e-Loyalty: How to Keep Customers Coming Back to Your Website
Authors: Ellen Reid Smith
Venue:  (2000)

:Customer loyalty has always been grounded in human interaction. Years ago, you'd walk into your favorite store and the staff would know your name, they'd remember your favorite brands and they'd smile, nod and take pains to make sure you came back. Because you were treated well by a personable, friendly staffand because you were physically constrained by time and distance to limit yourself to particular storesyou'd go back to the same stores again and again. The reach of the Web and advances in database technology have made this same level of personalized attention attainable by e-tailers thousands of miles away with a virtual staff customers may never meet. With customers now free from the shackles of distance, they can comparison shop and fill out a profile that enables a personalized element where e-tailers remember their name and preferences at a level that exceeds what a brick and mortar retailer can provide. The Web is empowering customers, making them more demanding of a great shopping experience, and consequently more fickle than ever before. Customers today have the world at their fingertips and keeping them loyal has become even more difficult. This is why websites are failing at an alarming rate. It's more obvious than ever before that success lies not only in attracting customers, but in retaining them. Although many of the strategies for building loyalty remain unchanged, many companies have failed to learn how to transfer these techniques to the web. In e-Loyalty, leading customer loyalty expert and nationally acclaimed speaker Ellen Reid Smith offers the definitive and essential step-by-step guide to creating and managing highly effective online loyalty and retention strategies. In Internet parlance, she has mastered the secrets of creating "site stickiness." In this breezy and invaluable guide, Reid Smith walks readers through strategies and techniques for humanizing digital loyalty. Using some of the Internet's leading consumer and business-to-business websites as case examples, she takes readers from the early stages of implementing e-loyalty marketing programs all the way through budgeting and evaluating their impact. From explaining the key concepts of e-loyalty, to advising on critical website design factors, the techniques Reid Smith imparts in this book can be applied by companies of any type or sizefrom the Fortune 500 companies that she is regularly called upon to consult with to Internet start-ups. Most of all, what truly distinguishes Reid Smith is her unwavering focus on not just retaining customers, but retaining a company'smost valuable customers through customer lifetime value modeling. Her advice will help companies ensure their retention programs are focused on the most profitable customers. Ever the visionary leader, she recognizes that this aspect of online marketing will increasingly become the most important issue facing websites everywhere. No matter which segment of the online economy you hail from, this is the essential handbook for initiating, cultivating and extending that rarest of company assetse-loyalty.