Speaker 1 (0s):
Welcome to “Let’s Talk Loyalty”, an industry podcast for loyalty marketing professionals.
I’m your host, Paula Thomas and if you work in loyalty marketing, join me every week to learn the latest ideas from loyalty specialists around the world.
This episode is brought to you by Epsilon and their award-winning PeopleCloud loyalty solution.
Personalization should be integrated into the entire customer experience, including your loyalty program.
With this in mind, Epsilon recently released a guide outlining six key components that will put you on the path to personalizing the entire loyalty experience.
This guide challenges you to do some housekeeping and reconsider how you think about your current and future loyalty personalization efforts.
So to download your copy of the report, visit epsilon.com/letstalkloyalty.
Welcome to “Let’s Talk a Little Loyalty” episode 160, which is a summary of my one-year anniversary episode in August 2020, and which was a huge milestone to celebrate by first year broadcasting the show.
So I wanted to do something very different to my usual format.
So in partnership with my friends in the Loyalty Academy, I launched a competition for a scholarship worth $1,750 for one lucky listener to become a Certified Loyalty Marketing Professional.
Before we talked about the competition, I introduced my two guests for the show.
Firstly, a gentleman by the name of Graeme Thompson, who was one of the original founders of the Loyalty Academy, and is now the Chairman of the Board of Regents,
As well as Graham, I invited a recent graduate of the program on the show, Emily Ong from Sephora Singapore to share her story and experience becoming a CLMP.
By way of background, Graeme enjoyed a great career in loyalty in New Zealand, where he founded a travel and incentives marketing agency.
As part of that business, he also created loyalty propositions for clients, and he realized that he needed really specialized expertise in the niche world of loyalty marketing.
He also made the point that from that insight, he realized how many other people in the industry are also there by default rather than by design.
Graham believes most of us underestimate the skills and knowledge needed to deliver a loyalty proposition successfully, and I actually still believe it’s one of our industry’s biggest challenges.
Graham himself traveled to the UK to study and to add to his own knowledge and expertise and it was there that he met Mike Capizzi, Bill Hannifin and Mike Atkin.
Together the guys developed the concept of the loyalty academy and created the content and the entire course that would be needed by loyalty professionals who want a global qualification.
The academy leverages the knowledge and experience of a whole host of highly knowledgeable loyalty practitioners, and the whole program was launched in 2015.
On the show, Emily then talked us through her loyalty career, firstly, working for a Government Board in Singapore, where she created and built a health-related loyalty program for residents of the country.
It was there that she realized how much she loved working in the loyalty industry and since then she had moved on to join Sephora in 2019 as the loyalty product owner.
She explained it was the enjoyment working in loyalty that led her to researching and studying eventually with the Loyalty Academy, which at the time, before COVID, was available to study in person in Florida or alternatively on demand online.
Emily herself chose the online format in order to be able to study from her home base in Singapore.
As someone who believes in lifelong learning, Emily shared that she really enjoyed the whole experience doing the program and the format because it combines a number of required modules as well as elective ones, which meant she was reassured she was learning all of the basics, but it was also able to choose some topics that were particularly relevant in her day-to-day role.
She mentioned the case study she had to do to pass the course and the fantastic support that she had from the whole community of CLMP around the world, as well as the team teaching the qualification.
Graham highlighted again the critical importance of qualified loyalty professionals with the relevant expertise needed to build a profitable program that can support the commercial needs of any business.
The CLMP program therefore covers everything from concepts and propositions through to data analytics, loyalty communications, as well as the fundamentals of the financial approach needed. The course is constantly being updated to stay relevant.
Overall, the CLMP takes about 20 hours of study and is intended to equip loyalty professionals with ideas and concepts they can apply immediately in their role.
Our final topic was to introduce the scholarship and how listeners could enter to win.
In closing, I summarised my view that the Loyalty Academy is super useful in all our careers, but most importantly, it’s the community that really makes the difference.
So with that, I was delighted to celebrate my one-year anniversary of “Let’s Talk Loyalty” in partnership with the Loyalty Academy and the guys in The Wise Marketer.
As a closing thought, for anyone who is interested in that course right now, I wanted to mention again that the Loyalty Academy is being run here in Dubai, this December 2021.
So do check that out if you’re looking to join an in-person course for your loyalty career.
So that’s it from this episode of “Let’s Talk a Little Loyalty”.
Please do join me again this Thursday, when I’m interviewing the Chief Digital Officer of the world’s biggest retailer, 7-Eleven USA.
I’m really excited to share that with you all on Thursday, so I look forward to talking with you all then.
This show is sponsored by “The Wise Marketer” – the world’s most popular source of loyalty, marketing news insights and research.
The Wise Marketer also offers loyalty marketing training through its Loyalty Academy, which has already certified over 170 executives in 20 countries as Certified Loyalty Marketing Professionals.
For more information, check out the wisemarketer.com and Loyaltyacademy.org.
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