Loyalty: How to Forge Lasting Customer Relationships

Each individual carries tremendous interactive potential in their pocket, namely their smartphone. For most of us, it is a natural extension of our daily lives, providing instant access to a multitude of services and information. The mobile experience transcends the limitations of the traditional customer experience by offering instant and personalized connectivity.

Maintaining a loyalty system that fails to consider that the average Canadian user spends nearly 3 hours of his day of their day with their face glued to their cell phone screen is to miss out on opportunities to strengthen customer relations.

Building customer loyalty in a competitive landscape where every company offers its own program, requires organizations to stand out from their rivals. Strengthening the quality of the customer relationship and forging close ties through numerous, positive interactions with the brand via a mobile app is a sure-fire way of achieving this objective.

The relevance of your mobile application lies in its ability to build strong and lasting connections with your customers. To do this, we refer to the 5 elements of the relevance pyramid that hierarchically determine how the brand builds a close relationship with the customer:

1. Shared Values: Your customers must be able to connect with your brand through common values. By clearly communicating what motivates you and how you can make a difference in their experience, they will see the common ground you share. In Juliette's case, we want to emphasize being an organic grocery store more prominently.

2. Pride: A measure of success is when your customers are inspired by your brand. With their phones always at hand, encourage them to interact and engage with your brand by giving them the opportunity to talk about you on social media and to their close circle.

3. Partnership: Show your customers how your application helps simplify their shopping experience, bringing them value and enjoyment. They need to see that you are partnering with them and understand their reality, so they naturally return to you. You are reachable and accessible when they need you. This reinforces the feeling of reliability. Your customers want and need to be able to rely on you.

4. Protection: Safety and security are paramount. Your customer must feel comfortable enough with you to give you access to their personal information. The experience must inspire confidence through its fluidity and quality.

5. Personalization: If they invite you into their daily lives through your mobile app, your customers want to be rewarded with a unique and personalized experience that directly matches their needs and priorities. Recording favorite items or recurring actions at their fingertips demonstrates the ease of use of your product in a fast-paced world.

The main objective is always to create an experience that will be a source of support for their shopping experience. We want to be able to integrate features that will continuously entice your clientele to come back to you because there is a sense of pride and belonging associated with your brand. It is through a simple-to-use and intuitive application that your customers will feel supported, listened to, and confident. A well-executed, functional application generates positive emotions in your users that will compel them to talk about you to their loved ones and integrate you into their daily lives.

Juliette is the General Manager for a major Quebec bookstore. The company manages to attract the attention of numerous readers with a wide selection of exclusive and niche titles, despite a market trend towards digital content. An increasing portion of its sales can be attributed to the online store and an app that offers a powerful search engine, as well as its fast and efficient special orders service. The only downside is that the loyalty program is underutilized by customers, even though it is accessible through the mobile application. This is where nventive comes in. How can we help Juliette make her program more effective?

The bookstore maintains strong relationships with its customer base, easily climbing four out of five levels of the relevance pyramid but failing to capitalize on the last one: personalization. This is where the loyalty program comes in. By collecting data on purchasing history and associating it with customer profiles, the bookstore can offer titles or related products to its customers based on their preferences: authors, genres, categories, special editions, etc. Customers will appreciate receiving carefully curated suggestions regularly and will be encouraged to make more purchases and visits, especially if there is a points bonus or associated incentive.

The mobile application is an unrivalled bi-directional communication tool in this context to encourage action and interactions: notifications and newsletters about new releases, a section of the app dedicated to personalized suggestions, bonus points, or gifts for birthdays...

To identify the mobile tactics your company can use to activate your loyalty program, our digital strategy experts have developed an ideation workshop. One of the goals is to reestablish the solid foundations of your relationships by ensuring that your customers remain emotionally engaged.

From the perspective of a company like the bookseller, aiming to achieve its objectives by activating its loyalty program, the use of an ideation framework in a workshop setting becomes essential. It's at this point that our Digital Strategists experts invite you to dive even deeper into understanding your customers' real needs. The very first step of the workshop is to put ourselves in the shoes of the customers to better understand their emotional needs, preferences, and behaviors. The workshop then sets the scene for the subsequent stages: the functionalities to be prioritized according to needs, and an understanding of the technological environment that will enable us to seize the opportunities that arise...

The aim is to establish a strong emotional bond between your brand and your customers, making the use of your loyalty application an essential part of their routine. After all, it's no surprise to learn that human beings are creatures of routine, who rely on habits to achieve their daily goals, which we will explore in a second step.