Revamping Customer Loyalty

Recently Target revamped its loyalty program, bringing to light the challenges that retailers are facing around rewards programs and loyalty. There's a quick podcast here. Since every retailer has a rewards program, how do you stand out while still making it a win/win for you and your customers?

People buy from you for a reason – so why do they?

For Target, I like what they did. They made their program an extension of who they already are vs. creating a generic one. It focuses on discounting, social giving, choice, and some aspects of personalization. Many loyalty programs copy what others are doing. That doesn't do anything to differentiate you from your competitors.

What do you do to stick out? People buy from you for a reason – so why do they and what can you do to incentivize them to buy more? It's a simple question, but a complicated answer; yet your approach is what starts to define your solution.

I grew up in a small town, and there is something magical about that personal connection with businesses.

AI provides an advantage today. I know. Please, avoid the eye roll. But, what makes local or small businesses great is you can remember your customers & preferences. I grew up in a small town, and there is something magical about that personal connection. But when you scale to thousands of locations and millions of customers, intimacy is lost. AI's processing power and self-learning capabilities can bring customer intimacy to scale.

With any customer loyalty program there many things to consider, but here are 4:

1. Make the program an extension of who you are (as mentioned above). Know who you are and deliver that.
2. Understand every customer's DNA: Use AI to understand how/why/when/where each customer buys
3. Incentivize them with relevance but provide incremental value: If someone always buys coffee, sure give them a coffee discount. But maybe you might want to incentivize them to try something new that they would like. Get a coffee free when you buy a breakfast sandwich.
4. Feedback loops: How do you adjust when something didn't work? They didn't take the sandwich and free coffee? Should I try that again? Should I adjust and try something different?

At Antuit, we use AI to understand each customer and then process that information into a loyalty program to drive your desired results. My colleague Anthony Wintheiser breathes this every day and has a passion for doing things different AND better. As someone who loves customer intimacy, it is fun seeing it come to life at scale.