Samir Palnitkar Shares his Valuable Insights on Loyalty Strategies with Express Computer

An interesting conversation with Samir Palnitkar & Srikanth RP, Editor-in-chief at Express Computer (The Indian Express Group).

In an era where customers have many choices, brands must constantly evolve. This holds true for loyalty programs as well. Brands need to create a differentiated & personalized loyalty program with a holistic approach.

Here are key excerpts from the interview:

1. What is the perceived gap in the market that Zinrelo is trying to address?

Some statistics:

• It is 7 times more expensive to get a new customer than to retain an existing customer.
• According to Harvard Business Review, a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profitability by 25% to 95%.
• A loyal customer is 4 times more likely to refer a new customer.

In the post-COVID world, brands and large businesses are struggling to retain their customers and earn their loyalty. This is the gap that Zinrelo is trying to address for these brands and large businesses with revenues between $100M – $5B.

Thus, Zinrelo is addressing this customer retention gap by helping large businesses launch holistic loyalty programs using our three success pillars:

• An enterprise-grade, best in class, SaaS-based loyalty technology platform.
• Deep data analytics for program design and customer segmentation.
• Ongoing Strategy Consultation by our loyalty experts to help businesses get to the most out of the loyalty program once it’s launched.

2. Is brand loyalty extremely fickle today? How can a data-driven strategy help in retaining valuable customers?

Yes, brand loyalty is fickle. On an average, a US resident is typically a part of nearly 14 loyalty programs but active in fewer than 6 of them due to poor customer experience. Customers have a plethora of choices. Therefore, brand loyalty tends to be fickle.

Zinrelo’s data-driven strategy is based on extremely sophisticated AI/ML algorithms that create finely targeted customer segments and personalized loyalty offers to those target segments.

This data-driven approach is highly beneficial to marketers for the following reasons:

• Informed Decision-making: Knowledge of customer preferences, activity, and demographics-based behavior, marketers can make accurate decisions about the loyalty program structure. Life Nutrition, a premium health brand achieved a 26% revenue uplift within 6 months of their loyalty program launch.
• Targeted Segmentation and Personalization: Using loyalty data, all messages such as push notifications, emails, and digital ads can be hyper personalized and loyalty offers can be pushed to customers. For example, Vida Shoes, a leading US shoe brand suggested highly personalized loyalty reward options to its customers leading to a 47% increase in customer retention.
• Superior Customer Experience Design: According to Forbes, businesses focusing on customer experience make 5.7X more revenue than their competitors.

3. Zinrelo has been advocating a 360-degree approach to loyalty. Can you briefly explain this perspective and how does this approach help brands?

• The earlier generation of loyalty programs had only a single dimension to their loyalty. Loyalty for purchases. But times have changed. Customers interact with brands in many different ways, online and offline.
• A 360-degree approach to loyalty includes engagement with the customer on 6 distinct dimensions – transactional, social, advocacy, engagement, behavioral, and emotional.
• According to Forrester, emotion is the biggest driver of loyalty and is driven by experiences that create memories about the brand. Emotional loyalty helps customers to get deeply connected to a brand. For example, brands like Apple invoke emotional loyalty.
• Typically, customers who engage with a brand on these 6 dimensions are two times more loyal to that brand. This increases purchase size, purchase frequency, and profitability.
• Zinrelo’s 360-degree approach helps brands and businesses achieve holistic loyalty.

Jelly Belly, a 300 million candy & confectionary manufacturer in the US witnessed a 77% increase in customer retention & a 69% Increase in repeat purchase revenue with a holistic loyalty approach.

4. How can emerging technologies like AI play a role in improving the efficiency of loyalty initiatives? Please share Zinrelo’s experience.

Zinrelo is big on AI/ML. AI/ML is making a huge impact on loyalty programs. As customers interact with the loyalty program in a 360 manner, AI/ML techniques are used to analyze these interactions to provide highly customized loyalty experiences to the customer.

Examples:

• Marvel fans are shown a reward of their choice – two tickets to the latest Avengers movie.
• A cooking enthusiast is shown an experiential reward – A private cooking lesson with a Michelin-star chef.

This is the kind of personalization that creates extreme delight.

AI/ML techniques are making it possible to analyze 360-degree data and present customers with highly personalized loyalty offers that engage them and make them extremely loyal.

Zinrelo is helping brands with highly personalized and targeted loyalty automation using AI/ML.

Source: Express Computer