How to create loyalty and foster advocacy
3. Creating customer loyalty
A basic site loyalty metric is the distribution of the number of visits by visitor for a set timeframe. This should be a familiar table for users of Google Analytics, but it is a site-focused metric -- not a customer-centric metric.
A good way to foster customer loyalty is to provide content that helps people easily access your service on a recurring basis or to provide information that helps them increase the benefits they receive from something they already own. Similarly, excessive activity related to troubleshooting and problem-solving can be an indicator that people are having difficulty with a product. Visits to information about accessories or add-ons can also be interpreted as indicators of share-of-wallet related activity.
Measuring and tracking these types of activities will help create a loyalty index. Most sites skew toward customer acquisition, not product success or service use. Consider the needs and interests of current customers in your website design and think through how the design will support measuring their activity. Next, design your measurements to capture this activity so you can think about how to build and improve upon it.
Here's an example from the Nikon USA website. It's from the Digital Learning Center section linked from the Learn and Explore tab. The content shows how to get more out of your Nikon camera:
The site provides tips for different camera applications. Tracking activity here would be an interesting way to gauge interest in different uses of these feature-rich cameras.
4. Fostering advocacy and word-of-mouth (i.e. viral) marketing
A YouTube video view about your product is like a television commercial on steroids. With a TV commercial, users are motivated to watch the TV program that your commercial accompanies. With a YouTube video view, they are motivated to watch you! But how do you promote and measure success in the social media sphere?
Social media tagging tools provide a way for website owners to facilitate advocacy in cyberspace. Some bloggers have done an excellent job of making their sites readily accessible to sites like del.icio.us and Digg by including the relevant widgets. Interestingly, most branded websites totally omit these simple additions. Adding them enables you to track activity to see if your social media marketing efforts are gaining traction. You can also track the number of tags for your website at these sites using functions like the delicious URL lookup and tools like the Greasemonkey Digg counter.
