customer loyalty Archives | Page 3 of 9 | Ping! >> Loyalty Science in Practice

Customer Loyalty Dashboard in Google Analytics

Posted on July 12, 2018July 12, 2018

How loyal are your customers? If you business is like most brands, your answer is probably going to be complex and constant in flux. To accurately gauge customer loyalty, you need data from a variety of sources such as customer transaction data, social media data, and customer survey data. But what If you don’t have such data readily available or if you don’t have the analytic capabilities to tackle such data? It is still possible to use common tools to form a crude picture of your customers’ loyalty levels. In this article, I would like to talk about creating a customer loyalty dashboard in Google Analytics.

This article assumes that your website already uses Google Analytics. If you use one of the other web analytics tools instead, the basic ideas should still carry, although the exact terminologies and metric definitions may be different. This recommended dashboard should be applicable to most businesses. But it is particularly relevant to businesses where visits to the website is an important part of how your existing customers interact with you. This may apply, for example, to an online store or an online content provider (e.g., a blog).

Google Analytics Dashboard Brief Overview

(Note: I am keeping this general introduction very brief as I assume that you are more or less familiar with Google Analytics already and may even use the dashboard function. If you are not, a great resource for learning more about Google Analytics is the Google Analytics Academy. If you want to learn about dashboards specifically, check out the “About dashboards” section in Google Analytics Help.)

Google Analytics dashboards allow you to assemble several widgets to create a quick overview of how your website is doing. Since multiple dashboards are possible, you can create individual dashboards around certain themes such as customer loyalty or business growth. To access Google Analytics dashboards, click “CUSTOMIZATION” then “Dashboards” in the left panel. (If you only see a list of icons instead of actual links on the left side of your Google Analytics screen, click on any of the icons will expand to the full menu.) Click the “CREATE” button to create a new dashboard. Select “Blank Canvas” and enter a name for the dashboard in the small window, and click “Create Dashboard”. This creates a blank canvas that you can add different widgets to. Continue reading “Customer Loyalty Dashboard in Google Analytics”

Reducing the Loyalty Gap

Posted on June 20, 2018June 20, 2018

Although loyalty programs seem to be everywhere, many question whether such programs are indeed effective marketing tools. Strengthening the case for the skeptics, recent news report a restaurant that shut its doors in just a few months because it offered a ridiculously generous loyalty program. This is of course an extreme case. In reality, loyalty program providers can fairly easily keep program costs under control through smart program design involving the right combination of program currency, point ratio and reward structure.

Some loyalty program problems are not so straightforward however and can be much more subtle and challenging to deal with. One such example is the concern that loyalty programs foster loyalty to the program rather than to the company. That is, “I love Starbucks Rewards” may end up ringing more true than “I love Starbucks”. In the long run, this is bad news for the company because it makes the business overly dependent on the loyalty program. If a competitor decides to offer a more attractive program, customer attrition is likely to happen. What can businesses do to reduce this loyalty gap and make loyalty program members more loyal to the company rather than just to the program? I want to share with you some insights from a research project I conducted with a colleague in Belgium. Continue reading “Reducing the Loyalty Gap”

How to Build Customer Habits Through Customer Relationship Management Part 3

Posted on May 23, 2018July 12, 2018

Welcome to the third and final part of this series on how to build and leverage customer habits throughout the customer journey. In Part 1 and Part 2, I shared with you the differentiation between a habit shaping window and a habit maintenance and transformation phase in a customer’s lifetime with the business and how habit disruption can serve as a beacon for possible customer defection. Today I would like to talk a little about what you should know about loyalty and habit in the customer expansion phase. Oftentimes your business may not be content with just retaining your existing customers. Your ambition may be to grow your existing customers’ relationship with you by getting them to buy more, upgrade, or buy other product lines that you also offer. To do this successfully, you need to understand what drives your customer and know if your customer loves you or they are simply habitual or both.

Segment Customers by Attitudinal Loyalty and Habit

Before implementing a customer expansion (cross-selling or up-selling) campaign, it is important to know where your customers are in the two-dimensional space of loyalty and habit. By loyalty, I don’t mean just behavioral loyalty such as buying a lot, because habitual customers may look exactly like that too. Instead, I refer to loyalty in the sense of how consumers feel about your brand. The attitudinally loyal customers are ones that love your brand, believe in the quality of your product, and prefer you over competitive products when asked. Because attitudinally loyal and strongly habitual customers are both likely to buy a lot from you, they may look very similar in their behavior in terms of how frequently they purchase or how much they spend. You have to dig a little deeper into their behavior to identify which is which. The key difference is that habitual customers tend to demonstrate a certain level of consistency and stability in what they do. They may buy around the same time, from the same location, repeatedly buy the same product, almost always (or never) use coupon, etc. The ones who are attitudinally loyal but NOT habitual will also buy a lot, but you won’t see the same stable behavioral pattern. The table below will help you make a determination based on what your customers do. If you are interested in a more nerdy academic dive into the differences, check out my published paper Not All Repeat Customers Are the Same.

	True Loyalty	Habit
*What drives behavior?*	Belief about product superiority and/or emotional connection	The presence of contextual cues (e.g., eat cookie -> want milk)
*Awareness*	Conscious decision	Automatic process with no clear decision-making process
*Purchase pattern*	Erratic as need arises	Consistent in terms of time, location, and context (see more below)
*Reaction to competitive offerings*	Aware of competitive offerings but relatively resistant due to loyalty	Blind to competitive offerings
*Deal breakers*	Dissatisfaction, product quality issues, service failure, etc.	Change of contextual cues, such as store layout redesign, location change, etc.

Before I move on, I would like to add that habit is easier to observe through behavior than attitudinal loyalty, as habit has a certain pattern to it. To accurately gauge attitudinal loyalty, it would be best to survey your customers and ask about their thoughts and feelings about your product. But if that is not possible, the table above combined with customer purchase data should still help you separate those frequent customers who are driven by habit vs. not habit (e.g., loyalty). Customers’ social media conversations with you can also give you some clues as to how loyal they are to your brand. Continue reading “How to Build Customer Habits Through Customer Relationship Management Part 3”