In the age of instant gratification, where a cheaper price point is a mere online search away, or at the competitor next door, how do convenience brands cement themselves in the hearts, minds, and wallets of their customers?
Discounting has always been an effective mechanism for attracting business, but loyalty here isn’t meaningful or lasting, it’s wholly transactional. A veritable race to the bottom will simply damage profit margins and appeal to consumers who only buy from you for lower prices.
The key to driving loyalty for convenience brands is forging emotional loyalty through a mature program that goes beyond points-win-prizes or a free flat white on your tenth visit.
However, marketing teams are still struggling to make the case for fully-fledged investments in loyalty. All too many convenience brands still invest far more resources in customer acquisition strategies than reducing attrition. Yet reducing churn rates by as little as 5% can see profits increase from 25% to an astonishing 95%.
For convenience brands, there should be no greater achievement than locking-in a loyal customer — one who not only has an affinity for your products and services but trusts your brand’s promises.
WATCH NOW: A Convenient Way to Drive Loyalty
Modern loyalty programs
Almost every brand has a loyalty initiative of some description. The converging forces of privacy legislation sweeping the globe, consumers more cognizant than ever of privacy-preserving tools, and browsers curtailing cookie tracking have meant a loyalty program is a quick fix for collecting the opt-ins required to talk to customers.
However, loyalty programs that rely on transactions alone will struggle to rise above the noise and create a symbiotic relationship with customers. A modern loyalty program must listen to its customers; it must personalize experiences; it must be relevant and react in real-time; it should spark an emotional connection; it should track transactions while aspiring to be more than transactional.
Done properly, a loyalty program can collect not just opt-ins, but the preference insights and behavioral data to deliver truly-personalized marketing. Convenience brands that make it their mission to personalize to the individual create consumers that are 44% more likely to become repeat buyers.
In recent research in conjunction with econsultancy, we discovered only 14% of consumers are not loyal to any given brand – that’s a lot of revenue left on the table by not implementing a fully-fledged loyalty strategy.
Watch our on-demand webinar, packed with insight and tactics from Mike Brinn, Global Loyalty Leader, TLC Marketing Worldwide and Sina Saidinayer, Head of Business Development, Fidel.
Learn how convenience retail brands like yours can power truly personalized marketing.
