The Next Generation of Loyalty Programs Uses Data to Customize Experiences

Next generation customize experienceThe days of blindly offering a generic 20% off coupon as a way to increase in-store traffic and drive brand loyalty are dead. The future of effective customer engagement relies on collecting and leveraging data to create personalized customer experiences at every turn.

This may seem like a herculean task for marketers, but the good news is that loyalty programs are exceptionally poised to meet this challenge.

This topic was the theme during a recent discussion at the Apex All Payments Expo in Las Vegas. During the panel presentation titled, Build the Next Generation of Unique, Engaging Loyalty Platforms, the speakers, including Nicholas Rellas of Drizly, Jenny Bullard of The Jones Company/Flash Food, Inc., and Andy O’Dell of Clutch, all offered their particular insights.

“Loyalty is essentially a data capture strategy,” O’Dell said. “You need people to enroll in some kind of program that frees you up to operate in a way that is not restricted by privacy policy. Once you have access to that data, whether it’s online, in-store, on a mobile device, or in social, you have the ability to understand at a base level how a consumer operates.”

This data, once collected, serves several purposes. Data can get marketers closer to that hallowed mark of the personalized customer experience ideal. Every industry from high-end fashion purveyors to pharmaceutical retailers has the same need to understand how their particular customers engage with the brand.

Bullard offered a range of examples regarding how Flash Food’s Go Blue payment rewards card and mobile app incorporate beacon technology to correlate and cross-reference data, which builds extremely accurate customer profiles.

The brand now knows which customers only fuel up at the pump, which only visit the store, and how many complete both actions. Discounts and rewards can then be issued to drive desired behaviors accordingly. This beacon technology also tracks in-store movement so Flash Food can even see the rate and frequency with which consumers interact with different sections and products.

“Just knowing where that customer walks in our store and what interests them helps us to better merchandise our stores,” Bullard said. “It also helps us know what entices our customers to come in to our stores, and how we can promote our brands and our products.”

For Drizly, an on-demand alcohol delivery service that works in conjunction with a mobile app and local retailers, customer data driven insights have helped the company significantly increase operational efficiency.

“How [Drizly] thinks about loyalty and what is important is that 66% of our orders come between 4 and 8 on Friday and Saturday nights,” Rellas explained. “And it is an operational nightmare. So we can use points to affect not only how often you’re buying and how much you’re buying, but also when you are buying. We can predict when people are going to come in. We look at loyalty as a way to push and pull consumer behavior to ease the issues that we have.”

This notion of using loyalty program data to streamline functions is not only limited to Drizly’s unique marketing niche either. O’Dell spoke to how it relates to marketing departments across industries.

“Budgets are getting downward pressure right now, so there is a huge emphasis on streamlining the marketing overhead, while increasing its overall KPI performance,” O’Dell said. “And you can’t do that without real-time access to your data, and the ability to turn that inbound data back outbound very effectively and efficiently, so you can hit the personalization that the consumer wants that draws a higher conversion rate. Putting that data back to work for you is the critical element.”

The panel left the audience with a deeper understating of the importance loyalty programs play for both data collection and customer engagement. Next Generation Customize ExperienceAbove all, the speakers stressed that loyalty programs must never be limited to only one channel.

In the end, customers will choose for themselves how to engage with a brand. Whether that’s via a mobile app, an online platform, or in-store visit, they will seek the path they prefer. But by taking an omnichannel approach to customer connectivity, brands can better ensure that they are already there when the customer arrives.

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