Loyalty marketers are keenly aware of the power of personalization and its impact on creating emotional connections with customers. But, successful execution in this area can often elude them.
Loyalty360 sat down with Misia Tramp, VP Customer Experience Strategy & Insights, Metia to find out more about the current state of loyalty marketing.
How would you characterize the current state of loyalty marketing?
Loyalty marketing is in a state of transition. Brands are increasingly realizing that personalization is the key to driving desired behaviors rather than ‘points’-based systems. It’s through personalization that ‘emotional moments’ are created. Customers have become smart about ‘gaming’ the system when it comes to loyalty programs, and in many cases programs are driving calculative behavior rather than emotional connections. For programs to drive lifetime value, they need to evolve.
Where do you see loyalty marketers performing well and where do you see ongoing challenges?
The quantity of technology and data available to enable customer experiences has exploded over the past few years. We see marketers recognizing the importance of these tools in driving their efforts and are making good progress in adopting these new methods. This is particularly true online. The use of social channels as a way to connect with audiences, as well as the measurement of their value, is now prevalent where, before, there was skepticism surrounding the value of engaging via social. We see a huge increase in personalized web experiences in general, and the use of CMS technology to track the customer journey across channels is also a priority for many brands. The recognition for what needs to happen is definitely there. Where we see marketers having the greatest challenges is how to achieve their Loyalty Program visions.
What do brands have to do to acquire truly loyal customers and not ones who are just attracted to points or miles?
It’s all about personalization and emotive connections. One way we encourage our clients to think about this question is to answer the following: “How can your brand illustrate that it is loyal to its customers across all touchpoints?” It’s easy to get caught in the trap of assuming that loyalty is something that customers exhibit, but we hear time and time again that customers want to feel recognized and this can be lacking. Recognition is not about points – one could argue that customers have earned those through their behavior. Brands exhibiting loyalty to customers is demonstrated through thoughtful and contextually relevant experiences. This kind of thinking will ensure relationships are mutually beneficial for the business and the customer.
How important is really listening to customers?
Customers expect it and, in fact, are aware of how much explicit and implicit data they are creating all the time through every interaction. Where customers see that data is not being used and they know it exists, significant frustration is created. Customers expect brands to be intelligent about customer experience delivery. This includes the use of feedback, tracking of market trends, and anticipation of needs. Listening is table stakes – it’s what brands do with the data that will differentiate them and their loyalty efforts.
How can social media impact customer loyalty?
Social data is effectively the largest ethnographic dataset on the planet. Companies need to not only listen to what audiences are saying about their brands and products, but also to the higher order problems they are solving for. If you are a bank, think about tracking how people feel about ‘money’….if you’re an airline think about how to enable total travel experiences. These conversations are the leading indicators of what is likely to face brands in the future. In addition to using social as a data source, it is clearly a really valuable channel for engagement.
One of our key observations is that brands aren’t necessarily thinking about the journey they are driving across social channels and this means that social channels aren’t driving the depth of engagement that they could. It’s critical that any strategy involving social engagement is clearly mapped to a mutually beneficial outcome. With this in mind, if you can’t tie a social ‘like’ to a business outcome, and the value to the customer isn’t clear, the strategy is clearly not driving loyalty. You get the behavior you measure, and holding social channels as accountable to costs and revenue as traditional channels is critical.