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Earn a Little Faith
Acquiring customers is just the first step in marketing; ensuring that they keep coming back is the next step. Offering points, free products, and various other rewards to “loyal” customers has become a popular method of customer retention. Certainly, offering a discount on future purchases will likely ensure that the customer returns. But does this equate to loyalty?

While these types of rewards provide incentive for customers to use a service again at some point, marketers should look a little deeper to determine what will gain true loyalty from a customer. A Chief Marketing Officer Council survey found that most customers place value in loyalty programs, but a majority want to see more benefits, including more personalized deals. In addition, 24% feel that “rewards lack substance,” and the same percentage would like more personalized attention. (Read more about the survey results here.)

Providing purchase incentives is a good start, but companies will have a better shot at true customer loyalty by first building customer faith—faith that the company will understand and meet the customer’s needs. In addition to discounts and freebies, customers need good, reliable service and individualized attention. And once they have faith that a company understands this, then they will be most likely to return again and again, loyally.

Building Confidence
Online marketing has certainly risen to a valid form of marketing. According to a new Coremetrics study, online marketing saw the biggest increase in spending in 2009, and email marketing was reportedly the most commonly used online marketing method. But despite the faith marketers put in online marketing’s potential, according to Coremetrics, their confidence in how to effectively use this method isn’t as strong.

One big draw of online marketing is the ability to personalize advertising, but marketers are still working out the kinks when it comes to utilizing this approach and evaluating results. According to the study, 75% of marketers consider the use of online personalization tools to be a priority, but only 51% are actually using these tools. In addition, 62% report that “they are not confident they are tracking the right metrics for online marketing performance.”

To reach the full benefit of online marketing and personalization, marketers must understand the available marketing technology. John Squire, chief strategy officer of Coremetrics states that “Companies that can harness marketing technology can then get the most meaning and value out of the data they collect from it. In turn this enables companies to personalize their marketing efforts and create a competitive advantage.”

The Fan Page Number
Anyone involved with social marketing via Facebook most likely knows about fan pages. They exist for just about any product, service, or organization you can think of, with the number of fans displayed on these pages acting as badges of honor for the companies that create them.

However, if you think the driving purpose of this marketing method is to gather as many fans as possible, then you don’t have a full understanding of the fan page potential—or of what it means to be a “fan.”

Anyone can click on the “Become a Fan” button on a fan page, whether they truly are a fan of the product, have never heard of it and are simply looking to add to their list of fan pages, or even if they’ve had a bad experience with the product and just want to post a public complaint. As Adam Broitman states in an Online Media Daily article posted in January, “one must minimize the importance of the word ‘fan’, and be satisfied with the true nature of this entity; namely, someone who is paying attention.”

In short, though one thousand Facebook fans on your company’s fan page do not necessarily indicate one thousand people who know about your company, they do present marketing opportunities. They will see your updates and will learn about your services; and they’ll be able to comment, opening the door for communication and resulting, hopefully, in new and true fans.

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April W. Boone             April@GMStheBest.biz
John Boone                  John@GMStheBest.biz
Laura McGill                Laura@GMStheBest.biz