Welcome Back E-Loyalty: How to Keep Customers Coming Back to Your Website

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.

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

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!

The key concept in the Darwinian model of evolution is that even small competitive advantages will, over time, determine the dominant traits overall.What we are seeing in the "dot-com" world is a blindingly fast Darwinian process. The trouble is that due to its speed, it is difficult to differentiate why the winners are winning and the losers are losing. That is, unless you take into consideration the human side of the issues.In her book, e-Loyalty, Ms. Reid Smith brings her many years of experience together with a sublime understanding of human relationships to make it clear that though the Web may be new, the principles that work to develop loyal customers are not.The tools available are uncountable. The technologies have never been more powerful. The medium is mass-oriented. With Ellen as your guide, you will find clarity in solving your problems.This is a must read for anyone who wishes to survive and thrive online.

Let's admit it. Getting reliable insights into the Net is about as difficult as trying to see without goggles in a blizzard. Ellen Reid Smith has done us all a service by de-mystifying e-Loyalty. Her book not only lets you identify the most dangerous pitfalls...but walks you through the process of actually getting it right the first time. But perhaps best of all, she manages to feed us this information in a format that reads as easily as afternoon conversation over tea. No one should even think of going into e-commerce without this book tucked into their brain.