We hear it so often in the loyalty industry that “there is no one size fits all” solution. Creating and retaining customer loyalty is the ultimate goal of every brand, but different marketers have different needs.
Loyalty360 caught up with Adam Morgan, VP of Global Partners & Alliances, SessionM, to discuss this theme.
We continue to hear about brands that are looking to create alignment between their customer loyalty efforts and the brand promise. Should all brands try to become the next “Apple” or “Amazon?” Or is it more realistic and/or beneficial for brands to understand their own unique brand identity, and then define objectives, process and programs that align with that unique identity?
Morgan: There is no one size fits all solution for being successful on mobile. Just because one type of mobile strategy works for a company doesn’t mean it will work for you. Not every company needs the same level of engagement or personalization as well in order to garner loyalty. Rather than copying brands that are successful on mobile, brands should develop strategies that are tailored to their goals.
For example, Starbucks customers may visit their stores every day. Starbucks has had great success with its own app and points program because customers engage with them regularly, and can quickly accumulate points and redeem them for things they care about. A brand like Toyota, which doesn’t have high frequency interactions with customers, needs a completely different strategy. For Toyota, it’s all about improving service and maximizing the value that customers get from each touchpoint in order to grow their relationships.
There is so much focus on customer data and around creating actionable insight now. How should brands be managing data in a way that is less complex, easier to understand, and more impactful?
Morgan: One of the reasons data has become so complex for brands is that it lives in many different places that are not connected. What would make it easier to understand is if they had a single view of the customer, but also the ability to bias toward which customer data is most meaningful. Getting all of the data into a single repository is a technology challenge. Figuring out which data is most meaningful and can lead to higher customer lifetime value is a business one. Candidly, that is an area we feel we differentiate...behavioral data can be incredibly insightful, particularly when you can correlate it to things like purchase, environmental and geographic data in real time. Our customers are seeing associations they didn’t know existed in the behaviors and interactions of their customer base.
Can you define what the phrase “customer journey” means to you? What does it mean to brands? And how do you see it changing?
Morgan: It’s funny. Most visuals tend to depict the customer journey as either linear or circular, and the reality for most organizations is that it is likely neither of those. So the customer journey is actually not one, but many journeys that change their course and are not always forward moving. That linear definition and brand or product specific focus has limited how individuals are being marketed to at any given time and puts marketers at odds with customer behavior.
Technology is finally catching up now to account for that non-linear journey and that what and how we show content to the customer is not always a binary decision process. The historical approaches to targeting and personalization did not account for probabilistic decision making. That is where so many persona-based marketing strategies fall short. Really innovative strategies are focusing on a customer journey defined by the problem they solve, not the product they sell, which is a much more customer-centric approach.
Can you define OmniChannel/MultiChannel? What does that mean to you? What does it mean to most brands? How can brands manage the opportunity? How many brands understand these terms in relation to where they are / what they are doing / where the market is?
Morgan: If you look at the marketing buzzword meter over the past five years, few phrases can top the overuse scale as omnichannel/multichannel. Initially, omni and multichannel was the hyper focus on the content management players keen on solving the problem of taking one piece of content and publishing it once across every channel imaginable and engaging their customer regardless of which path that customer came through. That drove (and still does today) the abundance of focus on responsive websites to solve the “screen size” challenge of any device.
However, it didn’t solve the identity challenge of how to connect Jane the Twitter user to Jane the ecommerce customer buying clothes on your website or through a point-of-sale system in your store. Taken one step further, with the heavy shift toward mobile device usage and away from desktop computers, the context of what and where someone is when on their mobile device, typically gets lost in a responsive mobile experience. The responsive site becomes “a smaller version of their website.”
What brands need to do now is realize that you can approach omnichannel from a content perspective (and should), but you have to account for the fact that customers want and expect a more personalized mobile experience. They expect you to treat them differently if they are sitting on their couch watching TV as opposed to standing in the entrance to a department store at the mall or the aisle at Costco. If you are committed to solving that problem, then you have to start with identity and how you pull it all together so that you know you are dealing with the same person. You can’t treat someone equally across every channel if you don’t know who you are talking to.
What is the future of customer loyalty?
Morgan: More and more companies are focusing on loyalty as a business strategy that permeates every line of business and not just as a marketing program. This shift in philosophy means that companies are recognizing the value of a loyalty program as a way to generate customer insights to fuel strategic, data-driven tactics across marketing, but also product development. Our platform can natively integrate into any mobile app or website to create a seamless experience designed to increase engagement, motivate, and influence high-value behaviors and maximize the lifetime value of a brand’s audience. We are quite fortunate enough to do this for a number of the top brands in the world.