Is it just me, or when speaking about loyalty are you never sure which verb to use? Is loyalty built, do we drive it, calculate it, create it? I’ve come to the conclusion that we nurture it. Far from being something that is as simple as hard work or greater acceleration, the right data or the leading technology.
It’s about approach. Neither science nor art. Loyalty is a mindset and consequently must be grown, developed over time, expanded and nurtured.
So, what’s needed? Well, the bad news is there is no loyalty blueprint, so it needs to be designed around what you know about your customers. What they value about what you do and where you stand as a brand. Sometimes the answer will be common for all customers and in some cases, you might need different approaches for different customer groups. The good news is, however, when you define and adopt that loyalty mindset it is something your entire business can get behind.
More from PostFunnel on The Loyalty Series
What Is Loyalty and How Do You Recognize It?
Strategy
That’s when the magic happens, your customer strategy is clear for everyone to visualize. Decisions about technology, type of program, and nature of rewards suddenly becomes less about personal preference and more about what best serves your customer. The overall message to your teams, their departments, and for their objectives… solve for your customer.
Before you consider and, more importantly, before you purchase anything, firstly ask yourself what you are setting out to achieve. Once you know that, it will reveal to you the requirements you have and in turn allow you to see what is needed. It’s far too easy to immediately jump to finding a technology solution that can run a program for you. But so often the immediate needs you have are little to do with technology alone.
Tech & Culture
Categorize the needs into technology and culture, they are both of equal importance. Technology has to be a consideration because having the right tools will make the running of your program more automated and efficient, will deliver tangible results that can be scaled, and allow for real time decision making. In return this allows your teams to output actions and ‘do’ something with the data and insight you gather.
To overlook culture is a mistake. If the decision makers in your business are not prioritizing loyalty, if they are not viewing the importance of it in the same way and adopting approaches to improve it, then any investments you make in technology will struggle to deliver a return. In addition, you will constantly have to present your case for resource, margin, budget and prioritization of loyal customers to support your loyalty efforts.
Following that, start looking in detail at the functionality of available technologies, focusing in on three things; the requirements for and usability of your data within that technology, whether you can scale your loyalty strategy with the platform, and whether you will be able to measure the benefit it brings. These 3 things are the pillars that must be in place for you to get value from any loyalty technology, the rest I would be bold enough to say, is simply marketing and IT.
Data Usability
Usability of data is key – how easy is it to access the data for marketing, predictive modelling, and analysis purposes. Ask yourself, can you connect the data you have to this technology and the loyalty data to your other channels and platforms? Can data flow back into where you run reports, can it connect with financial analysis or onsite tracking to enable profitability reporting and is that data structured in line with your customer data?
Will you be able to scale your loyalty strategy? You need to know that financially, operationally, legally and from a stability perspective you can roll out positive test results at scale while also being able to continue testing.
Measuring & Reporting
How you measure loyalty is a whole topic in itself but knowing the metrics you will use, what data that requires and whether it can be tracked so that the benefit it brings can be analyzed, is a stage many teams don’t go through. Against the appeal of the capabilities within the technology it’s easy to forget about how a person or a reporting tool will access and handle the data you collect and make sense of it in relation to customer loyalty.
Reporting the results of individual campaigns is not enough. By firstly defining what you are setting out to achieve and then reviewing the pillars that expose areas of strength and weakness for you to address, you shore up the foundations of your loyalty strategy. The next stage is to think about what you are going to say or do and where you are going to say it, which is where technology and culture need to be aligned.
Customer Programs
Ten years ago, the options here were fairly limited to providing every customer with a unique plastic card, some discount or points and communicating to them through mail or email. Loyalty programs could run alongside the rest of the marketing activity as a complementary part of the business and a perk for customers. The options are much broader and deeper now and more than being something that ticks along in the background, for it to be a success, it must be front and center to your business.
When looking at how you action your program, once again, you will need to look at what’s important to your customers. Keep in mind that you want quality data, high uptake and engagement and a sustainable strategy but an easy to use, easy to understand and high perceived value program for the customer. Explore ideas such as whether your loyalty strategy will be explicit or implicit. Consider how you are able to run an omni-channel program, how customers will identify themselves and how your systems will recognize them.
Tracking
Have you thought about how customers will be able to track their loyalty progress and how you will be able to track their behaviors?
Consider how your technology and your brand might be able to reward more than just orders and purchases so that the loyalty driving activity is engaging, gratifying, and recognizes multiple indicators of loyalty. Being able to recognize customers outside of their buying cycle can be very powerful, particularly if you have a low retention rate or a wide repeat order window.
Also, think about how rewards can be made memorable or something that is sought after. Think about how the rewards you offer connect who you are as a brand and what your customers love about you. How will you practically communicate and deliver those rewards to achieve impressions, engagement, and participation.
Think beyond the basic triggers of order date, value and items purchased. Think about granular tracking to uncover things like visit frequency and quality, intent, channel preference, delivery options and device. This is all important as you improve the relevancy of your strategy so that it is something that makes your customers’ lives easier and nurtures their brand affinity.
Final Words
Incorporating end-user technology into your loyalty program enhances engagement and participation. It can often improve the delivery of your message and ensure that all data points are covered. Pushing the capabilities of the technology but with things that will make a difference to your customer, your store teams, and the success of the program is important, rather than gimmicks.
And finally, consider how well the technology you are looking at fits culturally into your business. Will it facilitate you and the other teams to put customer data at the center of your planning and decision making and can it work to provide customer data for their real-time decision making?