Today on the show, Bobby Greenberg talks about emotional loyalty and how marketers can measure it to create a more engaging customer experience. He also discusses that by understanding the key drivers of loyalty, brands can focus their marketing on the most valuable customers. This is important because, during recessions, it is important to focus on creating long-term relationships with customers rather than just getting them to spend as quickly as possible. Listen in!
With over 25 years in strategic marketing, loyalty, and innovation roles as a client, vendor, and consultant, Bobby brings a well-rounded and creative perspective to Kobie. In his role as Chief Marketing Officer, he advises clients on creating, enhancing, and transforming their customer loyalty strategies to maximize ROI and customer engagement.
“Most marketers focus on the transactional elements of it [data capture]. And there’s nothing wrong with that; that makes a lot of sense. You can capture that through the point of sale or the readily available e-commerce tools. But that only tells you the story just because someone spends a lot with you doesn’t make them loyal at all. And it certainly doesn’t indicate that they’re emotionally loyal.”
– Bobby Greenberg
What companies do on the initiative and programmatic side is Little L loyalty, while the overarching emotional connections that customers have with the brand is the Big L loyalty. Companies must realize their full potential by utilizing Little L to drive Big L loyalty.
Kobie Marketing has done strategies, built technologies, and ran programs to identify the universal drivers of loyalty, which boiled down to six points – (1) brand affinity, (2) product value, (3) rewards, (4) convenience, (5) special access, and (6) personalization. Companies must recognize how they deliver these points across the board, which can be daunting and expensive. The key is to prioritize, considering where you are and where you want to go. Companies can cause emotional attachment by smartly using these drivers.
Kobie uses the aforementioned driver framework as a toolset to benchmark and align organizations in their current state and desired future state, formulating a playbook or action plan. It starts with our proprietary loyalty assessment, which measures those drivers against the competition. The rules around capturing data are getting tighter, so having a multi-threaded lens to data is critical. Although most marketers focus on the transactional elements of it, having a customer spend a lot with you does not make them loyal. Another tool is focused on the behavioral side, which is stitched together with the transactional aspect. The next layer is the Emotional Loyalty Scoring (ELS), where the emotional motivations of consumers are quantified. The final proprietary tool is on financial modeling, practice, and toolset, which targets to identify where loyalty fits into the infrastructure of MarTech.
Big L loyalty is the perfect anecdote to this economic downturn. It is now even more important to ensure that your highest value and most engaged customers are those that stay. The key is making sure to focus on what matters most. Driving transactions and creating emotional connections at simultaneously what to strive for.
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