Integrating Your Loyalty Solution with SAP Marketing Cloud

In this blog, I would like to walk you through the benefits and approach of integrating your loyalty solution with SAP Marketing Cloud. You can integrate certain data of your loyalty solution with SAP Marketing Cloud to enrich the profiles of your loyalty members.

Why integrate your loyalty solution with SAP Marketing Cloud?

To achieve successful customer engagement, you need to know exactly what each of your loyalty members want. This means you need to know them on a deeper level, which can be possible by integrating with SAP Marketing Cloud.

Through SAP Marketing Cloud integration, you can gain better loyalty member insights and engage with your loyal members more intelligently and in a more personalized way across all devices and channels.

You can also build a stronger customer base with increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. This will allow your loyalty solution to run its marketing more quickly and efficiently.

What data can be integrated from your loyalty solution with SAP Marketing Cloud?

• Loyalty Members:

A membership typically represents the participation of an individual in a loyalty program. As a first step, you can create all the members of your loyalty program as contacts in SAP Marketing Cloud. You can set up a relevant ID origin for your loyalty solution and map the member information to the relevant attributes of a contact. You can also use the extensibility features of the contact object if you would like to include certain loyalty specific information like Member Tier or Point Balance for the member. Once this is in place, you could use the standard APIs for Contact to create or enrich a contact with loyalty specific updates.

• Loyalty Member Activities:

There are specific touchpoints in the journey of a loyalty member like registration, accrual, and redemption. You can integrate these loyalty specific activities of a member as interactions for a contact in SAP Marketing Cloud. This information would enrich the interaction history of a contact with loyalty related activities and can be used as any other interaction for subsequent processing. There are specific marketing interaction types related to loyalty available in SAP Marketing Cloud which can be used in interactions. An indicative mapping between the loyalty activity types and marketing interaction types is provided below:

Loyalty Activity Type	Mkt Interaction Type
REGISTRATION	LOY_REGISTRATION
ACCRUAL	LOY_POINT_ACCRUAL
EXPIRATION	LOY_POINT_REDEMPTION
CANCELLATION	LOY_POINT_REDEMPTION
REDEMPTION	LOY_POINT_REDEMPTION

If you would like to enrich the interaction with loyalty activity specific information such as Accrued Points and Redeemable Points, you can use the <InteractionLoyatyPrograms> entity. For example, if a member has made an online purchase, you could pass <ActivitySubtype> as Online Order and <AccruedPoints> as the loyalty points that the member accrued as part of the order.

For more information on loyalty subnode assignment to an interaction, see the section InteractionLoyaltyPrograms in Interactions.

• Offers and Coupons:

An offer is a limited promise that a seller makes available to selected consumers in conjunction with an incentive. Offers are usually used in a loyalty program to send out coupons to customers boosting customer retention. You can import the offers and coupons created in your loyalty solution into SAP Marketing Cloud to leverage your marketing activities.

How to integrate your loyalty solution with SAP Marketing Cloud?

SAP Marketing Cloud offers an API-based approach to integrating data from your loyalty solution. You can implement the following APIs to integrate: