We take great pride in our partnerships here at Movable Ink, so we’re taking the time to introduce you to the innovative partners who help elevate the campaigns of our shared clients.
We sat down with Jess Kaufman, Director of Partner Enablement at CrowdTwist to learn how marketers can stay innovative. You can learn more about our partnership with CrowdTwist in this case study and meet them in person at our upcoming Experience Transformation Tour event in Chicago on September 10th.
What do you do for your organization?
I’ve been with CrowdTwist for 3.5 years and currently work to develop, nurture and expand CrowdTwist’s partner ecosystem across both technology and agency verticals. I work to advance sales pipeline and produce joint-marketing collateral to further drive business goals and objectives for CrowdTwist.
How does your company help digital marketers stay innovative?
CrowdTwist’s customer loyalty platform enables brands to unlock unique insights and incremental value through omnichannel engagement and data capture. This empowers brands to build a robust 360-degree view of their customers and drive deeper relationships and emotional loyalty through personalization. These meaningful experiences encourage customers to continue engaging and spending with the brand over time.
In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges that digital marketers face?
One of the biggest challenges digital marketers are facing today is hyper-focusing on customer acquisition rather than customer retention. Many digital marketers don’t realize it costs 5x more to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones. While that’s the go-to stat about customer retention, other studies go as far as to say that a 5% increase in customer retention will increase profits anywhere from 25% to 95%. This seems like such an easy sweet spot for digital marketers to tackle knowing the revenue potential. CrowdTwist’s loyalty programs are proven to drive both customer acquisition and retention via cost effective loyalty campaigns.
What are the biggest trends happening in your field right now?
Within the loyalty space, segmentation and personalization are an ever-growing and vital trend for brands to get behind. Customers expect brands to create personalized, and relevant experiences based on the data they share. Our platform powers a segmentation engine that can display the engagement activities and reward offerings customers are interested in based on previous spend and engagement behaviors. We have the ability to define these customer segments based on captured loyalty data within our platform and across the technical systems of our client’s ecosystem.
Do you have any recommended best practices to help marketers level-up their customer experiences?
Within loyalty programs, exclusive and experiential program rewards and benefits drive overall program engagement, further spend, and brand valuable behaviors. The key to a successful rewards strategy is to effectively market these rewards and offerings to your customers based on previous engagement, shopping behaviors, and current loyalty program status (i.e. points balance and tier level). As a shopper, if I have an affinity toward one specific brand or category – and that same brand or category is the loyalty program’s newest reward offering, it is the brands’ responsibility to get that offering in front of me across their channels.
In your opinion, which brands are creating the best customer experiences right now? Any recent examples?
Brands encompassing personalized loyalty data in emails are seeing higher open, click-through, and conversion rates. Sephora is an example of a brand doing this really well. Earlier this year they sent a ‘progress’ email to their loyalty members that highlighted how many years the customer has been enrolled in Beauty Insider, the points they’ve earned that year and how much money they’ve saved through loyalty exclusive campaigns and offers. This is an example of a great marketing campaign that drove loyalty program awareness, continued engagement, and purchase while instilling a 1:1 connection and exclusivity with customers.
What do you think are the most important digital marketing metrics that every brand should track?
Loyalty programs are proven to deliver ROI and our clients typically experience a 40% increase in Customer Lifetime Value across program members. Within loyalty programs some of the most important metrics we look to track include:
- User Enrollment
- Program Engagement
- Customer Spend, Frequency, and AOV
- Incremental Revenue
- Reward Redemption
How can marketers stay ahead of their competitors in 2019?
Loyalty is a great opportunity for brands to stay ahead of their competitors. Many brands aren’t aware that their loyal consumers are willing to:
- Tell friends and family about the company (60.0%)
- Join a loyalty / VIP program (52.3%)
- Spend more on a product even if there are cheaper options elsewhere (39.4%)
- Leave feedback / online review (37.0%)
- Participate in a contest / promotion (31.8%)