- Contest Factory
- June 7, 2018
Customer Loyalty
It goes undisputed among sales and marketing professionals that it is easier to make a sale to an existing customer than it is to sell a product or service to a prospect. Not only is it easier, it costs less too. With all this gravy, it’s no surprise that Loyalty Marketing is an industry all unto itself. There are thousands of organizations dedicated to building your custom loyalty program or off-the-shelf reward programs you can join and brand for your corporate identity to reward your loyal customers.
Whether you select an off-the-shelf loyalty program, custom development or in-house creation, you need to ensure your efforts and investment are having the desired outcome. This is something you should consider, set goals and forecast prior to program implementation.
Focusing on Customer Loyalty Means Tracking Customer Loyalty
Just like all campaign efforts, your loyalty program is going to require a lot of testing and experimentation, which means that you’ll need to be able to track your progress as you deploy new techniques moving forward.
First, document your baseline key performance indicators (KPIs) so that you can see the genuine impact that your loyalty program is having. Measure these KPIs before, during and after launch – tracking how they improve over time once the program itself goes into effect.
Depending upon the type of loyalty program you offer, members may self-select into the program and you can use events to track each member opt-in and watch your sign ups grow. You will need to use Google Tag Manager to deploy Event tracking. This will enable a non-coding marketer to create events. To see the results of tracking this information, click BEHAVIOR in Google Analytics left navigation pane. This will expand and provide sub-categories. Click on events to expand the events sub-category menu.
Consider the following:
- To learn more about the people who have requested more information from you and who want to find out more information about what your brand has to offer, track newsletter sign-ups. In Google Analytics, use the “Admin” dashboard to create a new goal using the “+ Goal” button. Select the “Event” option at the bottom of the page and further customize your tracking capabilities around those specific people who sign up for your newsletter or perform a similar action.
- Track the number of people who visit often, otherwise known as people who visit your page over a certain number of times in a defined period. In Google Analytics, use the Segment Builder to configure an individual filter that isolates the behaviors of people who visit X number of times over Y number of days (whichever you prefer). Then, compare those behaviors to your total population using Google Analytics’ reporting feature to get a much better insight into those loyal users. This should show you the impact your program is having on visits, page views, sales, buying cycles and content preferences.
- Track the people who visit you frequently, otherwise known as tracking the time between visits. Google Analytics will actually do this for you automatically based on a very simple calculation. This is one of the metrics that you can view right from your dashboard. Just view the “Channels” report for the appropriate domain.
- Finally, you can get to work tracking loyalty sales themselves. To do this, you’ll need to use custom variables to better track not only the activities, behaviors and patterns of your loyalty customers, but their transactions, sales and times between purchases as well. To do this, you will need to enlist the help of a developer who can both make sure that everything is set up correctly and that you’re also tracking the right users over the long-term.
To find out more information about how to renew your focus on customer loyalty, or to get answers to any additional questions you may have, please contact us today.
