Loyalty is not about customers being loyal to you. It's about you being loyal to your customers. You earn loyalty by giving it. One way you do that is noticing how they wish to interact with you in the real world and trying to duplicate that, where appropriate, in the virtual world.

For example: Most of our searching is visual in the real world of supermarket shopping. Our memory relies on colours, shapes and positions to navigate through a vast range of choices. This is hard on the Web. Tesco, the world's largest home delivery grocer (now helping Safeway in the US get its web/home delivery act together), found that customers were giving up halfway through filling up their on-line basket using an A-Z product finder. The process was much faster than in the store itself. But, it didn't feel fast: it felt tedious.

So, Tesco offered first-time web visitors a 'favourite list' drawn from ClubCard data, which came from the customer's off-line behaviour - how they shop in real-world stores. Instead of the customer's favourite products lying hidden in an alphabetical list, there they were at the top, ready to buy. Click through rates soared.

And the point is...the on-line and off-line worlds are not two different places. Customer behaviour in one is a guide to customer behaviour in the other.

Source: I learnt this from Clive Humby, whose company Dunnhumby, created Tesco's Club Card, possibly the only loyalty card I've come across that deserves the name 'loyalty card'.

This tip is a sample from a book I am putting together called

Take One A Day
365 Ways to
Get Closer
to Your Customer