Loyalty programs are the price you pay for rich customer data — you make money from the careful use of that data. That insight, and the 2002 Reinartz/Kumar Harvard Business Review research that backs it, changes how you decide which customers earn loyalty investment and which don't. Here's the practical structure that follows from it.
Right offer or right time — which one matters more? A retail client asked, and the answer surprised both of us. Khan, Lewis and Singh's Marketing Science paper runs the numbers properly and the result is gold for one-to-one marketers. Here's what they found, and what it implies about how much effort to put into timing versus content.
A widely-shared ClickZ piece called out NPS for being statistically broken, methodologically arbitrary, and fundamentally wrong. It misses on all three. Here's a line-by-line response — useful the next time you see the same critique re-circulating on LinkedIn.
Improving CX assumes you know which drivers actually move loyalty — and most teams don't. Worse, the relationship between a driver and the experience is rarely the straight line people assume. Here are the four shapes that relationship takes, and what each one means for where to invest.
Brian Carroll's prospecting rules say it can take 8 to 12 calls to reach a B2B prospect, and most callers give up after three. That's a great rule of thumb — and a terrible operational policy if your data integrity, right-party-connect rate or list quality are working against you. Here's what to weigh alongside Carroll's rule before you commit a telemarketing team to twelve attempts each.