Relevancy should be considered a customer reward in and of itself, according to Rick Ferguson Vice President, Knowledge Development, Aimia.
During his Thursday webinar, “Real Relationships,” hosted by Loyalty360 and presented by Aimia, Ferguson advised marketers to consider relevancy even more in their customer-centric, loyalty-based strategies.
“Relevancy is one of most underutilized rewards we can deliver,” Ferguson said. “Relevancy itself is a reward because it’s based on actual customer behavior. If a customer receives an email and looks at the offer and says: ‘Wow, this is actually applicable to me!’ Then they are more inclined to open the email and proceed from there.”
To develop real relationships with customers, Ferguson said marketers must become loyalty scientists.
“At the end of the day, we have to think like scientists, conduct ourselves like scientists, and be very clear-eyed about the results we get based on our experiments,” Ferguson said. “As marketers, that’s what we need to do. The value exchange orients us in the right direction.”
Armed with customer-centric data, Ferguson recommended the following points in developing real customer relationships:
- Identify
- Understand
- Influence
- Measure
- Iterate
“We need to focus on understanding what redemption behavior is and does to the customers,” he said. “That can create more relevant opportunities. On the rewards side, we want to practice as loyalty scientists by looking at data, and how they engage in redemption activity to identify the early signposts. Once you see that first redemption, follow up to create loyalty and increased lifetime value.”
Ferguson shared some interesting statistics related to just how much data is in the world today:
- 294 billion emails sent daily
- 4.75 billion items shared daily on Facebook
- 500 million tweets sent daily
- 8.0 zettabytes of data stored globally by 2015
“It’s an unbelievably scary amount of data out there right now,” he said.
Ferguson shared a few quotes related to the crucial importance of customer data:
- “Personal data is the new oil of the Internet and the new currency of the digital world.” Meglena Kuneva, European Consumer Commissioner, March 2009
- “The sexiest job in the next 10 years will be statistician.” Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google
- “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.” William Gibson, an American-Canadian speculative fiction novelist
Ferguson said the smartphone is only about 10 years old and that the next wave of technology innovation will revolve around a combination of smartphones with payment networks, rewards and loyalty programs, with the mobile wallet.
“Marketers are all converging on this mobile wallet platform,” he said. “If we can connect these additional data sources, we can get a look as to how they behave throughout the entire purchase cycle. This represents a very exciting future for us.”
The way out of the marketing conundrum, Ferguson said, is to work together with your customers.
“Use data responsibly and in a sustainable fashion,” he said. “Consumers feel empowered and in control. Consumers have a high degree of control with a huge degree of brand transparency in the utopian future.”