by Jeanne Roué-Taylor

Everyone wants to categorize and define the increasingly fast evolution of how businesses sell and their customers buy. Getting ahead of the trend is everyone’s goal, but we know intuitively that some will prosper and others will be in their shadow. The prosperous will turn their customers into fans.

So many acronyms

A recent post talked about the expanding use cases for marketing and CRM amid all of this change. It also covered the blurring of the line between the two disciplines and the problems this creates in the enterprise divided up by department and function. Companies are struggling to adjust to a new model.

This new model has been given many names depending on where published and what’s being sold. Some call it customer engagement management (CEM), others call it real-time interaction management (RTIM), digital experience management (DEM), or our favorite, customer loyalty management (CLM). Whatever it’s called, it boils down to turning customers into fans.

Turning customers into fans

Turning customers into fans is a powerful phrase around which we can align. It gets to the heart of what makes great companies stand taller than the companies that simply create customers and call it a win. Fandom is a momentum that moves an enterprise forward through multiple products and even through customer service or technical challenges. Great fans come to the stadium win or lose because they want to believe in their team. Fans actively cheer on their favorite.

Success has a formula

Turning customers into fans is much more than a phrase, though. There are specific capabilities that need to be part of the mix if turning customers into fans is your goal.

• Social media – Social media has a critical role in capturing, engaging, augmenting and monetizing great customer experience.
• Loyalty – There is no better way to deepen the relationship and turn a customer into fan than a well-executed loyalty program.
• Exclusive Content – Fans expect something special and to have access to especially relevant content that makes being a fan different than being just a customer.
• Gamification – Being a fan needs to be engaging and fun. Micro-incentives offered as part of continuous interaction shape the experience and reward the behaviors that benefit both fan and “team.”

Each of these four components is a necessary part of creating fans for your brand. Having a system in place to deliver the components successfully requires analytics that constantly measure the success of social connection, loyalty, exclusive content and gamification. Analytics are critical to know what’s working and develop the course corrections that have to happen to continually improve upon a system that creates and keeps fans.

Turning customers into fans is in reach for those willing to make the investment necessary to get started right away. Our modern times are unforgiving of those who don’t take advantage of the opportunity.

You Might Like:

• Webinar On-Demand: 2020: Predictions for Loyalty Marketing and Tomorrow’s Consumer
• Food For Thought: How to Combat Showrooming

by Jeanne Roué-Taylor

There are still marketers today who think of their mission as traditional advertising, direct mail, loyalty programs and the like. Defining marketing solely in those terms made sense just a few years back, but makes increasingly less sense today. Unified marketing platforms like the newly released Loyalty Lab® Reward 13.1 bring together real-time data context that has been available for other industries, but is now sweeping through retail.

The single biggest change is the move from static, predefined marketing to real-time interaction with the end consumer. This involves engaging, often at the time and place of the consumer’s choosing, with real-time offers of information, suggestions and enticements to act. This isn’t without a few paradigm shifts, the biggest being the shift to in-the-moment awareness.

In the moment

Engaging at the time and place of the consumer’s choosing involves being ‘in the moment’ at the point of sale, the Web, mobile (in or near the store) and social (engaged with the brand) using information that is down-to-the-second. This type of interaction is more analogous to how people actually think and drives much better and faster response than the static model. Executing it requires the right technology to make it work at speed.

Before you think this is over the horizon, Gartner’s 2012 report, Me Marketing: Get Ready for the Promise of Real-time, Context-Aware Offers in Consumer Goods, “By 2015, context-aware promotions will comprise 10% of promotional activity among consumer goods manufacturers in developed markets.”  This is sure to quickly increase as the early adopters are followed by the mainstream.

Ahead of the pack

Will your business survive as a latecomer to this shift? This is about being able to understand a consumer’s full shopping experience and habits at any moment so that engagement is relevant. As shoppers become more accustomed to this level of interaction, anything less will seem more and more old-school.

Therein lies the problem for those who don’t adapt: Consumers who see relevance will quickly learn to pay attention to nothing less.

To learn more, read the press release on Loyalty Lab® Reward 13.1 here.

You Might Like:

• Webinar On-Demand: The New Event-Driven Marketing
• Food for Thought: Beyond Good Products – How to Rediscover the Consumer Relationship

by Chris Taylor

The ability to catch the consumer’s eye has become far more than flashy neon and holiday sales. As consumption becomes more digital and discerning, targeted offers to calculated demographics become so 2012. Getting and holding the consumer’s attention is now about engaging at the time and method of the consumer’s choice.

Likewise, creating brand loyalists involves moving from those first engagements to fan-level excitement. It sounds great but takes a very deft touch and very smart systems to engage in what Gary Vanyerchuck calls, “The Stream Economy.” In his own words, “The speed of the world is much faster and the skill-set and the understanding around the content are the biggest stakes in the marketplace.”

The best brands integrate content into a platform that is tuned to Vanyerchuck’s stream economy. Those brands wouldn’t be caught dead showing up with an offer when they’ve made no attempt to know and delight the recipient in advance. Self-serving ways are transparent and increasingly ineffective.

The secret to the stream economy is “seeing” context, meaning the sum of all things that describe the moments for engagement between buyer and seller. Context is a combination of the environment, like weather, and events, like arrival at a particular location. Traditional databases and queries can’t keep up with the stream economy. It’s far too real time.

Those who integrate with the stream economy are successful now and into the future.

To learn more, read our press release on Loyalty Lab 13.1. For more by Chris Taylor, follow him on Twitter @findchristaylor.

Originally posted at the TIBCO Blog.

by Jeanne Roué-Taylor

Loyalty benefits are often thought of as offers that kick in before the shopping trip and discounts which are taken at the register. Rarely are they thought of as being delivered in the midst of the shopping experience.

These days, there’s no reason why it has to be that way. Consumers are gradually being asked to scan bar codes at self-checkout or to check prices, and retailers are learning how to monitor self-scanning.

This matters because before you get to the store, and by the time you’ve arrived at checkout, the timing isn’t ideal to provide customers with offers and advertising. The moment to communicate, build trust, and make an offer is optimal when the decision is actually being made.

In the shopping cart

Studies show that 50-70% of purchasing decisions are made at the shelf, not before, meaning that there is ample time and motive for merchants to climb into the shopping cart. When you add technology to determine in-store location, being along for the ride with the customer is the best place to be.

The implications are enormous. As customers grow comfortable with linking their loyalty reward accounts to other accounts and information, it becomes easy for a retailer to say, “Your son’s birthday is next week. Do you have the cake?” as they pass the bakery. Similarly, customers can be enticed to try new products based on their social connections’ likes.

Customers respond to convenience, and there’s nothing more convenient than being able to get the best offers from manufacturers and retailers at the time the purchase decision is being made. As we grow used to climbing into the shopping cart, we’ll wonder how we ever did it any other way.

You Might Like:

• Whitepaper: The New Event-Driven Marketing
• Whitepaper: First Year Goals for a Repeat Purchase-Focused Loyalty Program