What has your email club done for you lately?

Loyalty programs and email clubs are not created equal

Have you implemented an email club to connect with your customers? You’ve asked them to provide an email address, and perhaps their gender, date of birth and address. You send them campaigns about new product information, promotional discounts and special birthday offers. So now your email club members have become loyal customers who won’t shop anywhere else right?

Not exactly. Email clubs let you stay in touch with customers who’ve agreed to share their email address with you. They allow you to capture basic demographic information, which gives you some data to work with to create your marketing campaigns. But aside from their gender, age group and zip code, what do you really know about your email club members? After receiving countless emails that may or may not be relevant or meaningful to them, how engaged will they remain with your brand? As consumers get more demanding and fickle, retailers are increasingly adopting customer-centric marketing approaches in an attempt to cement relationships to prevent their customers from straying to the competition. Creating unique and memorable experiences for shoppers through personalized, relevant and meaningful offers is a proven way to entice loyal customers to do business with you – again and again. Your email club may help you foster better engagement and increase contact with club members, but it cannot earn and maintain the loyalty of your best customers, which is what a true loyalty program will do for you.

The difference is in the data

Capturing and analyzing critical consumer data is at the heart of a successful loyalty strategy. A solid loyalty program should take a business through each stage of the loyalty lifecycle to ensure its success and a strong ROI. However, a strong emphasis on the data collection and analysis steps is critical if you want to drive strategic insights that will lead to real results. In order to identify and understand their customers, retailers need to know what, when, and why they make purchases. You can start to understand your customers’ buying behaviours by looking at their demographics, their preferences, shopping habits, and even SKU-level information. And let’s not forget the value of knowing who your “best” customers are. Your best customers (or most loyal ones) should be your main focus since they generate most of your sales and profits, and they are most likely to spend and visit more often. Identifying them and developing targeted campaigns specific to their preferences will ensure that they stay happy, engaged and loyal.

Personalization drives results

Now that you’ve gathered your data, organized it, analyzed it and inferred key insights, it’s time to act on this customer intelligence by creating and offering relevant offers to your various loyalty member segments. By consistently offering personalized marketing communications to your customers, you can begin to cultivate stronger relationships with them and set the foundation for growing sales in the long-term. And because you have identified your most valuable loyalty members, you can rest assured that you are allocating your marketing dollars more efficiently by offering promotions and rewards that are more meaningful to your customers. Knowing what makes your active loyalty members tick is the key to driving lasting relationships, further spending and repeat business.

While email clubs are simple to launch, require minimal investment, and provide a channel for keeping in touch with your customers, they definitely fall short on return because they cannot deliver the key data and insights you needs to build a true customer-centric marketing approach to loyalty. On the other hand, by providing you with the tools to identify buying habits and shopping behaviours in real-time, segment your membership base, and continually engage with your customers through targeted and relevant offers, an integrated and multichannel loyalty program will allow you to effectively influence future customer behaviours, build meaningful relationships with your membership base and ultimately increase your sales.