e-Loyalty: How to Keep Customers Coming Back to Your Website (Hardcover)

by Ellen Reid Smith (Author)

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

Product Description

Customer loyalty has always been grounded in human interaction. Years ago, you'd walk into your favorite store and the staff would know your name, they'd remember your favorite brands, and they'd smile, nod, and take pains to make sure you came back. Because you were treated well by a personable, friendly staff--and because you were physically constrained by time and distance to limit yourself to particular stores--you'd go back to the same stores again and again.

The reach of the Web and advances in database technology have made this same level of personalized attention attainable by e-tailers thousands of miles away with a virtual staff customers may never meet. With customers now freed of the shackles of distance, they can comparison shop and fill out a profile that introduces a personalized element where e-tailers remember their name and preferences at a level that exceeds what a brick-and-mortar retailer can provide.

More than ever, the Web is empowering customers, making them more demanding of a great shopping experience, and consequently more fickle. Today's customers have the world at their fingertips, and keeping them loyal has become even more difficult. This is why websites are failing at an alarming rate. It's more obvious than ever that success lies not only in attracting customers but in retaining them.

In e-Loyalty, Ellen Reid Smith, leading customer loyalty expert and nationally acclaimed speaker, offers the definitive and essential step-by-step guide to creating and managing highly effective online loyalty and retention strategies.

Using some of the Internet's leading consumer and business-to-business websites as case examples, she takes readers from the early stages of implementing e-loyalty marketing programs through budgeting and evaluating their impact. From explaining the key concepts of e-loyalty to advising on critical website design factors, Reid Smith imparts techniques that can be applied by companies of any type or size--from the Fortune 500 companies she is regularly called upon to consult with to Internet start-ups.

Most of all, what truly distinguishes Reid Smith is her unwavering focus on not just retaining customers but retaining a company's most valuable customers through customer lifetime value modeling. Her advice will help companies ensure that their retention programs are focused on the most profitable customers since this aspect of online marketing has become the most important issue facing websites worldwide.

No matter which segment of the online economy you hail from, this is the essential handbook for initiating, cultivating, and extending that rarest of company assets: e-loyalty.

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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.com Sales Rank: #891,095 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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)

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

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

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.