THE NEW GENERATION OF LOYALTY PROGRAMS

THE BEGINNING OF HISTORY

Let's remember that loyalty has been perceived by companies as, primarily, a financial advantage for decades. This probably explains why 79% of loyalty programs today are based on simple, financial reward mechanisms, while only 21% are based on customer relations and recognition (in the 6th edition of the VERTONE multi-sector study).

As a result, every business now implements at least the same reward program as their competitor. Every hairdresser has the same card to stamp as the competing hairdresser on the same street. Each GMS offers you their points card or cash-back and notifies you of their promotional offers through their app. All of these programs run parallel; all are financial.

Because of this trend–wherein loyalty programs are designed explicitly for the financial benefit of both company and customer–we’ve seen the emergence of applications that help group an individual’s loyalty cards or membership numbers. Given that 60% of customers have competing loyalty cards and 59% of women have more than 10 loyalty cards, these solutions make a great deal of sense (source: Observatoire de la fidélité). 

However, they also expose just how indistinguishable and competing so many of these programs are when held side by side. This brings us to the question of our time: where is the loyalty to our company when our card today offers the same reward as our competitors? Where is the loyalty, when our card is collected among others? Where is the loyalty, when we only address the most volatile population: the one that is the most price-sensitive?

Does any of this equate to real loyalty at all?

 TOWARDS A NEW ERA OF LOYALTY

By simply asking these questions, we all understand that certain age of loyalty programs has thus passed; that the market is saturated; that a truly competitive company, in terms of loyalty, must today do better than simple "financial" card programs.

The truth of the matter is: that rewards card doesn’t tell your customer anything about you. Especially, when it’s sitting right next to five other rewards cards that do the exact same thing, the customer doesn’t think about your company when using it; they only think about the convenience it brings them. That disconnect stands in the way of the relationship that you want your loyalty programs to develop.

The five main reasons why the customer is loyal are :

1. quality (26%)
2. price (24%)
3. brand values (15%)
4. availability (13%)
5. the brand (8%)

(source: Selligent)

A card alone can only produce a few of these. To actually emphasize loyalty to your brand, specifically, you need more.

First off, you need to look inward. Rather than just looking at the rewards your competitors are offering, you have to ask yourself what your business needs. Thinking about loyalty is ultimately about solving problems in your brand, and amplifying strengths–from production to customer relations.

That is precisely what is at stake: the "relationship"--the construction of an outstanding and "distinguishing" story with the customer. Once you build that relationship you can enrich it with elements of quality, values, and performance unique to your organization., You are using rewards and brand events to build customer recognition.

Conversely, by rethinking the objectives of a reward and its attribution criteria, you can also create many more points of interaction with the customer, which will increase their loyalty, by deepening the relationship and offering them a range of value that matches where they are with your brand. The customer can be a sponsor, influencer, prescriber, tester, critic, depending on your brand needs. By leveraging all of these roles, you can not only derive customer value via traditional sales means (upselling, etc.) but also use that loyalty as a marketing tool, turning customer capital into relational capital.

Our loyalty strategy has enormous potential, as long as we look at it through the prism of relationship marketing. And loyalty cards have never been able to do that, even in a digital format. Sure, they offer savings and benefits, but they never occupied the role or provided the functionality of building legitimacy, speaking with the customer, establishing a loyal relationship, or adapting to his or her profile. 

WHAT'S THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOLUTION FOR LOYALTY 2.0?

Sponsorship programs already exist, rewarding influencers, programmers, testers, etc. Likewise, brand events are widely relayed via company websites, as are organization values, and promises of quality. The question is not inventing these things, it’s uniting them and optimizing them. 

It’s worth asking yourself a few key questions:

• What experience am I offering to the loyal customer? 
• How many touchpoints do we offer them?
• How are we building a coherent and personalized relationship across interactions?

Looking at your customer base, how are you exploiting the possibilities of::

your website for everyone

• your Facebook page
• your LinkedIn page
• your Instagram account
• your mini-site and our emailing/mailing campaigns for influencers
• your mini-site and our emailing/mailing campaigns for prescribers
• your mini-site and our emailing/mailing campaigns for testers etc.
• your old loyalty mini-site, "club advantages," and our emailing/mailing campaigns
• your loyalty card and app that deals with purchase-based rewards
• your dedicated emailing/mailing/SMS/notifications

Many companies start with a CRM, and, yes, a good CRM should be able to turn all this noise into music and bring some coherence to it. But in the end, creating, animating, and managing so many contact points in a 2.0 loyalty strategy will cost you in time, money, and manpower–unless you have the right ally.

tooodooo harmonizes all your customer data into one-of-a-kind loyalty programs

Instead of just trying to turn noise into music, wouldn't it be better to make a song? 

Rather than trying to juggle constant inflation of contacts while worrying about the cost of data management–especially when the result only concerns ⅓ of customers–wouldn’t it be easier to use a single coherent media hub to create a true loyalty campaign? 

This is the ambition and know-how we have put into tooodooo©, to provide companies with a single 2.0 loyalty media solution, capable of :

• communicating on all a brand’s values and events, services, and products, based on specific customer profiles - engaging the customer in their full marketing potential, in service of the brand according to its desires
• personally rewarding the customer according to a hundred or so criteria that can take into account all their roles, your products, your catalogs, your region, your country, your language, your budgets, your marketing objectives, etc.
• segmenting, animating, exchanging, and analyzing with an integrated CRM.

All starting at just 49€ / month.

When it comes to loyalty, tooodooo© is all you need, to take your customer relationships to the next level…and beyond.