The Customer Loyalty Solution

Book excerpt: How Today's Marketing Leaders Have Bypassed the "Experts" to Craft Effective, Inexpensive Customer Loyalty Programs Database marketing is today's most powerful tool for designing cost-effective, resource-efficient marketing and operations programs. The Customer Loyalty Solution cuts through theory and guesswork to examine how leading marketers from Land's End to IBM are using today's new breed of database marketing tools to compute lifetime value, cut costs in every area, and make databases easier to access and utilize from anywhere on the globe. Praise for The Customer Loyalty Solution: "The Customer Loyalty Solution combines the best of traditional practice with contemporary market factors in terms that inspire and cut across industries. Straightforward enough for the upcoming 1-1 marketer as well as a great catch-up for the seasoned practitioner."--Joe Rapolla, VP, Consumer Marketing Services, Universal Music Group/CLO "Delivers practical solutions instead of hyperbole and theory. Hughes makes this book fun to read, and he gets his point across--clearly."--Robert McKim, CEO, msdbm "Well written and easy to understand. Hughes imparts his wisdom to set realistic expectations and provides case studies adding real-world application."--J.C. Johnson, VP, Database Marketing, Fairfield Resorts "Hughes distills the jargon and complexity of database marketing into a refreshingly straightforward and practical guide. The Customer Loyalty Solution should be required reading for anyone serious about making database marketing work."--Jonathan Huth, VP, Relationship Database Marketing, Scotiabank New technologies like the Web have brought unprecedented change to database marketing. But some things never change. Successful marketers have learned that to understand their customers they must still think like their customers, who continue to ignore one-time discounts to ask, "Why would I want to be that company's customer? What's in it for me?" The Customer Loyalty Solution goes straight to the source, revealing how marketers today are leveraging their database marketing programs to identify and attract the most profitable new customers, increase current customer retention and repurchase, and identify and reward their most loyal and profitable customers. More than 40 detailed case studies and dozens of examples reveal success stories including Verizon's "best in class" datamart that realized a 1681 percent return on marketing investment Isuzu's database project that targeted only their best prospects--and cut industry-standard per-unit sales costs in half Weekly Standard's variable headline strategy that increased direct mail response rates by nearly 25 percent Author and database marketing pioneer Arthur Hughes doesn't hide behind incomprehensible formulas and impossible-to-navigate layouts. Each easy-to-follow chapter clearly addresses and explains a different piece of the database-marketing puzzle. Case studies are clearly marked and detail what went right--or wrong. Chapter-ending synopses summarize the lessons to be learned in each chapter and clearly review what worked and what didn't. These features and others combine with innovative charts and quizzes to ensure hands-on understanding of material covered and make the book a timely, practical guide. The Customer Loyalty Solution reveals how database marketing and customer relationship management initiatives are making a difference, today, for the world's leading marketers. It provides you with step-by-step techniques for benchmarking their efforts to develop intelligent strategies of your own, understanding how and why they work, and monitoring their results to continually adjust and modify for changing market conditions. The result will be far stronger customer loyalty, more consistent repeat