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The total cost of ownership (TCO) of a loyalty program varies widely. Variables include the brand’s business category, geographical reach, size and scale of their partner networks, frequency of engagement with members, and the nature of technology used. Due to this variation, it’s not useful to attempt to give indicative figures for the TCO. Instead, the purpose of this article is to indicate the major components of the TCO, focusing especially on the areas where companies ca

Fintech companies are now embracing loyalty marketing en masse, launching unique propositions in product and service niches where they can be best in class, and pick off valuable customers from traditional banks. A ‘fintech’ is basically an early-stage company using advanced technology to offer financial products and services in innovative, accessible, and agile ways. These firms deliver solutions like digital payments, online banking, automated investing, and crowdfunding. P

You’d hope that the C-suite would be enthusiastic to fund growth in the loyalty program, because effective loyalty marketing represents huge upside potential, when the program aligns with company objectives and shared values with customers. In the case of the most popular programs, they also represent a major share of companies’ current enterprise value. Yet historically, winning backing from the C-suite for loyalty initiatives has been difficult. Loyalty best-practices are l

For the past 10 years, Currency Alliance has published a loyalty trends article which reflects a bit on what has been working to drive customer engagement. We’ve also reflected on how market dynamics and technology will change the industry. But 2026 is the first year where we would argue the market itself is driving the biggest prevailing trend. While most businesses experiment with AI, consumers are demonstrably already using the technology to shop around for better value. T

The relevance of loyalty marketing to ‘ecommerce’ depends on what aspect of ecommerce you’re talking about. Are you a retailer? Do you sell ecommerce technology? Or are you from one of the many non-retail brands, associations or networks introducing ecommerce touchpoints to its various online and offline channels? Depending on your line of work, you may wish to skip to different sections of this article using these links:. reward programs for ecommerce retailers the technolog

CPG and FMCG brands have long used loyalty marketing to identify individual customers who purchase their products in retail stores that are not directly controlled by them. The earliest examples were vouchers or coupons that you could collect from cereal boxes etc. and send off for a prize. This can still be fun for kids, but most brands today are interested in more effective digital loyalty solutions which capture data from more customers, and quickly use that zero-party dat

Many people assume that operating a loyalty program necessarily implies issuing your own loyalty points or miles. This actually is not true. The optimal points to offer mostly depends on the frequency of engagement your brand has with target customers. Offering your own points could be less desirable than other options at your disposal. Points and miles are a dominant and popular form of loyalty value. They’re a low-cost incentive compared to other forms of incentives such a

Flexibility around loyalty redemptions is crucial to creating meaningful value for every customer. Rewards that are interesting for less-frequent customers, as well as to frequent customers, motivate every customer to engage more, and increase the share of wallet that they allocate to your brand. Reward catalogs, and the redemptions included, generate this motivation via the merchandised and shoppable experience of a commerce environment. What is strange today, is that most b

There can be many goals for establishing loyalty partnerships, but the optimal partner mix should usually be based on three objectives: increasing customer frequency and engagement, by expanding the loyalty program’s service offering or creating greater choice and freedom in how members earn and redeem their loyalty value capturing insightful data about members when they are interacting with partners to improve profiling and personalization generating incremental revenue to s

The loyalty trends for 2025 – much like the loyalty trends for every other year – are not necessarily equivalent to what brands should be prioritising in the next year. Your priorities depend on your state of evolution with loyalty marketing for your unique business. After 35 years in the technology business and the past 10 years in the loyalty sector, I have come to the conclusion that there are few annual trends that are strong enough to take your eye off the fundamentals.

The real purpose of marketing personalization is to maximize marketing engagement and, consequently, customer lifetime value (CLV). This implies being able to determine offers and incentives based on predicted CLV, so that personalization produces favorable business outcomes. This is precisely what loyalty programs were originally designed for, as marketing platforms purpose-built for measuring and incentivizing customer engagement, including when the customer is not shopping

‘Dynamic pricing’ is normally discussed in terms of the pricing of inventory – such as the cash price for a given hotel room, airline seat, or commodities, etc. based on supply and demand. But this concept should also apply to the redemption value of loyalty points and miles. The redemption value of a loyalty currency is fixed by most brands. But for a few years now, some travel and most coalition loyalty programs have been experimenting with dynamic values, and the results f

Consumers used to show loyalty to their main bank more or less by default. Now, forward-thinking banks are urgently considering how to keep their payment cards top-of-wallet and expand the stickiness of their relationships with customers over the next decade. The urgency is due to mounting downward pressure on banks’ revenue streams, and changes in customer behavior. On the revenue side: fintechs such as Wise, Revolut, AliPay, WeChat, and now Google Pay and Apple Pay, among o

As everyone knows in the loyalty industry, entering into new commercial agreements with partners can be a very time-consuming effort. First, there are the commercial discussions. Then there is the legal contracting – which involves all key stakeholders in creating a typical 30-40 page contract. Then there is the technical integration effort, and finally the collaborative marketing planning to promote the new partnership. After 2-18 months, a new partnership may go live, but d

Loyalty partnerships with complementary brands are the best way to create additional value, for customers and for your business. Depending on the maturity of your loyalty program, you may already have some program partners, or be a partner in somebody else’s program. Or, you may be considering whether embarking on some partnerships could be the right move. You should find this article useful whichever of those applies to you, or even if you never considered partnering. But if

The term ‘pay with points’ implies that a customer can burn loyalty points or miles at a point of sale as the method of payment. That means the points have economic value, and can be used to cover the entire purchase amount, or combined with cash to settle the payment obligation. It also implies that the customer can do this quite easily and freely, across a large proportion of a brand’s inventory, in its primary commerce channels. That’s in contrast to being offered a restri

Loyalty trends, as we’ve said in our previous years’ trends articles, are interesting to think about – but they are not necessarily reflective of what your own brand should be focusing on in the next year. To consider a loyalty topic to be a ‘trend’, it needs to be on the roadmap during 2024 for at least 25% of leading loyalty programs and on the radar for at least 50% of companies. These topics should be of interest for all loyalty marketing professionals, but depending on w

Recognizing loyalty program members at the Point of Sale (POS) has been challenging for over 30 years. Large brands with their own loyalty program typically invest heavily to integrate the loyalty platform into one or more POSs, but for smaller and medium-sized companies, this is often out of reach in terms of cost and technical complexity. The result is that it can be difficult for a retailer to deliver a smooth customer experience when identifying their own loyalty pro

Most people understand what incentives are and how best to use them, but they don’t understand why the entire industry came about. During the 1970s in most developed countries, the availability of goods and services exceeded demand for the first time. This meant that companies could no longer just put anything on the shelves and expect it to sell. Therefore, all types of marketing and sales disciplines started to evolve to incentivize and influence customer choice in ord

AI is much talked about. It has the potential to address a lot of business challenges, and enable many forms of elusive innovation in loyalty marketing. The biggest opportunities for loyalty programs relate to operating more efficiently to reduce cost, and improving personalization. Most larger loyalty programs have been experimenting with artificial intelligence for years now, and value has been found around personalization and fraud management. For smaller and medium-sized