Engage and retain eco-minded shoppers with green loyalty programs - Three requirements for success

More consumers are making buying decisions based on sustainability, ethical products, and a retailer’s commitment to supporting worthy causes that align to their values. To reach this vital audience, many brands are promoting responsible products, environmental practices, and brand values.

Sustainability marketing is not only a sound decision for the future of our fragile planet, but also a good business decision. Experts estimate that the sustainability market will reach $74.64 billion, growing at a CAGR of 21.9% from 2021 to 2030.?[Source: Green Technology and Sustainability Market Statistics: 2030]

Intelligent Loyalty programs, supported by AI-driven insights, provide an effective medium to capitalize on this opportunity by providing the context to understand each shopper’s goals, values, sentiments, and behaviors, so that loyalty offers can be aligned between each consumer and the brand. Intelligent green loyalty programs can help brands engage and retain the quickly growing audience of eco-minded shoppers with lasting emotional loyalty – instead of discount-driven points-based transactional loyalty models. ?

Three requirements for a successful green loyalty program:

1. Know what you stand for and commit to those values with actions, not just words.

Eco-minded consumers advocate and show loyalty for brands that do their part to conserve the environment with innovative products (production, packaging, purpose, reuse, etc.), services, and actions. ?They can distinguish between a genuine commitment to a cause and a marketing ploy such as green washing – a form of advertising in which green marketing and PR are deceptively used to persuade the public their products and policies are environmentally friendly. In fact, according to a recent report by Boston Consulting Group, 70% of consumers globally say they are wary of corporate sustainability claims and commitment.

A number of exemplary brands have overcome this wariness and distrust by truly walking their talk. Here are just a few examples of eco-friendly brands that know and demonstrate what they stand for:

• Wild Cosmetics is an innovative company out of the UK that sells deodorant in reusable deodorant dispensers and compostable inserts. The product is plastic-free, compostable, made from 100% natural ingredients, and produces zero waste. In addition, a percentage of sales goes to the non-profit organization, On A Mission that enables businesses and individuals to invest in carefully selected reforestation projects to compensate for their carbon emissions.
• Ecosia is a search engine organization that uses 80% of the profit made from user searches to plant trees where they are most needed. You can add the free Ecosia browser extension to your current search engine and plant trees with every search. There are currently over 20 million active users, and the organization has planted over 166 million trees in over 13,000 planting sites. Ecosia servers run on renewable energy and the company is completely transparent, posting monthly financial reports.
• Patagonia is on everyone’s list of best eco-friendly brands, and for good reason. Patagonia has demonstrated their commitment to protect our planet with the products produce and they sell and the actions they take. A message on their menu bar reads, ‘Earth is now our only shareholder’, and the ‘Patagonia Action Works’ program validates their commitment those words. Since 1985, the organization has given over $100 million to grantees working on climate, land, water and biodiversity issues. ?In addition, 1% of their annual sales goes to preservation and restoration of the natural environment totaling $140 million to date. In addition, to prevent worn gear from ending up in a landfill, Patagonia also sells ‘previously loved’ equipment customers have exchanged for store credit.?

Do you know what your brand stands for? Is your organization willing to make a genuine commitment to honor the eco-friendly values it professes?

Note: According to a 2021 study by Reuters, the number of Chief Sustainability Officers (CSO)?tripled from 2016 to 2021. If your organization does not have a CSO, you may be missing the?opportunity to let your investors, customers, and employees know that sustainability is a key consideration for your organization.?

2.?Know your customers and prospects and deliver products and experiences based on shared, eco-friendly values.

The second requirement for a successful green loyalty program is a deep understanding of your customers’ values and behaviors. Customers want to feel heard, understood, and appreciated. To garner consumer trust, brands must be able to deliver personalized, relevant eco-friendly offers, recommendations, and rewards to the right people at the right time via customers preferred channels.

Many brands, however, do not have the data and insights needed to identify their eco-friendly consumers and deliver the personalized, eco-friendly experiences they expect.

Technology can help address this gap with: ??

• Solution that integrates seamlessly with your MarTech stack, leveraging its data and supplying it with new insights and NBAs.
• Customer Data Platform (CDP) that collects and unifies real-time, multi-source data for use by systems of insight and engagement
• Single 360-degree customer view of each customer’s brand interactions, for the ability to deliver consistent customer experiences based on an understanding of preferences, behaviors, values, and loyalty membership types, tiers and segments.
• AI/ML analytics for actionable insights, predictions, and recommended next-best offers and actions.
• Event-driven offers that are in direct response to a consumer’s actions, behavior, or changes in status.

Do you have the right technology in place to understand and respond to your eco-friendly customers with products, experiences, and loyalty programs that speak to their?values—in real time?

3.?Know what works and what doesn’t and optimize your green loyalty programs for long-term success.

Launching a green loyalty program is just the beginning. The third requirement of a successful eco-friendly loyalty program is the ability to optimize it in a timely and effective manner. ?You must continually monitor the performance of your initiatives and optimize your programs over time to keep them relevant and poised for long-term success and maximum customer lifetime value.

Continuous optimization only occurs with real-time, actionable insights about customers’ changing needs, behaviors, and Preferences. Dynamically adapting your loyalty programs to?your customers’ values and preferences builds trust and enables you to realize your green loyalty program goals.

Unfortunately, without real-time AI analytics, dashboards, integrations and reporting capabilities in place, ?brands can’t monitor, measure, and optimize their loyalty programs in real time with course corrections to achieve increased engagement, customer loyalty, and ROI.

To monitor, evaluate and optimize your loyalty program, you should seek an analytics-driven loyalty solution that:

• Provides self- serve analytics and diagnostics to measure the effectiveness of your ?loyalty program so you can make course corrections to achieve your desired KPIs. ?outcomes.?
• Includes robust reporting and dashboarding capabilities to monitor the performance your green loyalty programs over time.
• Delivers customer sentiment analysis, analytical KPIs including CLV, Net Promoter Score, journey modeling and discovery, member acquisition, churn reduction, member engagement, and more. ?
• Uses an agile, modular, and micro-services architecture that complements and extends the value of your existing technology and data infrastructure investments.
• Enables you to deliver frictionless hyper-personalized experiences across all channels.

Do you have the right loyalty KPIs and technology in place to measure the effectiveness of your green loyalty program? Do your metrics include your brands impact on the environment? How will you keep members engaged in the long run?

Summary

Green loyalty programs can be game-changing when created with a genuine commitment to protecting the earth, an understanding of your customers values, needs and preference, and the ability to optimize them over time for relevance and long term success.

Learn how TCS Customer Intelligence & Insights? Loyalty Management can help. View video.

TCS Customer Intelligence & Insights? (CI&I) is an intelligent loyalty management, AI-driven customer analytics, and real-time CDP software solution that turns data into actionable insights, predictions, and recommendations, enabling retailers to deliver innovative, hyper-personalized loyalty programs and experiences.

CI&I’s scalable, modular, and highly configurable AI-driven platform is designed to help you meet your loyalty goals today and into the future. It can complement your existing loyalty system by means of real-time APIs, transforming it into an analytics-driven, intelligent loyalty solution that delivers personalized, omni-channel experiences that drive loyalty as an emotion.

CI&I offers loyalty program management, member management and services, event-driven offers, and micro-services to incorporate loyalty into customers’ journeys. Its industry-specific, out-of-the- box use cases speed time to value. And its developer-friendly, low-code, self-serve analytics platform accelerates complementary use case deployment.