Consumers today know they deserve more than ever before when it comes to expecting superior experiences from brands. Customers want to be recognised, want to be nurtured, want to be heard and want to be pampered. If they trust a brand enough, they are willing to hand over personal data and information, just so they may be treated as special.
On the other side, as marketers, we seek customers who will love us, customers who will trust us, customers who will be our advocates and customers who will make us part of their lives. Therefore, the easiest place to start is with customers who have whispered their secrets to us; from the data they’ve shared, always knowingly, always willingly, knowing we protect their privacy.
Exchange of data, insights, and engagement
Loyalty marketing is a strategic aspect of celebrating customers, akin to a dialogue since it involves a two-way flow of data, insights and the need to engage. It is the tangible, measurable and beyond measurable relationship that customers want their favourite brands to cultivate with them. It is where customers allow a brand a place on their tables, in their homes, in their hearts. They do that because they’ve received from brands true value in exchange for their data they’ve shared.
When well understood, data unravels stories that people willingly share with brands, in the hope of getting far more in return. An effective loyalty solution must gather the data trail of what customers share and allow marketers to give back what they seek. In turn, this helps brands turn customer loyalty into table stakes that set a high bar on what customers should expect from brands.
Building a loyalty programme that delivers
Behind the visible glamour of brand and customer relationships lies a myriad of complex processes. This is the world where data, designed by technology, feeds into the brand experience we seek to create and comes alive. Understanding our customers as individuals is crucial. For instance, data can help brands understand how a frequent but low-value buyer is just as valuable as a less frequent but high-value buyer. Which customers do we need to focus on to retain them for the long term? Who should we reward for staying years with our brand? Essentially, it’s about marketers being as empowered and enabled as they’ve always wanted – allowing them to focus on the outcome, while experts manage the process of driving that outcome.
Achieving this is no mean feat, however. While companies often invest in technology platforms that help them get the initial traction on building customer loyalty, they often find the benefits plateauing over time if they are not augmented by the right services that can help them get the most from the solution in terms of using the platform optimally and leveraging the data to get powerful and actionable customer insights.
So, how do you know if your loyalty programme is truly equipped to deliver adequate insights, engagement and experiences as a value exchange for your customer’s trust in you? You can self-evaluate by asking yourself these questions:
1. Does your solution enable you to measure customer emotions and incorporate them into strategic frameworks?
2. Are you equipped with the means to capture qualitative and quantitative customer insights through tools such as benchmarking, customer segmentation, behavioural analytics, churn/retention models, predictive models, look-alike modelling, and dashboards to visualise the
data easily?
3. Does your solution allow you to proactively bring partners to the table and create alignment to ensure successful results that improve your loyalty capabilities?
4. Do you have access to predictive analytics and AI to help anticipate consumer behaviour and create personalised, context-specific offers in real-time for loyal customers?
5. Does the solution come with data-backed frameworks and methodologies to help brands connect customer motivations and needs to business objectives?
6. Do you have the ability to collect all kinds of data from your best customers, including coveted zero-party preference and interest data to support frictionless personalised experiences?
7. Are you equipped to analyse satisfaction scores
or sentiment as a proxy for emotion and calculate an emotional loyalty score at the individual and brand level?
8. Is your solution rooted in privacy to ensure customer data is protected?
9. Do you have access to built-in recommendations and nudges to help you make smarter moves, faster?
A competent technology solution that combines the right technology solution powered by expertise in customer insights and services can help deliver most of these asks. And finally, it is useful to keep in mind that loyalty is a function of three magical ingredients: the experiences we curate, the emotions we evoke and the memories we leave behind.
