In the fast-changing world of marketing, loyal customers are the holy grail of any thriving business.
As such, nearly all B2C companies have developed their own loyalty program, designed to reward return customers and collect data on their behaviour for marketing and personalisation decisions.
A well-planned, dynamic and genuinely rewarding loyalty program can transform one-time customers into devoted advocates and deliver more meaningful insights than simply the number of purchases made.
Loyalty is evolving, and Web3 is opening up a new realm of opportunities and overcoming some of the challenges of traditional loyalty programs.
Web3 beckons a new type of loyalty experience – one that gives genuine ownership of rewards to customers. They can truly benefit from owning them by choosing what to do with them – even transferring them to fellow shoppers to generate new business, helping marketing teams build richer customer profiles in the process.
Key challenges for marketers and businesses
From limited data, lack of real-time insights, and data privacy concerns, to basic predictive analytics – challenges with traditional loyalty programs are becoming more of a strain.
For starters, customers don’t really ‘own’ their points; they often have several pools sitting with different brands that don’t actually motivate return visits, and points are usually only awarded for transactions, not high-value customer activity like making referrals.
These points can also expire and be difficult to keep track of, nor can the users share or trade what’s theirs. Businesses often find themselves in the dark, not able to use accurate, advanced predictions when implementing audience targeting.
A centralised, Web2-based loyalty system simply doesn’t tell them everything they want to know about their customer behaviour online.
One of the most straightforward challenges that marketers face is that their various channels are not well linked. A customer may interact with a brand on social media, make a purchase on their webstore, visit their bricks-and-mortar store, or check out a sale on social shopping channels.
It is tricky to stay aligned across so many touch points on which customers interact with your business, where they do so, and how many of them there really are.
Marketers are dreaming of an omnichannel platform where they can reward customers for more than simply finishing a purchase.
Marketers are dreaming of an omnichannel platform where they can reward customers for more than simply finishing a purchase, create better engagement around their products, and gain valuable insights into customer behaviour.
Developing a comprehensive understanding of customer behaviour is vital for marketers. And, while legacy loyalty programs can offer good insights into individual customer preferences, they make it difficult to track how customers find your products in the first place.
With the advent of emerging technologies, marketers are now increasingly looking into next-generation data analytics and innovative customer relationship management systems.
The idea of seamless, platform-agnostic user experiences probably sounds familiar: it’s the basis of the metaverse and Web3. To create the loyalty experience customers are after, this is exactly where marketers should look.
