Guest post by Emily Murphy (@ekmurphy):

A few weeks ago, Zach Hofer-Shall led a tweet jam on social influence. It garnered such a good response that we decided to take another Customer Intelligence approach to the #IMChat. But this week -- at 2 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, June 14^th -- we’re going to talk about a different hot topic: customer loyalty.

Personally, I would consider myself something of a loyalty program junkie. I sign up for lots of programs and willingly share loads of information about my preferences and interests. But in my experience, most loyalty programs don’t do much with that information. I get discounts and accrue rewards, but the offers are rarely customized to my interests or past transactions.

In this tweet jam, I want to get a sense of your experience with loyalty programs. More specifically, we’ll address the following questions:

1. What are your favorite loyalty programs? Why?
2. What makes a loyalty program unsuccessful?
3. What is the impact of social media on loyalty?
4. What role do you see gamification playing in loyalty?
5. How do you measure loyalty?

Love it or loath it, we can't escape the marketing funnel. It's under our collective skin.

Why? For a start, most marketers agree that only some of the people who are aware of their product are actually considering it. And only a portion of these people will go on to prefer it, buy it, and perhaps become loyal users. We could illustrate this observation in a number of ways. For example, we could draw a dartboard with "total addressable market" as the largest outside circle and "loyal customers" as the smallest circle in the center. Likewise, drawing a funnel is a natural and useful way of making this very basic point.

If only marketing were that simple. In truth, marketing is a messy business. For example, moving from awareness to consideration and preference might be sound advice for a rational shopper, but actual buyer behavior involves heavy doses of emotion and chaos. And loyalty is not the end of a customer's journey; it's a state that the marketer must cherish and sustain, hopefully leading to positive word of mouth. 

On top of this, one can imagine a boorish marketer taking the funnel a little too literally. Draw it with the wide end at the top, and you can imagine some marketers believing that the more water they pour into the top, the more water they will watch gush out of the bottom. Of course, most marketers are smart people who use the funnel without abusing it, but it would be nice if we could find a model that was 100% idiot proof.

What a week! The high level of discussion around the Online Retailer Expo & Conference 2010 should dispell any doubts about Australia's near-term future: Online and multichannel retail have entered a period of rapid expansion. That was the theme of my colleague Patti Freeman Evans' conference keynote. It was a theme of both of my sessions at the event. It will be a theme of research that we expect to release shortly. And it was a theme reinforced by countless private conversations we had in Sydney and Melbourne last week: Expect continued growth and increasing competition, from home and abroad, and from both traditional retailers and new entrants, including some firms you certainly weren't expecting. Indeed, there are exciting times ahead.

So far, so good. But how will we get there? As competition increases, how will online and multichannel retailers attract and retain the most profitable customers and increase their lifetime value? Marketing leaders must answer this question, and they must answer it with more sophistication than is common in Australian online retail today.

In researching my latest report, "Online Retailing In Australia 2010: Marketing, Merchandising, And Customer Service," I found that most Australian online retailers use analytics, but generally in a limited way.

A common use would be to measure and compare the ROI on a range of acquisition tactics, such as search advertising and banner advertising. So far, so good — if acquisition is the start and finish of marketing.

First: Take our survey on marketing measurement and receive a free piece of research for your effort.

Second: Some background. It's that time of year! Time to make lists of what went well and what needs to be improved and overhauled for the next year.