Many brands follow the same old tried and true approaches to marketing and building brand loyalty – sending weekly email deals, offering loyalty and rewards cards and providing coupons for future purchases. However, all of these efforts can fail to deliver real value, be overlooked – and most importantly, don’t differentiate from other brands.
So, as a marketer using a loyalty program as an approach to drive commerce and reinforce high value behaviors, how do you differentiate?
Mobility has introduced a world of opportunity for marketers to create a one-on-one relationship with a customer that is truly personalized, always-on and opt-in. That might sound like the longest string of buzzwords, but with people checking their mobile phones an average of 110 times a day, mobile phones give brands and advertisers 24/7 access to their customer.
But having unlimited access doesn’t mean you can market just anything and expect your customer to react. A mobile-first loyalty program allows brands to create a personalized mobile experience in order deliver relevant content and real value — often in-store where the sale is made. With a mobile-first approach to loyalty, brands get access to first-party data and are able to get real-time, actionable insights to build a customer’s profile about their habits, preferences and purchasing history. From age, gender, and DMA to offline purchases, parental status, and ethnicity, mobile loyalty programs allow brands to create a robust, detailed profile to target an individual, not a mass audience.
According to the Bond Loyalty Report, the amount of programs people actually engage with has decreased from 7.8 to 6.7 over the past year — meaning consumers are looking for quality programs, not quantity. With a database of rich, first-party profiles of consumers participating in a loyalty program, brands are able to personalize deals and promotions, increasing a customer’s lifetime value and deepening their engagement. By tailoring offers and incentivizing high value behaviors, we’ve seen brands increase store visits by 40-50% or increase consumer retention by 30%.
Whatever your brand’s goal is — driving in-store visits, increasing brand awareness, or retaining your current customers — a mobile-first approach to loyalty can differentiate your brand from the competitors and give your organization a data-driven approach to marketing and outreach.
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