Points Don’t Always Mean Prizes

“Life is the name of the game and I wanna’ play the game with you!” Bruce Forsyth, 1973

You’ll have noticed that we have updated our theme from Connected Isolation to Connected Activation. As rules begin the relax – 2 meters to 1 meter, children back at school the ability to interact in ways that are truly social not just social media – brands are attempting to determine what the iterations of the next 6 or 12 or 36 months can be. What action are we planning to retain or rebuild our consumer relationships?

If you’ve been guided to this blog there’s a good chance that your business is one of the “Strivers” or “Thrivers” that we’ve referenced in previous posts. As part of this tribe, building and securing the loyalty of your new customers is playing a significant part in the way that you’re planning for the possible ways Covid could play out in the next year and beyond.

Loyalty, whether, personal, professional or commercial has become a much more embedded aspect of the national zeitgeist – “if you were there for me then I’ll be there for you”, and loyalty achieved through relationships built on authenticity, honesty and integrity are the ones that truly have longevity. That’s what we’re hearing from our clients and, that a significant part of their strategic focus, as we move into the next phase of our Coronavirus life, is the shift  from offer driven acquisition to forecasting, understanding and building relationships built and measured on “life time value”, not just click to buy. It’s about brands developing a new understanding of loyalty. One that is built on relevance and trust not discounts and offers.

It’s a believable, and consistent, customer and community experience.  

Loyalty is a relationship, it’s is about friendship, about belief, about trust and understanding. It’s a mutual commitment; it can’t ever just be about “what’s in it for me?” Yes!  Points have a place but let’s be honest and call discounts what they are. True loyalty comes from a connection at a human level between brand and customer. As a consumer I want you to understand me, have taken the time to think and relate, not simply bombard me with offers on all the stock you need to shift.

So how do we do this? The keys, if we are to be relevant to every customer, are, intelligence, insight, knowledge – in one-word DATA. Actually, two words, CLEAN DATA. Brands have to be confident that every step of the customer journey is honest, that it doesn’t look disconnected. If you’re trying to look authentic but don’t really commit, then at some point you’re just selling “snake oil”. How loyal is someone shopping for the next best offer?

So what do We mean by CLEAN DATA? We’re talking about purity, about distillation, about creating a single point and single page of customer truth. One source of information that informs every touch point along the customer journey – marketing, recruitment, search, payment, delivery and returns – and every nuanced point of interaction. How can a brand truly understand their customer and the connection when there are multiple variances of customer data that remains disconnected?

Let me give you an example. I shop, instore and online, and use three different email addresses but one single means of payment and one single address to ship to. In a month, from one clothing brand, I will receive 5 communications, making different offers to different iterations of my data within their various data silos. It’s frustrating me as a customer and wasting their money as a business, both on the cost of execution and the amount of points or discounts I can rack up. However, combining the right data platform with the right kind of expertise significantly reduces the cost of sending me offers that are irrelevant to me and hugely improves my experience of their brand and builds a connection that increases my value on the basis of more purchases and fewer discounts needed to secure them.

If you want to build my loyalty, talk to me in a sophisticated and genuine fashion. I’m an adult and I understand the nature of the commercial relationship between me and businesses that want me to buy their products. If you want to drive the lifetime value our relationship talk to me about the things that will interest me and show me the products that will inspire me. I would much rather pay full price for something I desire than get 200 points for something that I may or may not need.

At BORN we create content and build commerce based on knowledge and data. We focus on combining creative and UX to provide consistently exciting, entertaining and inspiring digital and physical experiences.

To find out more about how we can help your brand to deliver CX that consistently outperforms your competitors visit our website and start a conversation.