Except for supermarkets and convenience stores, most retailers see a customer an average of 5-6 times a year. The ongoing digital explosion will likely reduce the frequency to 2-3 in the coming days.

Unfortunately, traditional loyalty paradigms are built around the number of transactions and repeat purchases. To make it worse, even as customers’ behaviour and purchase journeys have become increasingly complex and non-linear, retailers are still stuck with a one-dimensional view of customer loyalty.

Rethinking Loyalty Program Paradigms
There are critical downsides to measuring customer loyalty from a purely transactional standpoint. And these downsides are becoming increasingly accentuated in the digital world.
Today’s ever-connected customers have hundreds if not thousands of choices at any given point. And as humans typically do when presented with a lot of choices – they rely on several factors like brand experience, emotional connect, convenience, price and reviews from friends and families to guide their choice. With so many variables on the table, how do brands begin to predict customer behaviour?

The answer lies in seeing customer loyalty with a dualistic mindset: one with an emotional as well as a transactional nature. And with each passing day, it’s becoming imperative for brands to view customer loyalty from this new vantage point.

What is Emotional Loyalty
Rather than give you a long-winded and boring definition, we’ll try to explain it with an example. Imagine a tourist exploring a new city. After a long day of sightseeing, he feels drained and craves a coffee and sights:

Phew, I badly need a coffee, is there a Starbucks nearby?

That sums up emotional loyalty – it’s a fast and almost instantaneous positive preference for a brand with zero rational or logical deliberations. Unsurprisingly, Starbucks also has one of the best loyalty programs in the F&B space.

Components of Emotional Loyalty

• Affinity
• Attachment
• Trust

How to Measure Emotional Loyalty

Marketers typically track behavioural loyalty metrics like conversion rates, customer value, basket size to gauge the effectiveness of a loyalty program. However, it’s equally important to analyze emotional loyalty metrics that gauge intent, sentiment, perceptions, and customer experience:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Customer Satisfaction Levels
• Sentiment Scores

How to Nurture Emotional Loyalty

Building emotional loyalty requires an integrated and dynamic mix of activities and interactions between your brand and customers that will drive personalized engagement at every touchpoint. Here’s how successful loyalty programs build affinity, attachment, and trust among customers:

• Create unique, personalized experiences
• Anticipate your customer’s needs
• Prioritize data security
• Encourage two-way communication

For detailed insights visit https://www.capillarytech.com/blog/loyalty/emotional-loyalty-connected-customers/