During the Sept. 26 Loyalty 360 webinar titled, “How to Identify and Drive Profitable Customer Behaviors Using Intelligent Loyalty (Plus 5 Key Steps to Get You Started),” Forrester analyst Emily Collins stated to attendees that “the age of the customer is here to stay.”
“Consumers are increasingly interacting with brands,” Collins said. “Marketers turn to loyalty to deepen customer relationships because they can better identify and more easily reward customer behavior.”
Customer retention, profitability, and engagement are the top three business objectives for a brand’s customer loyalty program, Collins said.
“Loyalty isn’t just for marketing,” she said. “It touches every part of the organization. Programs that ignore customer lifetime value, and aren’t tailoring their offers are wasting times with rewards because they fail to drive behavioral changes in wallet spend and redemption frequency.”
Brands cannot have a successful loyalty program if they fail to engage beyond the purchase, Collins said.
“Loyalty program customers are willing to raise their hands and identify themselves and fill out information about themselves,” Collins said. “It has to be about more than just dishing out rewards.”
Many loyalty programs have undifferentiated strategies, or they have changed very little over the years. With such fierce competition for consumer mindshare, Collins said, creating differentiation is at the top of the list for marketers’ challenges.
Building Intelligent Loyalty involves advanced segmentation and customer insights, Collins said. She listed some key points to drive Intelligent Loyalty:
Understanding member needs and motivations drives high perceived value
Preparing for relentless adjustment prevents stale strategies. “Build test and learn into everything you do.”
Measure loyalty program success on three levels: corporate measurement, engagement measurement, and operational measurement – and its impact on consumer behavior and on overarching goals of the business. How does it improve average lifetime value of customers? Then you can identify areas that are successful and which ones need improvement
Orchestrating across channels and meet customers on their turf. “If you can’t recognize those customers and where they choose to interact, you’ll never gain their loyalty.”
Understanding effective methods and appropriate channels
Alignment across the organization encourages collaboration and broadens benefits
Steven Hoffman, President of Exchange Solutions, explained to attendees that loyalty has to be an integral part of a company’s overall customer strategy. Hoffman offered three keys to a successful loyalty program.
Never stop iterating
It requires senior leadership crossing all silos
Set and continuously monitor ROI targets