To be considered loyal, it shouldn’t be enough for a customers to feel a bond to a company, or to simply stick with the relationship. It should also require certain actions, or shopping behaviors, on the part of the customer.

In other words, loyalty and profitability are not synonymous: The proper target audience for any marketer should be those customers who actually are profitable, not just customers who visit your site often or who may have warm feelings toward your product or service.

Assuming this is true, questions arise. How do marketers encourage clients or customers to become “Profitable Loyals” and against what benchmarks or metrics are those PLs measured?

I’d argue that once a marketer can accurately label their own PLs and set benchmarks and metrics around them, it is  easier for business development to target clients who may, indeed, become PLs.

Thoughts?