The following is am exclusive guest contributed post from Jason Wolfson, Marketing Manager at RadiumOne.
Brands including Starbucks, 7 Eleven, Sephora, Sears, Men’s Warehouse and Gap all share one critical customer loyalty strategy: each has a mobile app loyalty program. The programs work by giving consumers a convenient access point to loyalty program features from within a brand’s mobile app. These loyalty features vary greatly from app to app, but all serve the common purpose of encouraging and rewarding customers who engage time and money with a brand on an ongoing basis.
Brands who provide mobile access to their loyalty programs do so for user convenience and manageability. Mobile loyalty apps are good for customers because they give customers on-demand, on-the-go access to loyalty point information and redemption tools, which no other access point can do at the same scale, or with the same ease of use.
Enhancing the mobile loyalty experience with additional mobile technologies such as push messaging, geo-fencing, in-app tracking and mobile data analytics generates more value. These enhancements aim directly at building deeper and more profitable customer relationships. Brands can start by:
1) Driving re-engagement using personalized, location-aware push messaging
2) Understanding loyal customers better through behavioral, transactional and location data
3) Improving cross-channel engagement with mobile app loyalty users
Driving re-engagement
When loyalty cards sit forgotten in a customer’s wallet, a brand can’t do much about it. In contrast, when mobile loyalty apps sit forgotten, a brand can use personalized, location-aware push messaging to drive re-engagement. The message can be triggered when the user of a mobile loyalty app enters a geo-fence, enabling a brand to communicate with app users as they get close to a physical store location. In addition, brands can personalize the location-aware push messages based on prior behaviors and shopping history. Personalized messaging has a very high potential to advance the customer relationship.
Understanding loyal customers better
Another way to advance the customer relationship is by generating a better understanding of genuinely loyal customers. Often, loyalty data sits in a silo populated by a sea of transactional data. With the right tracking, a mobile app loyalty program can empower far deeper insights based on behavioral and location data, in addition to transactional data. In this way, a mobile app loyalty program can add to a brand’s holistic store of customer data where it’s easy to analyze and available to act on.
Improving cross-channel engagement
Finally, brands can advance the customer relationship by re-engaging mobile loyalty app users in any marketing channel, including display, mobile, social and video. This means engaging customers with paid digital media in a personalized manner, such as based on their loyalty program status. With a holistic approach like this, the loyalty program can influence users even when they’re outside the brand’s app.
Next opportunity for mobile loyalty app programs
Mobile loyalty app programs today have the convenience angle covered. The next opportunity is to aim enhancements directly at driving re-engagement, understanding loyal customers better and improving cross-channel engagement using mobile technologies. This will go a long way toward achieving customer engagement that sticks.
