By nature loyalty is fleeting. It is built on the strength of the relationship between a customer and a business.
Fill in the following blanks. My favourite drink is My
favourite shirt colour is .. I would buy for a gift
for my mother. I doubt if many of us would have the same three
choices written down. We are spoiled for choice.
Some ways in which loyalty is derived
We, as customers, can make satisfactory purchases at a range of
outlets. Sometimes we may gradually become fond of a particular
brand. Maybe it is a clothing brand with styles that look good,
feel comfortable and always seems to fit well. Brand loyalty is
common for a variety of reasons that go beyond that just
mentioned. It may be the prestige of wearing the label, driving
the car or drinking the wine. It may also be associated with
sporting teams, event memorabilia or club paraphernalia. These
are strong loyalties but are not the only ones.
Customers change their mind and leave you
Do you still have the same favourite clothing label now as when
you were a teenager; enjoy the same drink; even have the same
partner? Few of us would answer 'yes' to all these. We change our mind; we change our priorities and we change our income. We
change where, when, what, why and how we purchase goods and
services because, as customers and consumers, we can, and do.
As an online marketer, your shop is much more easily accessed by
new customers and much, much more easily left by those same
customers compared with our concrete-based brothers and sisters.
Why? Because your customers and consumers have never met you,
never grown to like you and so feel little guilt if they shift
their loyalty to the shop next door (next click) where they can
purchase exactly the same goods and services. Now they give their money to someone else and that is a bad thing.
Should I spend a lot of money to acquire and retain customers?
How can we stop customers going next door? Many companies spend
large portions of their budget trying to do exactly this. Do you
have tens, even hundreds, of thousands of dollars to find out? Do you have even more money to fund loyalty programs, extensive
giveaways or long term sales events? Can you match, dollar for
dollar, advertising spend with international corporations? On
this we finally have an area where we mostly agree. Microsoft,
Apple, GEC, General Motors, Citibank and so on are probably able
to spend a little more on customer acquisition and retention than we are.
Is that a bad thing? Should we close our site, or forget about
setting one up if we are just in the formative stages of building an online presence? Is competition from large corporations too great? They are sellers of goods and services just like we are. They have budgets to work within just like we do. They plan for success just as we should. In fact we find more similarities than differences, so we will ignore size, maturity, brand recognition and market penetration. These things do not happen overnight. We will start with our first customer, our first sale, rather than worry what 100, 1 000 or even 10 000 customers are doing. Then we will worry about customer 10, then 25 and so on, until we make a good income. And that is a good thing.
Approach with caution
We will explore the concept of loyalty some more. Why is it so
important? Well, once we have our first customer inside and ready to buy, we do not want them moving next door to make purchases before we encourage our second customer into the store, do we? The more customers we keep, the more money we will have to spend on our favourite clothes, wine and car.
Thank you for your time.
WelcomeToTheMall.com is committed to online excellence. We hope
you enjoy our series of articles. You have permission to publish
this article electronically or in print, free of charge, as long
as the bylines are included. A courtesy copy of your publication
would be appreciated.
About the Author:
Paul Hathaway is a partner in the development of
welcometothemall.com. welcometothemall.com is committed to
excellence in the online shopping experience and is willing to
share results of research undertaken to keep the online shopper's decision making as easy and familiar as possible. Visit our site to see the results. You can contact Paul at
articles@welcometothemall.com.
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