As the world’s only loyalty marketing platform designed exclusively for convenience retailers, we have a unique understanding of the key marketing success factors that are critical in your business if you want to achieve true customer loyalty. And our top priority is helping you operate more efficiently while communicating effectively, so this article discusses the idea of “automating” essential elements of your programme using a suite of the powerful communication features within our platform.
Automating your programme communications frees your time
Our Objective
For busy marketing professionals, a key challenge is simply having enough time to do everything we want to do. And of course to ensure our work is delivered to the highest standards of excellence, delighting our colleagues, our customers and ourselves.
With this clear understanding of our client’s needs, we’ve built our platform to support both simplicity and efficiency, allowing you to automate every forseeable communication with your members based on a number of powerful communication principles.
Automation allows you to effortlessly:
- Plan campaigns that span the entire expected lifecycle of your members
- Prepare relevant and engaging messaging that members will enjoy receiving
- Prevent churn by connecting with your members in meaningful ways such as sharing a free treat with your top customers once a year on their birthday.
Here is a summary of the types of customer segments we see across all of our clients. As well as their level of interest in your programme, members have different levels of trust and understanding of your brand, so your segmentation should consistently consider the “life cycle” of your members as they join, activate and engage.
Segmentation is powerful as it allows you to personalise every interaction with every member
Creating Segments Using Insights
There are three main types of customer insights to consider when building your automated customer communications:
- Customer demographics: Our platform allows you to collect insights over time both explicitly and implicitly. For example, a customer can supply details of their gender or date of birth, or we can learn where they live by noticing where they shop.
- Transactional behaviour: Members who buy certain products, or haven’t bought certain products may be segmented together for specific communications. For example, a customer who has bought a car wash subscription would be suitable for other fuel or car related offers, coupons or games.
- Non-transactional engagement: This includes segmentation of customers who have, or have not, opened the app within a defined period of time. Lapsed or dis-engaged members can be targeted with fun or relevant campaigns to re-engage them.
Capture insights that support your planning process using our loyalty platform
Communication Strategy
Campaigns can and should be built with all of the above insights in mind, as well as the customer’s life stage. Some best-practice programme plans you can and should create include:
Onboarding Campaigns:
- Welcome messages for new members who join each day.
- Activation rules for automatic on-boarding of newly recruited app users.
- Birthday messages – with or without a gift or offer.
- Refer-a-friend message to be sent at a pre-determined time soon after the new member has joined.
- Campaigns can also be automated to continually request and capture new information as and when the customer provides it. So from day one, when you may only capture simple contact information and permission to register them, through to full demographic details and perhaps purchase preferences (eg “I’m a vegetarian – please don’t send me offers for meat” or “I’m allergic to fish – please don’t send me offers for sushi”).
Feedback campaigns:
- A recurring campaign can be scheduled and automated – for example, a quarterly question to measure your “net promoter score” will ensure you have up to date feedback on a continuous basis from your members.
Commercial Campaigns:
- Automated campaigns can be designed to recognise purchase patterns and offer customers better value in return. For example, a customer who has bought coffee regularly but not daily could be offered a package for unlimited hot drinks at a great price that keeps her loyal.
- Campaigns can also be scheduled BEFORE they renew a subscription package (which members find reassuring) or AFTER they renew to simply say thanks.
Connection Campaigns:
- Campaigns can be designed to monitor sessions on your app and provide insights on which members are engaging and those who aren’t. Inactive members can be sent richer offers or more engaging content on a more frequent basis.
Set It and Forget It.
From the first time you create, launch and set up your loyalty programme, these automated campaigns can be used indefinitely.
Our platform includes a whole suite of intelligent tools to ensure the right people hear and see the right message at exactly the right time. You can of course also exclude members from any contact by placing the in “communications quarantine” – increasingly important as consumers become more aware of the value of their data and their attention.
The idea truly is to simply set it and forget it!
All that remains is for you to work on other ways to continually delight your customers while our platform does the heavy lifting delivering your personalised communications day in and day out.
Keep your connection with members using automation while you focus on building your business
About Us
Liquid Barcodes is a leading global loyalty and digital marketing technology company specialising in the convenience store and foodservice industries. Our proprietary cloud-based technology platform allow retailers to create and manage their digital marketing campaigns with a proprietary process we call the “customer connection cycle’ to engage, promote and reward customers activities in real-time across digital and media channels.
How we do it:
We have developed the most advanced loyalty and digital marketing technology platform specifically for convenience store and foodservice retailers globally.
Retailers use our self-service dashboard to create and manage loyalty driven marketing campaigns that increase purchases with their existing customers, as well as effectively target and acquire new customers through partners or paid media channels.
One core component of live loyalty is gamification. We have gamified branding, loyalty and promotions. We believe this approach is essential in order to get customers’ attention and ultimately truly engage them with repeatable actions thereby winning their loyalty.
Check out some of our exciting/proven results here:
About Me:
Chief Content Officer, Liquid Barcodes and Independent Loyalty Consultant
With over twenty-five years marketing experience, I specialise in loyalty marketing consulting, managing consumer loyalty propositions, strategy and operations. In addition to working with Liquid Barcodes, my clients have included Telefonica O2 Priority, Three Mobile, Electric Ireland, Allied Irish Bank and The Entertainer Group (UAE), as well as Avios – the global points currency for some of the world’s top airlines. I am also a former judge for the Loyalty Magazine Awards and host of the “Let’s Talk Loyalty” podcast.
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