Marketers can take great advantage of Inertial loyalty, through a steady stream of marketing messaging and impluse drivers.  These customers will continue to respond and interact, without much prodding.  At the same time, these customers have no explicit tie to your company, so they can be persuaded to leave at any time.  Witness the 8% increase in churn at Verizon since the iPhone was introduced, which is a lot in mobile.

How do you identify this?  Not easily.  Customers who do not engage with the brand are far more likely to have Inertial or Involuntary Loyalty, although many customers with real loyalty also fall into this category.  The best way to address these customers is to migrate them to Rational or Emotional Loyalty.  At least then you have tools to improve loyalty.  Most likely your Rational Loyalty efforts will also resonate with these customers.

“It’s inevitable that customers leave.  Your customer base is constantly evolving, and your customer loyalty and retention metrics likely hide that natural dynamic. Traditional measures look at full attrition and ignore shrinkage, maintenance, and growth. Savvy companies look deeper and respond to incremental behavior changes within their customer base.

The two measures presented below, dollar retention rate and replacement rate, let you spot issues in your retention and customer development efforts early and focus your decision making on the results you really want – revenue and profit.”

Read the full article at Chief Marketer.

This was prompted by internal research we’ve been doing to identify trends in customer behavior that can help predict larger shifts in revenue in the future.  We’ve found a lot of interesting stuff and spun off many ideas, of which this was one.