Paula: 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.
Thank you.
This show is sponsored by Comarch, a global provider of innovative software products and business services.
Comarch’s platform is used by leading brands across all industries to drive their customer loyalty.
Powered by AI and machine learning, Comarch technologies allow you to build, run, and manage personalized loyalty programs and product offers with ease.
For more information, please visit comark.com.
Welcome to Let’s Talk a Little Loyalty, my new shorter show for loyalty marketing professionals.
In today’s episode, I am summarizing my interview with Leanne Papaioannou, a loyalty expert in Ireland whose marketing agency called Chilli Pepper Marketing was the first and may in fact still be the only loyalty strategy agency in our home country.
We first discussed some incredibly powerful work that Leanne did with a fuel and convenience retailer called Topaz, which went on to win an extraordinary number of international loyalty awards.
Leanne worked with Topaz to identify some key consumer insights that could inform the development of a loyalty program that would truly change driver behavior in this very challenging sector, given the tiny margins available on fuel.
Having tested a number of concepts and models, they eventually settled on the idea of using gamification to engage with their customers, creating a program called Play or Park, where customers earned points every time they refueled in a Topaz station or bought products in store.
When they reached 200 points, they could play a game with a valuable prize every month worth over 10,000 euros as a once-in-a-lifetime experience for customers to win.
If the member didn’t like the prize in one particular month, they could simply park the points until the following month and then they had more entries for a prize they were truly excited about.
Leanne shared her view that both statistics and case studies are needed to show the potential impact of loyalty within any business.
She believes in the importance of working with the leaders of the business to understand their business goals and ensure they are committed to building a powerful solution to help drive customer engagement.
She has three principles for success in any loyalty program.
Firstly, the loyalty program should always be in line with the brand positioning and ethos.
Secondly, research has to be used to generate real customer insights and then the loyalty strategy can be built on that.
Thirdly, she believes in creating rewards and experiences that customers have not experienced before.
From an operational point of view, Leanne then shared some tips on building a great loyalty program step by step.
Firstly, she thinks it’s important to meet with the various members of the senior management team to understand the different objectives, challenges, background and expectations of the loyalty project within the business.
Secondly, she believes it’s extremely important to conduct a loyalty innovation workshop to include everyone involved in the project and get their input in order to design the optimum loyalty strategy using any customer research that can identify loyalty triggers.
Thirdly, Leanne then makes recommendations to the brand based on concepts that would drive increased loyalty with their unique customer base.
Once the idea has been agreed in principle, the next step is to develop a business case to assess whether the loyalty strategy is likely to be successful.
Then after finalizing and testing the strategy, the next stage is to implement it using technology.
To learn more lessons in loyalty from Leanne Papaioanno’s amazing career, you can simply head over to letstalkloyalty.com and look for episode number 8.
That’s it for this episode of Let’s Talk a Little Loyalty.
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 thewisemarketer.com and loyaltyacademy.org.
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Publisher’s Note:
This transcript was generated with the help of AI and podcast publishing tools such as Apple Podcast’s transcription service.
In the interests of efficiency and minimising our costs as a small business, it has not been checked by a human.
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