After two years in the virtual world, Dreamforce made its in-person comeback in September 2022. And it was indeed the epic family reunion Salesforce promised.
The event was jam-packed with sessions, and one of the most notable in the retail and consumer goods vertical focused on how to turn transactions into brand passion with Loyalty Management.
Here’s a look at some of the key takeaways from the session.
The Current Landscape of Consumer Loyalty
To set the stage, it’s important to understand the current landscape of consumer loyalty.
In today’s world, the younger the consumer, the more they value elements like:
- Early access to products or services
- Personalized attention
- Exclusive events
- A sense of community
These values have created two different categories of genuine loyalty: Rational loyalty and Emotional loyalty.
Rational Loyalty: What It Is and Why It Matters
What it is: Rational loyalty centers around tangible rewards, like earning points for making purchases or engaging in other desired behaviors like signing up to receive emails. Other common characteristics of rational loyalty programs include discounts, rewards or perks (e.g. sample offers and birthday bonuses) and coupons for loyalty members.
Standing up a rational loyalty program requires allocating budget toward initiatives to promote the program and to cover any rewards, perks, etc. offered to members.
Why it matters: Rational loyalty programs are a more traditional approach to capturing consumer attention and measuring loyalty. However, programs that take this approach are now becoming the minimum viable product for brands that want to build consumer loyalty.
Nevertheless, these programs are a tried-and-true way to increase customer spend, purchase frequency, basket size and lifetime value.
Emotional Loyalty: What It Is and Why It Matters
What it is: Emotional loyalty is more intangible, but is becoming increasingly important as 63% of consumers feel an emotional connection to the brands they buy from most. Ways to influence emotional loyalty include brand personalization, shared benefits and values and creating a shared understanding between the brand and consumers.
Building emotional loyalty requires allocating resources and budget toward more intangible brand efforts, like enabling deep personalization and developing and promoting a clear set of values.
Why it matters: As the retail and consumer goods space becomes increasingly crowded and competitive, companies that want to be true market leaders will have to develop a sense of emotional loyalty among consumers. This approach will ultimately become more important than the traditional rational loyalty programs.
When done well, emotional loyalty efforts will lead to increased customer engagement, brand advocacy, purchase exclusivity and overall satisfaction.
Building Emotional Loyalty Through Loyalty Management
Building emotional loyalty requires a strong approach to Loyalty Management. This starts with a system that allows retail and consumer goods companies to:
- Build consistency across various points of engagement (e.g. continuous messaging and values across channels)
- Create experiences that are unique and exclusive (e.g. access to VIP events)
- Personalize interactions based on behaviors and interest (e.g. targeted recommendations for future purchases)
Together, this system should not only build emotional loyalty, but also lead to brand advocacy in which consumers speak passionately about the brand and recommend it to others. This flywheel of highly engaged, satisfied consumers who feel a deep emotional connection to the brand and are willing to promote it publicly is what will differentiate leading brands going forward.
How AllCloud Can Help
AllCloud’s team of experts can stand up Salesforce Core + Loyalty Management + Marketing Cloud to deliver a best in class Loyalty Management system to achieve these goals. This setup includes the Loyalty Management product offering built on Salesforce Core and embedding journeys within Marketing Cloud to drive highly personalized experiences.
Our team’s deep expertise in the Salesforce ecosystem and experience working with leading retail and consumer goods companies put us in a unique position to build and integrate these related systems to help differentiate brands through true emotional loyalty.
Contact us today to learn more and get started.