Charles Ehredt

Ask various segments of your customer base to identify other brands that they tend to shop with. Those companies that come up frequently will like be good strategic partners because if the customers already engage with them, it is probably because of similar values. In B2B sales, find out from your target customers which other companies offer complementary products or services. Those companies probably already have hundreds or thousands of clients like your target, and they are likely to already have sales channels selling to the same buyer.

In the loyalty sector, strategic partnerships have existed for a few decades - basically hotel groups and rental car companies collaborating with airlines so common customers could earn points faster and get to interesting rewards. Many of these relationships are relevant for frequent travelers, but not for the majority of people who travel once or twice per year. The contrary would be coalition loyalty programs like Nectar in the UK or Air Miles in Canada. These programs usually combine 4-6 anchor brands with high customer frequency of spend with dozens of smaller brands with lower customer frequency. Advantage of these partnerships include sharing customer insights to improve marketing and sharing the costs of incentivizing customers.

Your customers already belong to dozens of loyalty programs and may not be very interested in earning another loyalty currency (i.e., your points). They may prefer to earn more points from a popular hotel or airline loyalty program. You can easily offer the points/miles that your customer wants to collect by collaborating with partners and not forcing those customers to earn another set of points that may never materialize in real value.

Testing is obvious. When multiple systems are integrated and intended to work together, the programming can sometimes not work as planned, so testing is essential. With loyalty programs in particular, if you don´t test, there is a risk that you award too many points for certain customer actions - and that can cost a lot of extra money when customers expect to redeem those points. Be sure the number of points (and the value of those points) aligns with the economic benefit of the customer action - so you are giving the right incentive.

Aligning (integrating) the loyalty solution with the booking flow (which is normally controlled by an ecommerce platform) requires that the systems can talk to each other. That means that they have APIs to share data, inform each other when customers complete desired behaviors, track points accrued, and make those points available to redeem for future benefits. The best loyalty solutions don´t interrupt the booking flow, but capture customer data as the customers move through the booking process. If customers have to complete extra steps to earn points, then the additional friction will turn off many potential loyalty program members, and they will cease to remain active.

Loyalty consultants can help with the design process, but you can also look at peer solutions and effectively borrow best practices that have been proven in the past. But keep in mind that most loyalty programs look pretty much the same, so if you create a program like everyone else's, you may not stand out or be differentiated in your market. Focus on delivering customer value and not just offering a lot of points. Value comes from what customers can do with your points - i.e., the rewards. Make sure you have rewards that your target customer really wants to earn, so they are motivated to collect your points in the first place.