Increasing customer loyalty is the surest road to bigger profits for financial services brands, according to the latest Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index (CLEI), released Feb. 4.
This is surely not something lost on Fidelity, Vanguard and Schwab, three companies who placed among the top five in the index’s rankings of mutual fund companies and online brokerages.
The 24th annual index from the New York-based brand engagement and customer loyalty research consultancy says it has definitively identified “loyalty” as a profit-generator for brands that know how to create and market it.
“Brands looking for guaranteed profits, can’t do better than loyal customers,” says Robert Passikoff, president of Brand Keys. “Today, loyalty is a fusion of emotional engagement, trust, and an ability for a brand to engage; to meet or exceed expectations consumers hold for their ideal product or service. The brands on top of this year’s category lists know that.”
In 2019, Brand Keys says there are three concrete fiscal realities of loyalty and engagement that companies need to keep in mind:
- It costs 9 to 11 times more to recruit a new customer than to keep an existing one
- An increase in loyalty of only 7% can lift lifetime profits per customer by as much as 85%
- Depending upon the sector, an increase in loyalty of just 3% is equivalent to a 10% across-the-board cost reduction program
“Decision-making has become increasingly emotionally driven over the past decade,” said Passikoff. “But the addition of increased expectations for brand trust has radically altered the category landscape. Neither ‘business as usual’ nor ‘more social networking’ will cut it in this new brandscape. Brands have to move loyalty to the top of their to-do lists.”
Top brands customers in the Brand Keys survey rated highly at creating emotional engagement and loyalty in the Financial Service categories are:
Mutual Funds
- Fidelity
- Vanguard
- T. Rowe Price
- TIAA Cref
- Schwab
Online Brokerages
- Schwab
- Vanguard
- Fidelity
- E*Trade
- Ally
Banks
- Chase
- Citibank
- PNC
- Bank of New York
- Capital One
- TD Bank
- Bank of America
- Wells Fargo