e-Loyalty: How to Keep Customers Coming Back to Your Website [Hardcover]

Ellen Reid Smith (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 15, 2000

While the explosion of e-commerce has created tremendous opportunities for starting new businesses and growing existing ones, companies are learning that keeping customers on their website--when competitors are only a click away--is the key to success. However, the rules of e-loyalty are very different than those for brick and mortar businesses, and learning them on your own can be painful, frustrating, and costly. Ellen Reid Smith has helped Hewlett-Packard, Hasbro, Budget Rent A Car, Datek.com, and many other industry leaders move from merely acquiring customers to retaining customers by creating the critical "site stickiness" needed to convert customers into evangelists and browsers into buyers. In e-Lovalty, she discusses both the art and the science of developing successful e-loyalty strategies and offers numerous case examples to make these lessons come to life. The book offers a step-by-step guide for developing an e-loyalty strategy, based on proven retention strategies, with the reader taken through the critical success factors in creating and managing an effective implementation plan. Smith will make readers into e-loyalty evangelists through e-loyalty seminars in 2001, an e-Loyalty newsletter, and an exclusive e-loyalty Website featuring analytical tools and implementation resources to complement the strategies outlined in the book.

Editorial Reviews

Review

" Clearly an edge will be earned by those who read and live by this book." -- Brian Anderson, President and CEO, AwardTrack Inc., a 24/7 company

"E-Loyalty provides a guide for... not only superior content, service and selection; but also provides customers with the follow through..." -- Roger Siboni, President and CEO, E.piphany, Inc.

"Ellen Reid Smith... [is]... your North Star to achieving long-term loyalty and customer retention that pays off big!" -- Greg Buchholz, CEO of Loyalistics.com

"Ellen Reid-Smith has addressed the core factor that separates winners from losers in e-commerce: driving repeat customers." -- David Kenny, Chairman & CEO, Digitas

"In this book Reid Smith provides exactly the road map you need to build and maintain that loyalty." -- Kelly Conlin, IDG President and CEO

"It's impossible for a web site not to succeed with following all of the advice in this book. Period." -- Seth Godin, Author: Permission Marketing & Unleashing the Ideavirus

"e-Loyalty" is a must-read for all consumer-oriented web site executives who want long-term success in the marketplace." -- Whitney Grimm, Vice President of Content & Strategy, Games.com, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc.

e-Loyalty provides the reader with a soup-to-nuts version of everything necessary to create a successful website. -- Jeffrey Diskin, President, COO, Hilton HHonors Worldwide

About the Author

Ellen Reid Smith runs a successful Web marketing company, Reid Smith and Associates, and was previously Vice President of Worldwide Marketing for IBM. Her loyalty programs have been featured in such publications as Brandweek, Adweek, Marketing Computers, and many others..

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers; 1st edition (January 15, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0066620708
• ISBN-13: 978-0066620701
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,093,819 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The step by step manual to truly engender loyalty!, January 27, 2001

By 

Ken Kingery (Atlanta, GA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: e-Loyalty: How to Keep Customers Coming Back to Your Website (Hardcover)

Ellen Reid-Smith has distilled everything you need to know and everything you need to do into a step-by-step manual for creating a website that will cause people to show up and then to keep coming back. The real key is that you must focus your efforts on Most Valuable Customers (MVCs) as these are the people who make your business profitable and pay the bills. Reid-Smith demonstrates with hundreds of excellent examples from her many years of first-hand experiences that companies who try to please everybody equally end up pleasing nobody completely. If you design your website to attract everyone and assume that your "great" service will keep them coming back, then, you don't have a prayer against your competition. As Reid-Smith points out, you MUST design with your MVCs in mind and focus on strategies that build "switching costs" that will keep you best customers with you and make it difficult for them to consider going to a competitor. This focus on MVCs will give your website a distinctive "personality" that will soon attract casual users to also become MVCs. The book is easy to read, but, is clearly quite deep on the details of what you need to do to go get it done. I applaud Ms. Reid-Smith for being the first to market with such a helpful blueprint for success fo content and commerce website developers!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great primer for Loyalty, April 10, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: e-Loyalty: How to Keep Customers Coming Back to Your Website (Hardcover)

I consult for clients in ebusiness strategy and one of my clients was interested in using a loyalty program to retain clients. With little time on my hands, I needed to become an expert on Loyalty and Ellen's book was the best primer I could find. As a resource, her book provides a great foundation for what loyalty is about, the theory, and the how-to-approach for building a loyalty program. I may be a quick study, but I credit Ellen's book with giving me the knowledge that I needed to be credible with the client in our first meeting. With all the confusion out there about loyalty, and the misperception that everyone has about loyalty=points program, I believe Ellen's is the right book to set you on the right path

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book gave me a plan for designing customer retention, March 6, 2003

By 

Amy (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: e-Loyalty: How to Keep Customers Coming Back to Your Website (Hardcover)

I heard Ms. Smith at a conference and bought her book to get more details on her 7 steps to designing an e-loyalty strategy. The book throughly explains her 7 steps with tons of examples, some of which were really funny (I love humor in a business book). I designed and implemented a customer retention program based on the book and our customer return rate has really soared. Both the customer communications and reward ideas were key in raising our page view and purchase rates. It's a great book for businesses with websites that aren't successful, or for anyone implementing a customer retention program online.