The Future of Retail Loyalty Programs

I've always been fascinated with the way Small retail stores develop loyalty through customer relationships that can last many years, even generations. How customers engage with retail, and how loyalty programs are evolving is truly a fascinating topic.

Increasingly, loyalty programs are meeting personalization, gamification and automation. This is fundamentally changing the customer experience and the loyalty strategies Retail stores use to keep customers coming back to their Retail stores. How this relates to local retail businesses and small to medium businesses (SMBs) in Retail is transforming the landscape of the kinds of software tools available to small retail business owners. 

As our means of customer data acquisition and analytics improves in #Indieretail, the way we do our loyalty programs and understand a customer's lifetime journey in relation to the Small to Medium retail store is transforming.

In this context, knowledge isn't power, it's the insight required to improve our relationship with our customers. Listening to customers, engaging them via sophisticated loyalty campaigns is one of the latest trends. This is the next generation of marketing automation that is gamified and personalized to value segments.

When user generated content (UGC) is paired with a loyalty program, that is by offering tangible rewards that customers value, it can make all the difference. Brand advocates are then compensated for that Instagram photo and that hashtag#, for that vlog that mentions a small Retail store's brand or products.  This is a powerful strategy for Small Retail stores to leverage what is happening in the digital world as of late 2015, early 2016.

With the right software as a service (SaaS), small Retail can keep up. UGC and social referrals that are rewarded, create a new level of engagement implicit in better customer retention strategies, that promise to be highly effective for small local retail stores. This creates a word-of-mouth mechanism that is inbuilt to your reward program. 

Small retail business, that are primarily brick and mortar and defined by their location (of a few locations), have a unique challenge to forge more personal relationships with their most loyal customers. Typically, the highest value segment of customers, only represent 9% of their customers.

These are the consumers, that truly maximize their window of opportunity with your brand in their customer lifetime cycle.  It's these consumers that are in the best position to be your top brand advocates.  The top 5% customers, are closely linked with the ones who will be the best friend-referrers to your brick-and-mortar store. 

At Thirdshelf, the key values represent the passion of enabling & empowering small to medium retail businesses to build high-value relationships with their customers. Building a quality customer journey is only truly possible if you know who your customers are, can identify who your high value customers are and create campaigns accordingly that are personalized with high business intelligence and customer insight.

Thirdshelf tailors loyalty programs in campaigns that can demonstrate the ROI of each customer and each campaign. The beauty of these analytics, is that you don't have to wade through metrics and KPIs, the ROI is seen in gross sales for each campaign based on sku data across the lifecycle of each customer, campaign and the value segments of your real customers. 

We believe in brick and mortar small stores, and feel they enrich our urban environments and give a retail experiences that far from being an anonymous transactions, are successful when the retailer has an engaging relationship and offers a unique customer experience to their consumers.

This can best be achieved with a data-driven approach that enables a life-cycle management process unique to the industry of your small retail business. We recognize that in times of economic uncertainty, if small stores can leverage their customer analytics, precise ROI of campaigns, sub-vertical benchmark comparisons, and tailored loyalty program to the high-value customers of small retail businesses this will enable, empowers and champions the indie-business store owner and their branding.

The objective is then to help small-retailers build high-value relationships with their customers. This is our company DNA, and this is the key component of our mission statement. 

Giving a seamless experience to SMB retail, we are integrated with Lightspeed and Vend and are invisible to the consumer, that is because we are a white label service, we empower brands to have better and more engaging relationships with their customers. We specialize in customer lifecycle management, loyalty campaigns via Email and our solution offers an answer to the question:

How to maximize the relationship of the consumer through their entire lifetime cycle. 

We are passionate about Small and Medium Retailers, join us in this journey and follow us on Twitter & LinkedIn.