Mobile Loyalty – The m’loyal way

NOIDA, India - Feb. 21, 2015 - PRLog -- Digital channels come with the inherent advantage of being one-one / targeted media vehicles. They provide strong tracking and measurement of ROI. M’loyal, the leading player in the mobile loyalty space today provides real time customer capture at Point of Sale, tagging purchase / frequency and product usage to every customer allows you to run deep analytics on your own data. Precision marketing done based on analytics drives much higher ROI on your campaign. It drives repeat, increases basket size and induces stronger referral.

If you don’t capture, who do you engage? POS (Point of Sale) is a data warehouse. All activity relevant to your business happens at this critical place. Putting just the right, secure hooks at your POS to capture customers, tagging them to their billing makes your data warehouse much more intelligent and usable. Mobile number provides the much needed unique identity of a customer, creating unique product identification for each product SKU tagging to the mobile number of the customer provides the much needed last mile / end customer reach.

Tracking end customer purchase nationwide across wholesalers / retailers gives you direct insights on the actual end customer, zone performance, city performance, product SKU performance and above all usage / frequency pattern of your end customer. Slicing / dicing of this data would allow you to identify your top customers, incentivize the right customers and invoke them to purchase at the required frequency consistently, keeping them away from competition.

Customer invoked programs can work very well in a national setup, where customers come from tier 2/3 towns. Invoking your customers to send back the product ID using the right omnipresent technology helps invoke warranty, servicing & product registration. On the other hand, it helps the brand manage warranty cards, servicing, loyalty, customer data collection, counterfeiting and rewards with one single implementation. It reduces cost of warranty, pilferage, data collection & customer rewards drastically and makes the system very close to real time, digital and much less dependent on human intervention at every stage.

Creating the right reward / incentive structure for the customer is another key factor in such initiatives. The idea is to use the data coming from the source and cluster your customers based on purchase patterns. Each cluster can then be handled differently by sending out offers / information relevant to their buying behavior and needs. The rewards structure can be tuned to the lifestyle and local needs of each of these clusters, thus automating the subjective nature of customer engagement to a large extent. M’loyal rewards store is a collection of rewards across 100+ brands from various sectors of retail and cater to needs and lifestyle of all types of consumers. M’loyal rewards is an ideal readymade infrastructure to enhance and extend your consumer loyalty program.

Data Analytics is the central piece of precision marketing. Targeted and personalized campaigns done to the right customer with the right offer, at the right time induces confirmed action. Each Brand is a data warehouse of customers that are shopping either at its stores or on the brand online store. This data warehouse needs to be tamed and utilized to create personalized campaigns to drive up each campaign ROI. Customer clusters definition is critical for every living retail business. Each consumer is different, has different preferences and interest areas, sending same communication to all customers may ward off many sections of your customer base. M’loyal Analytics engine allows you to automate customer clustering based on your key business parameters. It helps understand consumer needs, buying patterns, demographics & purchase baskets, communicate one-one with them and send out offers tailored to their needs. This brings in data science into your marketing communication and increases ROI tremendously.

Data Analytics and not loyalty induces customer purchase and business growth. Loyalty programs are a way for the brand to know the customer and for the customer to gain incentives for their loyalty. Loyalty programs do not add to your top line directly, but campaigns done based on Data analytics of your loyal customer base has a direct positive impact on your topline and bottom line.

Consumers need more and need it quick. Mobile is the changing the way, a consumer interacts with his / her favorite brand. As choices increase in the market, consumer loyalty is important to drive stickiness. Mobile helps you to create the much needed recall and one-one communication with your loyal consumer. Recognition, preferred service & instant gratification are known to be the most impactful incentives for an Indian consumer. M’loyal platform has replaced Plastic loyalty cards by sophisticated mobile apps / mobile cards that help recognize the customer and also push notifications / alerts & audio / video messages to the consumer. Online rewards helps members to redeem their accumulated points online by selecting appropriate voucher based on their needs and points. This is delivered to the customer on his mobile and can be carried to the mall or redeemed at outlets. This allows complete control of his points to the customer, thus increasing redemption rates to around 14-18 % as compared to traditional rates of 2-4 %.

Loyalty programs need to move to become privilege programs and then go higher in the value chain to become actual rewards program. Customer lifestyle marketing needs to you go deeper and impact the lifestyle of your top consumers. Identifying their preferences allows you to reward them with items / services that they really value in their day to day life.

Rewards / Points / Privileges, rightly structured can turn your loyalty program into much higher value initiative that makes customers stick to the program and tremendously increase referral as the perceptive value becomes great for every consumer. Rewards should evolve constantly based on strong analytics of your consumer data. The objective is to create targeted rewards for different customer clusters in your ecosystem. Each customer based on his / her buying pattern & product affinity gets to see customized rewards for his lifestyle and needs.
Globally the trend is to advertise the consumer benefit rather than the product. Idea is to differentiate your product offering by creating a strong loyalty / privilege program that your loyal consumers could sign up for and get enthused to come back again to earn their rewards and privileges.