CUSTOMER LOYALTY SOLUTION

Enhance customer loyalty with Microblink’s solution

Power customer loyalty programs wherever and however your customers shop. Unlock real-time purchase and promotion validation with Microblink.

Solutions for Building Customer Loyalty

Customer loyalty programs are designed to reward customers for their repeat purchases and to incentivize them to continue shopping with your company. Loyalty programs typically offer incentives such as discounts, free products, exclusive experiences, or points that can be redeemed for various other rewards.

Premium customer loyalty programs also exist, which are typically defined as fee-based programs. While there are consumers that can get plenty of mileage out of free programs, premium members enjoy the enhanced perks and treatment they receive, whether transactional or experiential in nature. The most popular premium loyalty program, Amazon Prime, has been able to attract over 200 million global members thanks almost entirely to offering free, expedited shipping.

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Businesses with innovative, best-in-class customer loyalty programs experience better brand recognition and greater word-of-mouth referrals from satisfied customers – in part due to the sense of community and belonging felt by brand loyalists, who want to spread the word about their favorite product or service.

Companies that implement customer loyalty programs typically see increased revenue due to higher average order values and higher retention rates. If you’re familiar with the 80/20 rule, you know that 80% of a company’s revenue tends to come from the top 20% of customers. The 20% is basically synonymous with loyalty program members, who spend 67% more on average than other shoppers.

Types of Loyalty Programs

Digital loyalty programs are becoming increasingly popular across industries – from food and beverage, to retail, to airlines, travel and hospitality, to banking & financial services.

Whereas paper coupons, physical loyalty cards, and then barcode-enabled loyalty tags used to be the preferred method for tracking (and rewarding) frequent shoppers, the explosion of smartphones and online shopping has brought loyalty apps to the forefront of customer loyalty programs today.

While these loyalty apps provide customers with an easy way to track their purchases and rewards on the go, they also provide businesses with valuable first-party data. It’s a win-win for customers and businesses, as these consumer insights can be used to drive more personalized loyalty programs and customer experiences.

Benefits of Microblink’s customer loyalty solution

Omnichannel

Mobile loyalty programs offer customers the convenience of tracking purchases and unlocking rewards wherever and however they shop. Many, including Starbucks, Walmart, and Kroger, as examples, also function as an easy payment method.

Real-time Engagement

These mobile apps also allow for more dynamic ways for businesses to engage with their most loyal customers, whether that’s sending personalized push notifications when they’re in the vicinity of a retail location or alerting them of early access to a product or event.

Gamification

Gamification loyalty programs are particularly effective at driving repeat purchases by incentivizing customers with rewards that increase in value over time. Techniques such as quizzes or surveys to collect valuable customer feedback can also help shape future product, promotion and broader marketing strategies.

Many brands and retailers use game-like elements such as challenges, badges or leaderboards to engage their customers and keep them coming back for more. Starbucks, for example, uses its star rewards (i.e., points) to incentivize customers with different tiers of freebies they can earn, through a fun, user-friendly interface that doubles as a payment method.

As early adopters of customer loyalty programs within the food & beverage industry, Starbucks is still widely regarded as one of the premier loyalty programs available today. Sephora’s Beauty Insider program is another example of a leading retail customer loyalty program that has tiers (from free “Insider” to earned “Rouge” status, based on how much one spends) and offers exclusive savings (discounts), samples (gifts), and experiences.

Personalize the customer experience

According to McKinsey’s Next in Personalization 2021 report, 75% of customers base purchasing decisions on their brand experience. What’s more, 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and 67% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen.

The need for innovative, personalized loyalty programs as part of broader customer retention strategies has never been higher, but the task of gathering first-party data has never been more difficult. Two-third of businesses report that their greatest challenge with personalization is the gathering, integration, and synthesis of customer data.

The average US consumer belongs to 16 different loyalty
programs, but is actively using less than half of them.
Learn how to build lifetime customer value with innovative loyalty
programs.

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Fortunately, solutions exist to help businesses track data related to their customers’ shopping behaviors and purchases (whether online or in-store), so that they can better understand customer habits and preferences and create more tailored, personalized loyalty strategies and programs.

First-party data is the foundation of knowing your customers and opens the door to endless, personalized methods of consumer engagement, thus creating and strengthening loyalty.

Businesses can take various approaches to capturing first-party data and delivering best-in-class customer loyalty. One approach, outlined above, is to develop a mobile loyalty app. The beauty of a mobile customer loyalty solution is that it meets today’s customers where they are (on their phones) and also enables companies to collect vital first-party data via account creation and user permission. Perhaps the most vital of such is the first-party data, however, but often overlooked, is handed back to consumers post-purchase in the form of receipts.

Tools for Driving Customer
Retention and Loyalty

It’s much easier to engage and retain users effectively when your business is using the latest tools and technologies. Just as CRM (customer relationship management) software allows companies to track interactions with their customers over time, purchase data capture solutions help companies gain a holistic, 360 degree view of what their customers are shopping for, along with how, when, and and where.

Microblink takes an AI-first approach to online purchase data collection. Users can link their email inbox to begin processing email receipts or can connect their online shopper accounts to extract ongoing and historical order histories. Both approaches operate in the background, without ongoing user engagement, enabling purchase data collection as far back as 3 years.

This data can be used to establish a baseline for customer loyalty programs (for example, levels of loyalty, tiers of engagement and subsequent approaches for rewards) or to ensure longtime customers are rewarded for their continued loyalty. (Just imagine signing up for a recently-launched customer loyalty program with your favorite grocery retailer to realize you’ve already earned elite status!)

✓ Gain unprecedented consumer visibility with SKU-level data
✓ Automate legacy approaches to receipt scanning and data collection
✓ Improve purchase data quality with >95% accuracy

What’s more, Microblink’s flagship receipt scanning solution, BlinkReceipt, captures images of physical receipts and extracts purchase data down to the SKU to deliver real-time promotion validation for CPGs and third-party loyalty rewards companies.

Ultimately, whether it’s focused on in-store, online or ideally a combination of both, the goal of any leading customer loyalty program is to deliver memorable, differentiated customer experiences that build lifetime customer value and translate into brand value and market share for decades to come.

Ready to turn purchases into rewards?