covered? or some such thing and they clicked, they were ready to buy, and it would have been worth paying for the click.

Shopping.com is similar. If you’re there, the life event is a new TV (not quite as profound as marriage, but important just the same).

I’m not sure how much a click on the Best price for a TV MiniMall ad by someone who is not ready to buy a TV is actually worth. Remember, they haven’t come to Shopping.com. Shopping.com has come to them.

Keeping that in mind (the value of a click from my site vs. the value of a click from the Shopping.com site), all of the controversy makes perfect sense.

I just don’t get it. Advertisers spend millions of dollars for a 30 second or 1 minute spot in a football game yet in many cases they fail to follow through online.

I mean, if you are going to spend that much money to get your product visible wouldn’t you want to back that up somehow?

In this article I look at some of the shortcomings of a Super Bowl campaign and what I think advertisers should be doing about it.

So, Super Bowl 40 (sorry XL) has come and gone. Like so many other people I of course watched the game. Not so much for the game but for the commercials.

You see, Super Bowl Sunday is the time of year when many companies launch their year’s advertising program starting with an inaugural Super Bowl commercial.

And like every year, the usual suspects were there – Budweiser, GoDaddy, Pepsi and Coke to name just a few.

Now, there are some interesting things that took place with the commercials this year. For one thing, there were a lot of web properties hosting the ads online. Last year there were only a handful, but this year big names like Yahoo! and Google got into the ads.