“All good strategy eventually degenerates into work”1
The ‘work’ in a loyalty strategy ensures you are chosen when a customer buys. 

If a customer buys, you want them to choose you, every time.

Simple objective, complex subjects, many levers, endless variations, lots of work. If your Loyalty Strategy is working, you should be the choice at each purchase step –

  • Intent to buy,

  • Research options to buy, 

  • Decide what to buy,

  • Purchase

Intent

Marketing influencer Byron Sharp has argued2 that the loyalty work for a brand is to establish mental and physical availability, awareness, so that when a customer is intending a purchase you are the easy, preferably only, choice. Making your product the automatic choice for us genetically lazy customers is the ‘Sharp’ strategy.

The Ad Contrarian, Bob Hoffman puts it more succinctly; “All of the world’s hugely successful brands have one common characteristic. They are famous. A brand that is famous has enormous advantages over its competitors that are not famous.”3 Part of the work in a loyalty strategy is the effort required to make your brand famous.

There is a role for differentiation in your value proposition, as brand awareness (fame) is a combination of both recognition and recall, “…if you are staring at a Google search bar, recognition is not going to help you in the least. You need to recall the brand without help”4 It is for recall that customer loyalty programs work to create an emotional engagement with customers, to establish ‘genuine’ loyalty5. But…

We are scared because we run from the bear6
(We do not run because we are scared).
Customers buy brands and develop emotional bonds.
(They buy because they trust the brand).

Customers build emotional bonds with brands and programs through purchasing experiences that do not disappoint, that build a sense of trust that the brand is a reliable supplier of the brand promise.
Emotional bonds follow as the customer accepts you always deliver to their expectations. Once established these bonds influence purchasing decisions, but it is impossible to get customers to run, then be scared, without the reliability bear.

Customers are not actively searching for emotional bonds with brands, they are looking for shortcuts and confidence in their purchases, so build trust, not psychological shortcuts7. 

An accurate reminder, conveniently on a post-it for your screen,8 

If you are fortunate enough to get them to enrol in your program, do your best to reliably meet their expectations, “…companies create loyal customers primarily by helping them solve their problems quickly and easily.9”

There is a time and place to Delight customers, but it comes in the second tier of the Ellipsis Customer Experience hierarchy, after trust has been established.10

Earning customer loyalty requires you to meet a hierarchy of requirements, analogous to Maslow's hierarchy of needs in that each level must be satisfied before the next becomes important. A personalised email cannot make up for lack of stock, and a friendly call centre agent cannot make up for a regularly incorrect order delivery.

Personalisation goes hand in hand with ‘easy’ - minimising friction for customers often requires you to dynamically adapt to individual customer needs and preferences. But what distinguishes personalised service from 'creepy'? Trust.