Loyalty management in Retailers
To attract and retain customers while driving profitability and growth is a key challenge nowadays, there are a lot of products and competitors and the companies have to offer a different experience to the customers. Is not just “buy and sell” relation, customers 2.0 want more than it, the customers want something more adaptive to their needs!
Here in Brazil, we don’t have so many loyalty programs, we don’t have discount cards in magazines, it’s not a common thing, but we have some interesting loyalty programs most of them in flying companies. What I don’t understand is, why don’t we have a lot of loyalty programs in the retail area? Brazilian people are one of the most loyal customers in the world and I’ll explain why all retailers must considerer to implement one loyalty management solution.
Brazilian people buy the same products, always! We don’t even think in buying a different product because we are accustomed to buy that product!
We are so loyal that we have changed some products into brands, I mean, we don’t buy soda, we buy Coca-Cola and there are a lot of others examples like this one! It’s like American people, for example, they didn’t go to the supermarket, they go to Wal-Mart, they don’t drink coffee, they go to the Starbucks.
It’s not a simple thing, this represents the customer behavior here in Brazil and in any place in the world and it opens a new paradigm.
What I want you to understand is Brazilian customers are loyal to products, but not to the retailers yet, and with this starts our quest!
Loyalty programs consists in a loyalty vicious circuit where customers buys products, earns points or discounts to buy more products. Some researches shows that loyalty programs can increase retailer’s profitability and the customer’s frequency to the stores both significantly. Just for example, Starbucks increased the customer’s frequency in 10% after starting their loyalty program. Loyalty programs also can increase customer retention and the marketing ROI.
The main point is if we can turn the brand loyalty of Brazilian customers into loyalty customers in the retailers offering a loyalty program across multi-channels, statically retailers will increase the frequency of customers and the profit and open a new way to do business in Brazil and I truly believe that if the customer in your country has the same behavior you must implement a loyalt management solution as part of your CRM solution!
With my best regards,
Caíque
Caique, good analysis of Brazilian consumer, many times customer links with brands retailers. In Latinomerica (spanish countries) this has changed in a fast way because of the increasing of bigger retailers like Falabella, Exito, Carrefour and others (apparel, electronics and shoes) . They have set loyalties programs to redeem points or get discount in POS and so get others products.
On the other hands, some markets like Venezuelan or Colombia loyalties programs are focus on customer retention specially for those consumer good retailers, there are a lot competition in the mid of this industry. I have been in other industry where sales is leverage by using Web Chanel and they add coupons functionality as means to get discount, they can go forward even more by activating Loyalty in there!. A good example of above is the cosmetics and skin care industry in LA.
Caique, by a chance do you have any good presentation of SAP Loyalty Mag. for retailers?
Thank you