Resources

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

This article on the loyalty rules engine is probably the second-most important article I will ever write on loyalty marketing*. It is the most powerful, yet under appreciated module (or tool) in a loyalty marketing stack of software. The loyalty rules engine is the module that enables the types of promotions that are familiar from every major loyalty program. That includes things such as issuing 2% in points on the customer’s birthday, or double the points value if they redee

Today, the global economy is in an uncertain situation. This is caused by many factors beyond the scope of this article, but the result is that customers are more conscious about value, and companies are focusing more on cost control. Until a few years ago, brands would have reacted to an uncertain economy by cutting services that deliver customer value. Some brands will do this in 2023, but actually, the loyalty & marketing industries have learned from recent experience that

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-s

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

On 13th of November 2022, the interchange charges on credit card transactions in New Zealand will be capped at 0.8%. This fee is commonly how financial services brands have funded their loyalty rewards for at least the past decade. So how should New Zealand’s banks and brands respond, and how should other brands collaborate with partners to reduce dependency on any single source of funding? Of course, this has happened before in other jurisdictions. In 2017, legislation

A recent article on PhocusWire helpfully outlined a range of security vulnerabilities common to loyalty programs. Some of them were matters of procedure and staff training – which are clearly important – but many were technological vulnerabilities which can be avoided by using modern tools and systems. Securing loyalty systems is important because of the value of points/miles held by brands and consumers – which makes them attractive to fraudsters – and the significant indire

There are really only four ways to create value for all stakeholders in a loyalty program: maintain low operating costs, and funnel the savings into rewards add complementary partners in every spending category so the program and the currency are more useful and interesting share customer insight among partners, so you know how to maximize lifetime value for each customer, and can create more personalized engagement source aspirational redemption options at better cost, so

The long break in spending habits due to Covid-19 will cause customers to re-evaluate their relationship with brands. People in Barcelona are buying a lot more ice-cream lately. From my balcony in the evening, it looks like 2 in 10 are enjoying an ice-cream cone. One year ago, there might have been 2 people in 50. This isn’t just a casual observation, but a sign of a widespread consumer trend which every loyalty marketer should be thinking about. Consumers are becoming a lot

The Points Bank in a loyalty program is the module of software that keeps track of all transactions related to issuing, redeeming, or exchanging points among loyalty program members, partners and other stakeholders. This module maintains the ledgers so that all the transactions, a customer’s points balance, and the outstanding liability of the loyalty program are properly recorded and reported. Over the past 20 years, the points bank was typically embedded in a monolith

‘Digital transformation’ has been the buzzword for the last decade in enterprise strategy. The phrase is pleasing to shareholders and may sound exciting to employees, but delivering on it takes time and resources. So, to demonstrate some progress, many organizations have pursued initiatives that are only cosmetic in nature while not truly taking advantage of what digital transformation enables: namely that customer journeys, partnerships, trading ecosystems, etc. can b

In a recent keynote speech to the graduating class of Founder Institute – Barcelona, I talked about the traits that have served me best in my career as an entrepreneur. The ability to innovate with scant resources – and constantly leaning on others for help. The importance of networking in order to build potential and active partnerships. The confidence to make many small bets, relying on judgement and diversification to ensure that overall, they pay off. The ability to bring

commercetools partners with Currency Alliance to enable loyalty marketing in the age of composable commerce. Every company strives to build loyalty among its customers, but the methods to achieve the never-ending pursuit of loyal customers can vary widely. Because each customer segment will respond differently to available loyalty incentives, tailoring the customer experience by segment across channels is essential to maximize ROI. Millions of longstanding loyalty program

Did you hear the term ‘Big Data’ during 2021 (or 2020 for that matter)? I heard it once, two weeks ago at a loyalty conference in London. Loyalty trends were being discussed, as well as what had been hot topics in prior years – some of which just faded away as fads. The conversation gave me pause to reflect on what exactly is a trend, how applicable are trends in Southeast Asia to brands in Europe, and whether embracing the hype around the latest trends could actually di

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. Redemption catalogs, and the rewards included, generate this motivation via the merchandised and shoppable experience of a commerce environment. What is strange today, is that most b

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

Modifying legacy loyalty technology, to enable consistent and relevant engagement across the expanding number of customer-facing platforms, is becoming cost-prohibitive. The only efficient path forward is to put headless technology in front of your legacy systems – or, to migrate altogether. Less-technical businesspeople may only care about loyalty technology to the degree that it serves two key objectives: Delivering a consistently good brand experience across all custom

If 2020 has taught us anything it is that diversification (or luck from being in the right sector) can be a lifeline. It allows us to keep customers engaged when business plans fly out the window, due to marketplace calamities, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. In November 2019 when we published the Top Trends for 2020, we could not have known about the Covid-19 pandemic. But those brands pursuing each of the trends predicted for 2020 probably suffered less as the course of this

If a new CEO replaced you tomorrow, and had no previous connection to the current loyalty program, what changes do you think she would make? As CEO, the time you can dedicate to your loyalty program is probably close to zero. But as a four-time CEO myself, I know that even 30 minutes a month, to ask the right questions and get my team executing brilliantly, is time well-spent. Certainly that’s the case if the outcome will be greater ROI from the department, and an increa

Headless loyalty systems are API-first loyalty platforms that enable any customer-facing platform to integrate loyalty marketing functionality into their Customer Experience (CX) via API. Building adaptive loyalty marketing functionality is increasingly complicated and necessary, as loyalty points become a new asset class, and loyalty commerce between complementary brands gains traction. Most loyalty marketers aren’t thinking of headless loyalty platforms yet, but they should