Understanding the benefits of ‘the art’ component in the art and science of loyalty

When you think of ‘the what’ behind a successful loyalty programme, technology often comes to mind.

Technology is ‘the science’ that stores and processes all the technical functionality within our programmes. But what about the items that ‘fuel’ the functionality such as your loyalty strategy, services, and creative components—what we like to refer to as the art of loyalty. Blending this art and science together yields loyalty programme success.

Let’s take a closer look at the three key components of ‘the art’.

• Strategy: Your loyalty programme initiatives begins with your strategy, and your strategy is created by human intelligence (your people), not machines (technology). With the proliferation of new technologies, often brands can get caught up on integrating the ‘new’ or ‘cool and hyped’ technologies into their marketing programmes before truly understanding the impact they’ll have. Keep your strategy front and center and understand both the value and role humans have in personalising the loyalty experience and connecting emotionally, on a 1:You level—across the right touchpoints, on the right devices and at the right moments. As you’re developing and continuing to enhance your strategy and staying focused on the customer experience, determine how you can achieve personalisation at the brand and programme level. To start, it’s important to understand your brand level loyalty, or what we define as Big L Loyalty. Big L Loyalty is the passion, dedication, feelings, emotional connection and trust consumers establish with your brand that motivates them to continue their purchases and move through the customer lifecycle towards lifetime brand loyalty.
• Services: There are multiple areas of services that contribute to the success of your loyalty programme. For example, some of the services we provide to brands includes programme operations management, client and account management and change management. In terms of the programme management, we work with brands on loyalty programme design and redesign. Client and account management services includes the day-to-day management of your loyalty programme. Change management focuses on organisational design, business process optimisation and digital marketing transformation. These multi-disciplinary services work together to add value to your loyalty programme. In fact, several of our clients perceive these services and the team members that perform the work as an extension of their marketing team. Some of our team members actually work onsite, full-time at our client’s location. This enables our associates to be fully immersed in our client’s organisation ranging from the brand initiatives to the programme level details.
• Creative: Creating a memorable, one-of-a-kind customer experience is something we all strive for as marketers. Understanding the role creative plays in helping to make this experience memorable is important. Creativity is the art of marketing. It helps to unveil our emotions, making connections to brands. We’ve all seen an advertisement which we’ve emotionally reacted to. As a marketer, you need to think of the creative ways as to how you can drive these emotional connections and understand the role (the benefits) of creative services. It’s the digital and creative services such as a creative assessment, brand strategy and visual design, content and campaign development, website, app and interactive design that drive creative execution.

So, as you’re continuing to enhance the art of your loyalty programme, keep your technology capabilities front and center but never forgot the human intelligence needed to bring your programme to life.

Want to talk more about the art and science of Loyalty programmes? Get in touch at hello@epsilon.com today.