The beginning of 2022 provides a valuable time for companies to evaluate and plan their Salesforce Roadmap over the coming calendar year. Often, this involves strategic shifts reflecting changing customer needs, personas, and tools to better provide value for clients. This is especially true in a changing digital landscape, where marketers will need to rely on zero-party data and progressive profiling to reach customers and understand their preferences. Not only do companies need to demonstrate why new customers should engage with them, but they also need to drive horizontal value out of existing customers as well. The Salesforce Loyalty Management solution can help companies achieve that deeper engagement.
Salesforce’s Loyalty Management solution hit the market in 2021 as an additional cloud to provide increased avenues and insight into how to better engage with a brand’s most frequent customers. It can also provide the rewards and tangible acknowledgement to nudge infrequent customers into deeper engagement channels and patterns. Here are some of the reasons why Salesforce Loyalty Management is a top solution to build intelligent loyalty programs for both B2B and B2C customers.
Get Up and Running Faster
Loyalty Management’s out-of-the-box infrastructure and industry templates allow organizations to launch loyalty programs faster than a custom build. This infrastructure is flexible, with the ability to future-proof loyalty programs through frequent testing and iteration as consumers’ preferences and behaviors change.
Out-of-the box functionality of Loyalty Management is something many of our clients come to Concentrix Catalyst to learn more about when implementing or maximizing their Loyalty Management platform. Administration of members, automatic and dynamic promotions of membership tier, and timing functionality are all native on the platform. Salesforce Loyalty Management even has native capabilities in multi-currency scenarios that automatically convert based on real-time conversion rates.
Integrate Loyalty Into Every Experience
Generating customer loyalty is an investment that sets apart brands who have long-term customer visions. Companies should always approach Salesforce with the question of, “How do we maximize our existing Salesforce capabilities and licensing to maximize ROI?” This approach promotes a high-level strategic perspective to integrate loyalty with existing customer insights already being generated through Salesforce. It also allows data flow between Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, other Clouds, and even other integrated platforms to orchestrate broad customer journeys and accelerate time to value of existing customers.
But how does this circle back to strategic loyalty decisions and projects in the coming calendar year? Customer journeys are the ideal pathway a brand hopes a customer takes with them. Crucially, loyalty management provides brands the levers to incentivize customer decisions. Changes like seasonality and new products can be factored into these decisions. With the right vision, utilizing all the data at a brand’s disposal in a tool like Loyalty Management can create an integrated loyalty experience across a brand’s ecosystem in a ready platform. Customers enjoy a tailored experience that better meets their needs and rewards them across the organization.
A Single Source of Truth For Member Data
Integrated platforms not only create seamless customer experiences, they also yield more accurate customer data. We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: personalization is largely a data problem. That means, more accurate data means a better understanding of each individual customer and more relevant content and offerings.
Here’s a common retail scenario: oftentimes, first purchasers never return to make a second purchase, and even fewer customers return for a third. Being able to analyze accurate data from customers’ shopping habits can unearth valuable nuggets of information—in this case, learning that customers are predicted to remain loyal shoppers after a third purchase. By capturing this data through a platform like Salesforce Loyalty Management, an organization can add incentives for customers to visit the store again after the second purchase, potentially reducing customer churn.
With Salesforce’s powerful Tableau CRM integration, organizations can connect member data across different systems, generating the graphs and charts that can be built into dynamic dashboards so managers can understand customer engagement for reporting and decision making. Tableau can also ingest and harmonize data from other platforms such as CPDs, POS, advertising software, and data warehouses to analyze loyalty metrics and trends. When combined with customer surveys, feedback, and support touchpoints (for example, in Salesforce Service Cloud), brands can use broad customer trends to tailor experiences down to the individual level.
When loyalty as an outcome is treated as a strategy and leveraged throughout the entire business, organizations can get a 360-degree view of the customer, and that information can be used to engage them with personalized experiences. Through the Salesforce ecosystem we can move beyond the simple tiers and points that most other platforms provide, and into true “experiential loyalty” by combining zero- and first-party customer data with third-party data to build customer insights driven by Salesforce’s Einstein AI platform. In turn, Salesforce Loyalty Management data can orchestrate loyalty into every touchpoint along the customer journey.
Powering Loyalty with Salesforce Loyalty Management
Brands of all sizes have started to take loyalty more seriously. Many organizations have shifted toward collecting zero-party data and engaging in progressive profiling, due to growing privacy and security concerns among consumers. This, in turn, has motivated organizations to build loyalty strategies to keep, and grow, their relationships with customers. Loyalty stands to make a bigger business impact now more than ever.
To see an impact, however, brands need a sophisticated platform to manage loyalty. From gathering all customer data in once place to issuing rewards, Salesforce Loyalty Management, on the Salesforce 360 platform, can help brands achieve loyalty as an outcome. Here are some of the reasons why Salesforce Loyalty Management is a top solution to build intelligent loyalty programs for both B2B and B2C customers.
As a Salesforce launch partner in this cloud, Catalyst brings our proven strengths across Salesforce’s existing clouds to generate Loyalty as both a tool and an outcome. Learn more about how we power next generation loyalty for brands.
Mike Hepworth
Managing Director of Marketing Cloud