The four pillars of modern customer loyalty management

Marketing is going through a time of significant change as it embraces a new form of customer loyalty driven by right-time marketing. Few people tell the story better than Loyalty Lab‘s David Rosen. Rosen is particularly good at articulating how today’s marketers are evolving into digitally focused, tech-savvy pros with powerful technology tools and techniques at their disposal.

He understands that changes in marketing are driven by the broader changes in technology and consumer behavior over the past decade, like the fast adoption of social media and increasing dependence on mobile devices.

The Retail Struggle

Retailers have struggled to find the right ways to interact with existing or potential new customers as they learn the new paradigm. Most understand that relevance, timing, and context determine the right time to engage, but finding the right mix of technology and technique is elusive without guiding principles to provide focus for retail loyalty.

Rosen has an answer to that challenge.

The Four Pillars

Rosen is an advocate for the Four Pillars concept, a concept that combines customer-driven relationships, loyalty programs, wider event streams, and test and learn. His work with Virgin America and The North Face provide his evidence that it takes a philosophy to navigate times of significant change. Breaking down the concept looks like this:

Customer-driven relationships – Marketers have a role in how and where to engage, but customers’ preferences, motivations, and attitudes ultimately drive success.

Loyalty programs – Loyalty programs have an important role to play in giving customers an opportunity to raise their hand and provide permissioning for loyalty data to be collected.

Wider event streams – Transactions aren’t enough to know a customer. Brands need to monitor data that streams continuously across social media networks, mobile phones and other software and devices.

Test and learn – It all comes together when a brand can develop strategies to be tested with groups of consumers to find what’s the most effective message, timing, and channel for engagement.

The Four Pillars are a great answer to the challenge of navigating marketing’s changes. Listen to the webinar or download Rosen’s whitepaper on event-driven marketing to learn more.

This post was first published on the Loyalty Lab Blog and has been lightly edited.