The Customer Loyalty Loop Book Summary

Book Summary

15 min

Brief Summary

To create loyal customers, understand that every stage of a customer’s journey with your brand should be memorable and create a positive narrative around your company name. Understand exactly what should happen at each step. In the first stage, focus on sparking the customer’s imagination with mysterious and disruptive advertising and marketing. In the second stage, develop trust by training your salespeople to nurture the customer and by addressing their specific needs, interests, and fears. Make sure that there is as little resistance as possible between the buyer and the sale (whether it be making a seamless website or creating the right atmosphere in-store). Finally, after a purchase, follow up with clients and guarantee excellence from your product or service.

About the Author

Noah Fleming is an author, speaker, strategic marketing expert, and president of Fleming Consulting & Company. Fleming had worked with billion-dollar companies, showing how to find relevant leverage points to create lasting positive change. He’s coached and consulted thousands of business owners and is an expert blogger for Fast Company. He’s the author of Evergreen: Cultivate the Enduring Customer Loyalty That Keeps Your Business Thriving and The Customer Loyalty Loop.

Topics

Marketing & Sales

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Key Insights

In this book, Noah Fleming argues that instead of trying to get more people to buy their products, firms should focus on retaining each and every one of their customers. He writes that the value of loyal customers is understated, but that they can grow and sustain your business in the long term. Loyal customers not only buy your product, but guarantee purchases in the future, and advocate for your brand publicly. A good reputation can go a long way. Fleming explains his system for creating a memorable experience for everyone at each stage of the buyer-seller relationship. The key, he writes, is building a consistent system that nurtures the customer and provides them an experience they’ll want to revisit again and again.

Loyal customers will grow your business in the long term.

If you’re a business owner, think of the ways you try and grow your business. You probably spend a lot of time thinking of ways to get more customers buying your products. Author Noah Fleming writes that although getting more customers seems like a straightforward metric of growth, people are neglecting a far more powerful strategy: focusing on creating loyal customers.

According to Fleming, it is “five times more valuable to keep existing customers” than to score new ones. Why? When customers are loyal, they not only buy your products, but they buy again, and then advocate for your brand to friends, family, and social media. Imagine the way your brand’s reputation could spread if you could make all your new customers loyal.

Most small businesses spend 72% of marketing dollars on drawing in new buyers and only 23% on keeping customers coming back. Fleming explains that these numbers should be reversed. Fleming offers his plan for this sort of redirection: the “Customer Loyalty Loop”. The Loop takes into consideration each psychological stage of the customer’s relationship with your business, from before their first purchase to after, and focuses on building trust.

People create internal narratives about the world. By communicating a positive narrative about your business, you help people form positive associations.

Fleming writes that people make decisions, including buying decisions, with their intuition. Therefore, it’s important to appeal to people’s emotions and create positive subconscious feelings.

So how can you influence people to intuit that they like your brand? Fleming explains that for centuries, people have understood the world around them through stories. When deciding whether they enjoyed something, they construct a narrative from their memories. Several factors affect what sorts of the narrative result: the subconscious, past experience, and cognitive biases about how they think the world works. Fleming points out that primal humans used this narrative building to quickly assess whether they were confronting danger, and run away or fight if need be.

Business people should understand that the words they use can influence this subconscious processing. Fleming calls this exerting influence over the “experience-memory-recall-cycle”. To do this, work on creating memories that will stick out.

Making customer experience memorable should be your number one priority. They will remember the experience...