Thoughts from Matthew Dichter, Creative Director at JAKALA NA
Recently I had the pleasure of representing JAKALA and learning more about the current state of Loyalty Marketing at LoyaltySummit CXM last week.
It’s been well over a decade since I was in the world of Loyalty Marketing. Having spent time in my early career at CRM and Loyalty agencies like Digitas and Brierley, I’ve always been intrigued with harnessing data to create authentic, compelling, and meaningful customer experiences that surprise and delight and move the needle for brands. So it was especially interesting to re-enter the fray after a dozen years as they pondered the question “Is Loyalty Stuck?” Perhaps that time away will offer me some interesting perspective here.
Here were some of my key takeaways from last week’s event:
Loyalty Isn’t Stuck: It’s clear there have been several advances in platforms, data, AI, and decades of best practices to build upon — but the continued reliance on old channels (e.g. email), saturation of programs across categories, devaluation of points, and purely transactional experiences have become tiresome for consumers.
Missed Opportunities: Retail Media Networks are ascending as retailers look to leverage first-party data to target customers with highly personalized ads across digital channels. As marketing dollars pour into this space, it’ll be interesting to observe the trade-off of the short term transactional benefits versus the greater Customer Lifetime Value that we see from relationship-driven loyalty programs. Brands that can seamlessly connect the dots between the two will drive the most value for their businesses, strengthen their relationships with their customers, and elevate their customer experiences.
Points are Easy, Loyalty is Hard: Transactions are short, relationships are long-term. Our goal is to nurture that relationship by developing customer experiences that connect small moments over time that feel larger than life. (Paraphrasing some of my favorite quotes of the summit from AKA and Jill Goldsworn).
The 21/60 Framework for Onboarding: Loved Roger William’s adaptation of the “21-days to build a habit” concept to program onboarding. By creating 21 different engagements or touchpoints between the brand and the customer over the first 60 days will help create that stickiness we’re looking for over the long term.
One Size Does Not Fit All: Buy a loyalty platform or build one tailored to your specific business requirements? There’s lots of opportunities, strategies, and technologies available and it's important to find the right mix of partners and services to deliver a platform and program that works best for your organizational goals, marketing goals, and customer needs. At JAKALA, we have over 25 years of experience helping businesses transform their Customer and Digital Experience platforms through our Data, AI, Technology, and Experience services. #ShamelessPlug
Lastly, it will be really fascinating to see how Agentic AI will change the customer experience space. Dr. Yu ping Liu Thompkins from ODUs loyalty science lab gave a compelling talk on what brands need to consider to ensure there is a level of humanity and empathy in those conversations. But I was left wondering — what about when consumers are using AI Agents as well? Does one AI speaking to another AI need humanity? Do they even need an interface? Or just a transaction of strings of code and a decision tree to arrive at the desired result?
Really exciting things to come in this space.
