Loyalty Lessons
Your customers may be loyal, but don't kid yourself. There's no such thing as 'my brand, right or wrong.'
Your customers may be loyal, but don't kid yourself. There's no such thing as 'my brand, right or wrong.'
Every once in a blue moon, I’m asked to speak on marketing, communications, or something closely related. I’m never quite sure why people would want to hear my ramblings, but if it involves a trip out of town I’ll usually accept with the proviso if anyone falls asleep while I’m speaking, he’ll be nudged back to consciousness.
The Indiana Healthcare Marketing and Public Relations Society invited me to speak this month. As a healthcare marketer, I felt good being among my own. I talked about a topic I’ve learned a lot about over the past years: creating loyalty.
Bear with me. I’ll get to Web site content. First, here’s a story I told the healthcare marketers:
Several years ago, my organization developed a “smart card” for healthcare consumers. We planned to fill its little silicon chip with all kinds of critical personal healthcare information — until we heard what focus groups said.
The folks we surveyed said, “Hold on. Keep your high technology. We don’t want all that information on a chip where we can’t see it. Print the data right there on the card.”
So that’s exactly what we did. The card is on our site. All the consumer-supplied data is right on its face. A magnetic strip unlocks a database of the very same information when swiped at a physician’s office or one of our hospitals.
There you have it. Low tech and practicality won out. Today, we have 500,000 card-carrying members and work to maintain their loyalty.
This lesson applies to Web sites. Sometimes, high technology isn’t the best technology. Sometimes, people just want to read an informative block of text. Sometimes, they want to view a picture that doesn’t hop around like a hummingbird on amphetamines.
There are other loyalty marketing lessons. Check out the insights below. Some are gleaned from my organization’s trial and error, some from the top marketing researchers.
That said, I’ll add my return to California was with an airline rated very high in customer loyalty, primarily because it’s known as the “fun” airline. It has a nifty Web site, too. I ordered my tickets on it. Suffice it to say the ride was not so “fun.” I was told I was in the wrong “herd” for unassigned seating and was tossed one box of cheese crackers for a five-hour flight. I ended up bolt upright in a rear-facing chair, knee to knee with some party animals who made ample use of those bags provided for “flight relief.” Forget the Web site. Forget loyalty. Big lesson learned.