Are last year’s biggest trends in the loyalty industry changing, or are they growing?
Big Data, social media and the continued expansion of mobile market saturation were all topics of wide discussion and analysis throughout the loyalty industry during 2012.
According to G. Ashby Green, Kobie’s VP of Finance and Administration, these trends continue to grow and amplify, establishing themselves as essential components of today’s customer rewards experience.
Ashby sat down with Roger Williams of LoadFactor for a discussion about how companies with customer rewards programs are accounting for these trends when designing programs – for example, collecting data during a customer’s first visit to a restaurant in order to personalize the next one – for maximum value. After all, a social media “like” doesn’t automatically translate to a sale.
Ashby addresses some key points, including:
- While brands’ adoption of social media as a customer engagement tool, the original focus was on quantity – how many Facebook “likes” or Twitter followers can we amass? Now, brands with loyalty programs are shifting the spotlight to the quality of customer relationships on social media and turning those relationships into revenue.
- Driving loyalty through data will continue to become more sophisticated as brands – for example: restaurants that store information on where regular patrons like to sit, what their favorite appetizers and when their birthdays are– use tech channels to assemble data snapshots of individual customers’ preferences.
- Focus will continue to shift from brands trying to win customer loyalty through traditional points-for-rewards model and toward winning stronger “emotional loyalty” – and that comes from providing the customer with a truly great experience and making them feel truly valued.
Loyalty marketing is never static; it must continually change shape to fit the latest channels of communication that customers favor. As they enter the second half of 2013, rewards program managers will continue to seek more sophisticated ways of leveraging the engagement potential of Big Data, social media and mobile to build ever-stronger relationships with their best customers.
Find out what other loyalty insights Ashby has in his video here and tell us what you think! Share your views with us in the comments section below.
