The New Look of Loyalty, Making Loyalty Easy for B2B & B2C Growth

For years, I’ve heard marketers tell me – “Loyalty is hard.” “Loyalty takes time”. “Loyalty is too expensive”. “Loyalty is too difficult to get approved by my CFO”.

For years, loyalty has been anything but “easy”. Now it can be. & Now it should be. Organizations need to be using loyalty concepts and loyalty technology in order to deliver on their personalization and growth goals.

How can loyalty be easy?

2 reasons:

1. Loyalty technology is finally being built in a modularized extensible way providing users extreme flexibility of features in a nimble environment supported by existing integrations with the technologies in your tech stack.
2. Loyalty initiatives can be as easy as a simple commitment to a value exchange. The modularized way the technology is built, organizations are no longer forced into programmatic loyalty with points, tiers, etc.

Why now?

Now, because the world is changing and organizations need loyalty. They need loyalty for two reasons 1) to keep customers during economic uncertainty and 2) to collect and use customer data.  The changes in the privacy laws mean less dependence on 3rd party data creating an increased demand for zero and first-party data.

Loyalty is the fastest and most effective path to both.

The New Look of Loyalty

Consider your loyalty strategy as a build.

Start with a simple value exchange:
The foundation of a loyalty strategy is a committed value exchange.

• You commit to your customer to being a good steward of their data and deliver relevant personalized experiences.
• In exchange, they give you their data and they promise to identify themselves at all touchpoints.
• With this joint commitment, you are able to collect the information necessary to understand the customer and deliver hyper-personalized relevant experiences.

Next, as you learn about your customer base, learn what’s important, learn what motivates you can add more loyalty tactics.

Consider adding engagement strategies. Have customers write reviews. Have customers share their experiences on social. Add in a game, rewarding customers who do these activities.

Now that you’re engaging customers you can add in motivators for more and larger transactions. This is where developing tiers and/or point features come in. These tactics are proven in driving new and additional behaviors.  Setting tiers, that are higher than where various segments are spending, will entice people to spend more to reach the new tier in order to unlock new benefits, experiences, or offers.

Taking a building up approach to a loyalty strategy, allows you to:

• Include your entire customer base in the strategy
• Strategically and surgically add benefits and rewards to customer segments most deserved of these benefits.
• To learn as you go and not overcommit at the beginning.

Annex Cloud has the experts and the technology to support loyalty your way. We’re here to advise and lead you to the loyalty initiative that best fits your organization, goals, and customers whether your organization sells B2B or B2C.