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Loyalty is the ultimate marketing hack!

 

By: Ray Chelstowski

If you’re like me, you probably are probably served click bait every time you arrive on a website. Most often, mine come in the form of articles on life hacks. Life hacks are quick solutions to everyday problems using common products in new ways. The one I see most often is for plastic bread bag clips. Who knew that there were so many other uses for these small pieces of plastic? From labeling spare keys, to fixing broken flip flops, bread bag clips have dozens of alternate uses that make life easier and more productive. Loyalty programs operate in a very similar way, helping marketing heads meet a variety of pain points head on. They no longer are just about rewarding repeat customers. At Kognitiv we are working with brands to reimagine what loyalty can do and applying our strategy services, data protocols, and PaaS platform in ways they have never before imagined.

Subscription Upsells

Any business that sells subscriptions is effectively in the loyalty space. They just don’t know it yet. Loyalty is the evolution of subscriptions and changes the engagement protocol in a meaningful way. Instead of applying all focus and attention to recruitment and renewal, a loyalty approach allows brands to engage customers throughout their subscription, creating a more dynamic value proposition, ensuring better renewal rates, and protecting price points. A loyalty approach further accelerates upsell opportunities to higher tier subs and offerings. In a post-pandemic world where many customers are looking to narrow the number of properties they subscribe to, a loyalty approach to engagement can help these services remain “must haves”.

Clean Rooms

Many media agencies are encouraging their clients to put customer data in clean rooms where they can work with other peer brands and better reconcile the efficacy of digital ad buys in a cookie less world. But in clean rooms populated with loyalty data brands can not only reconcile their ad buys but leverage the data to be predictive and better inform buys before they are placed.

Collaborative Commerce

It’s always been difficult to assign attribution in partner marketing. Most campaigns deliver results that are directional at best. With collaborative commerce, two non-competitive brands come together to build incentives and rewards for consumers they share (or should share) that they could never create on their own. These collaborations are driven by data and often bring brands together that never would have thought that there was any overlap in their customer base. When collaborative commerce works, all parties walk away winners.

Gamification

Consumers want more personalization in the offers and incentives that they receive from brands they are loyal to. Perhaps the best way to deliver this is to build compete customer ID’s that provide marketers with not just contact info and purchasing history, but data tied to hopes, dreams and aspirations as well. At Kognitiv, we’ve found that “gamifying” the loyalty experience not only encourages members to share zero party data about themselves - but it also rewards them along the way in a manner that matters to them most.

These are just a few of the ways that we at Kognitiv are helping brands think more broadly about loyalty. In a world that is placing less and less importance on a physical in-store experience, brands need to create a value proposition that guard’s price, rewards return visits, and creates a personalized user experience. A commitment to this kind of discipline is now required across all market outreach and in turn has made loyalty the ultimate marketing hatch of the moment, providing new solutions each day to marketers looking to be nimble, strategic, and a step ahead of the field.

Ray.chelstowski@kognitiv.com

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