Beyond points and discounts: Loyalty that matters

Loyalty programs often fall short, offering irrelevant deals and transactional experiences. Customers desire deeper personalization. How can retailers break the mold and create loyalty programs that truly resonate?

The answer lies in leveraging data and technology to design more personalized experiences. Leading retailers understand that building relationships is key to winning over customer hearts (and wallets).

Loyalty done wrong: One size doesn't fit all

According to our own research, 75% of consumers say offers from loyalty programs aren't personalized enough.

Customers crave connection, tips that aid the buying journey, and offers that align with their unique needs and preferences, not generic discounts on products they never buy.

Personalization powerhouse: Health and nutrition

Health and nutrition are also increasingly important to consumers, making them a prime area for personalization in grocery loyalty programs. With customer data, retailers can offer:

• Product and recipe recommendations based on individual dietary and health preferences.

• Omnichannel navigation for easier dietary product discovery.

• Health scoring and gamified challenges to encourage healthier choices.

This creates a meaningful, relevant experience for customers. It not only increases conversion and basket size on specific transactions but supports customers' personal goals and fosters a sense of emotional loyalty, leading to an increased share of wallet.

Loyalty and personalization done right: Woolworths' Healthylife program

This program empowers customers to find the right food, track their shopping behaviors and get rewarded via the Everyday Rewards program for making healthy choices. Woolworths' personalized approach fosters deeper connections and drives positive outcomes for both customers and the retailer.

The future of personalized loyalty: Integrated commerce and AI

Our Integrated Commerce Accelerator marks the start of our journey to take the pain out of data integration for our clients. The accelerator brings together data from disparate commerce software vendors on Google Cloud BigQuery.

The goal of this accelerator is to help generate new and innovative insights that ultimately enhance the customer experience and enable personalization. This accelerator can also enable the rapid deployment of a modern composable commerce platform on Google Cloud — in a matter of weeks — to visualize and showcase the benefits it brings.

The next phase of this accelerator will involve layering in the full capabilities and functionality of Eagle Eye and Spoon Guru, demonstrating how once a business has the data foundations in place they are able to improve their profitability and drive meaningful value with loyalty and personalization.

Spoon Guru themselves draw on deep expertise in health, nutrition and product data to enable personalized shopping experiences.

Eagle Eye acts as the engine room of a retailers' customer engagement proposition, holding all of the rules associated with their loyalty, promotion and personalization programs, and enabling the execution of those rules into every customer touchpoint in real time at scale.

Because both Spoon Guru and Eagle Eye are complementary to commercetools, Bloomreach and Quantum Metric, this creates a seamless omnichannel experience across multiple touchpoints. Consumers only experience one brand, not a disparate set of tools or experiences from multiple vendors.

With each, retailers can transform loyalty programs from transactional to truly engaging partnerships that foster lasting customer relationships, without creating any additional overhead.

As our partner commercetools explains, “Customer expectations are at an all-time high because they have more options than ever before, and technology has made it easier to compare prices, products and services across a wide range of retailers.”

Personalization is no longer a luxury. It's a necessity. Our own research has found that 66% of consumers have spent more time and/or money than intended because of an immersive experience.

By prioritizing meaningful connections and leveraging technology to achieve this, retailers can cultivate truly loyal customers who actively choose them over the competition.

There is no time to lose for retailers in transforming their approach to technology and keeping customers engaged. But it isn’t merely a matter of implementing more tech.

Getting to the bottom of customer experience challenges means getting to the bottom of customer data challenges first. The right insights are the starting point. If you don’t understand who’s doing what or why, all the technology in the world isn’t going to make a difference.

About Eagle Eye

Eagle Eye is a leading SaaS technology company enabling retail, travel and hospitality brands to earn the loyalty of their end customers by powering their real-time, omnichannel and personalized consumer marketing activities.

Eagle Eye AIR is a cloud-based platform that provides the most flexible and scalable loyalty and promotions capability in the world. More than 750 million personalized offers are executed via the platform every week, and it currently hosts over 200 million individual loyalty members for businesses all over the world. Eagle Eye are trusted to deliver a secure service at hundreds of thousands of physical POS destinations worldwide, enabling the real-time issuance and redemption of promotional coupons, loyalty offers, gift cards, subscription benefits and more.

The Eagle Eye AIR platform is currently powering loyalty and customer engagement solutions for enterprise businesses all over the world, including Asda, Tesco, Morrisons, Waitrose and John Lewis & Partners, JD Sports, Pret a Manger, Loblaws, Southeastern Grocers, Giant Eagle and the Woolworths Group.

In January 2023, the Group acquired France-based Untie Nots, an AI-powered personalized promotions business, adding Carrefour, E. Leclerc, Auchan and other leading brands to its European customer base.

About Spoon Guru

Spoon Guru is an AI-powered nutrition platform enabling businesses to connect with their customers on health, nutrition, lifestyle, sustainability and wellness.

Spoon Guru navigates the highly complicated, nuanced and regulated world of health to deliver deep nutrition expertise on products and recipes via easy to integrate APIs. This powers relevant, personalized omnichannel experiences and opens up engagement with customers across their lifecycle on important, emotive topics that are meaningful to them.

Spoon Guru’s nutrition platform has been in operation since 2017, supporting leading organizations globally such as Tesco, Woolworths Group, Schnucks, Jet.com, Migros and Albert Heijn.