Like it or not, customer loyalty is changing

Due to heavy investment in the customer experience by a handful of market leaders, consumers have increasingly raised their expectations of brands over the past several years. Today, they expect more convenience, greater relevance and better value than ever before. Additionally, COVID-19 has raised the bar on those expectations even further, with customers developing new priorities around their personal safety. .

How can brands shift their customer loyalty efforts to not only respond to these changes, but to anticipate what will happen next, and uncover new opportunities? The answer is personalization. And, according to Boston Consulting Group, those opportunities will be sizable—BCG expects that personalization will push a revenue shift of nearly a trillion dollars to the 15% of companies that get it right. To help your company become one of them, Loyalty360 has put together an on-demand webinar featuring Formation CEO and co-founder Christian Selchau-Hansen.

How to address the top 4 pain points in customer loyalty

In his 20-minute presentation, Christian addresses how to solve the four primary pain points that marketers tend to raise regarding 1:1 personalization in customer loyalty. These include:

• Creating a shared, single view of customers
• Creating relevant and valuable offers for customers
• Budgetary constraints and lack of resources
• Adapting quickly enough to changing customer needs

The webinar reveals a 3-step plan to help you overcome these hurdles in a way that is rapidly scalable without being highly resource intensive.

3 key steps to capitalize on hyper-personalization in customer loyalty

1. Understanding the customer

Customers are complex, and to get a single view of them, marketers often feel pressured to collect every single data point from every source possible. The challenge is that it’s hard to find the budget for all that data collection, and even harder to make all that information actionable.

In the webinar, Christian simplifies this process and identifies the one critical customer data point you must start collecting right now. He then explains what follow-up actions you should take to identify valuable customer behaviors.

2. Automating marketing processes

In their pursuit of relevance, marketers typically turn first to segmentation, creating ever-smaller behavioral and demographic cross sections to help them personalize their content and offers. As segmentation becomes more complex, it requires more effort from the marketing team to target these segments and create specific offers or messaging for them.

Christian shares how to bypass this obstacle by automating marketing processes and offers using AI and machine learning. He also goes over how to align AI and marketing automation with your business objectives, ensuring that your marketing team is still making the decisions at the macro level. Most importantly, he explains how to use AI to track the customers behaviors and progress along their journey, so you can continue to learn and improve your loyalty efforts.

3. Optimizing for continuous improvement

In Step 3, the webinar goes over how to optimize your loyalty marketing so you can scale it rapidly. The key to rapid scaling, Christian explains, is to get offers to market quickly, run experiments, and measure their impact. This is where marketers using a microsegmentation approach typically run into trouble, because creating experiments, analyzing results and identifying insights for each microsegment is an extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive process.

To scale without this excessive human effort, the webinar will show you how to use machine learning to create automated feedback loops that continually gather data and fine tune your marketing accordingly. Christian also demonstrates how this is actually executed at the level of individual customers.

"We run multiple experiments every single day and 70% or more of those experiments fail, and that's an organizational imperative for learning. And the reason we like all that failure is because it means that we're learning really quickly what's working, what's not working." ~COO of Stitch Fix

Answers to your customer loyalty marketing questions

The on-demand webinar also dedicated time to taking questions from marketers like you. Christian and Loyalty360 moderator and CEO Mark Johnson give in-depth answers on topics including:

• What are the key areas brands need to focus on to stay relevant now and in the future
• What challenges brands face when implementing a personalization strategy
• Advice for those developing customer loyalty engagement strategies for the first time
• How to start small and build a business case for scaling
• How has COVID-19 affected the way companies are staying relevant

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