Member-Only Meetings

In this Lunch & Learn, Erik Kapila, Loyalty Program Director at Marcus Theatres, will walk through the components of net customer value using an illustrative example based on Marcus Theatres’ Movie Club loyalty program. He’ll show how member revenue, acquisition costs, and ongoing costs come together in one calculation, then share how the exercise helped his team evaluate the program and communicate its value to leadership.

Key takeaways:

• The inputs needed to calculate net customer value for a loyalty program
• How to bring revenue and costs together in a member-level calculation
• Ways to use the result to assess program performance and support conversations with leadership

For 25 years, loyalty marketers have optimized email to get the member to open it. What happens when the member’s AI opens, reads, interprets—and eventually acts on—the email for them?
 
AI is inserting a new intermediary between the loyalty program and the member. That creates both a challenge and an opportunity. Gmail now uses Gemini to summarize threads, and Google is moving toward an “AI Inbox” that can prioritize information and surface actions; meanwhile, email remains consumers’ preferred way to hear from marketers. 

During this Lunch & Learn session with Carolynn Jordan from Stop & Shop, we’ll discuss:
 

• How brands can optimize for AI, not just the member: Gmail and other AI tools can summarize and interpret emails, making clear, machine-readable value propositions increasingly important.
• Put the value up front: Offers, rewards, urgency and key member benefits need to appear earlier so they survive AI summarization and capture attention quickly.
• Rethink opens and measurement: If AI reads or summarizes the email for the member, open rates become less meaningful—putting greater emphasis on clicks, activations, redemptions and incremental behavior.