SessionM’s Acquisition of LoyalTree Upgrades Customer Loyalty, Retention Efforts

Officials at SessionM, a Boston, MA-based mobile-first marketing automation and loyalty platform, believe that last month’s acquisition of LoyalTree, a Pittsburgh-based provider of integrated point-of-sale (POS) marketing software for retail brands, will significantly impact their customer loyalty and retention efforts moving forward.

Terms of the acquisition, which follows SessionM’s $35M strategic funding investment in September 2016, were not disclosed.

Led by founder and CEO Brock Bergman, LoyalTree provides an API, built upon data integration with point-of-sale systems like Oracle MICROS, NCR Aloha, POSitouch, and others, which enable two-way communication with POS systems in real time to allow marketers to create and deliver personalized offers that can be redeemed at point-of-sale.

Loyalty360 caught up with Josh Foster, SessionM’s director of product development, to learn more about the acquisition.

“All of the biggest retailers and QSRs want fast data that enables them to take fast action,” Foster explained. “The LoyalTree acquisition allows us to instantly expand our real-time tracking, and offer management and incentive fulfillment across a number of additional POS systems. Our integration makes our customer profiles smarter and more dynamic and our messaging more relevant and timely, all of which contributes to greater loyalty and retention.” 

Foster said that the integration with LoyalTree allows clients to leverage all loyalty features in real-time at point-of-sale, including point awards for purchases, tiered reward stores, and triggered incentives.”

What’s more, Foster believes that the combined platform will inject purchase data and in-store connectivity into omnichannel marketing campaigns for greater personalization and predictability.

“Closed-loop analysis between marketing campaigns and in-store purchases can now be calculated using one end-to-end system for maximum speed and efficiency,” he said. “The new combined offering provides bidirectional campaign analysis to give marketers an accurate ROI of each consumer transaction as well as insight on what specific items each consumer purchased. This helps brands build more accurate and relevant customer profiles based on past purchasing behavior, giving them relevant data to make predictive offers in the future to drive long-term retention.”

LoyalTree’s integration with POS systems allows a barcode to be printed on each receipt and scanned for customer attribution away from the counter, reducing the amount of time a customer spends engaging with loyalty at the counter, thus speeding up transactions.

“The merger will serve as a unique offering for clients by making integration with point-of-sale systems easier and faster to deploy as well as cheaper to maintain,” Foster explained. “These combined capabilities also firmly position SessionM at the forefront of the fast-growing omnichannel marketing automation market. Our technology is one of the most comprehensive and agile solutions in the marketplace today. By combining robust customer data and omnichannel marketing automation with real-time POS data, marketers can create smarter offers in real time that deliver a unique customer journey and move the needle for revenue. Tying together a sophisticated omnichannel engagement platform with real-time POS data will make smart offers, which, in turn, increase share of wallet. We’ll also see more movement by companies to expand mobile payment options tied to loyalty.” 

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