#196: Loyalty Statistics and KPI's for Success (Short Summary Show)

In this short summary show, we look back on an interview with Mala Raj discussing the key statistics that every loyalty marketer should be measuring, and what success looks like across key industries like retail!

Listen to learn key insights from this loyalty expert from India, a market that’s continuing to thrive in so many ways.

Show Notes:

1) Episode #66: Loyalty Statistics & Loyalty Programme Performance in India – What Does Success Look Like

2) Mala Raj, Loyalty and Customer Strategy Specialist, Managing Partner Strategic Caravan International

3) Mala’s LinkedIn post on World Statistics Day as referenced in both episodes

Audio Transcript

#196: Loyalty Statistics and KPI's for Success (Short Summary Show) (8m)
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 for loyalty specialists around the world. Hello and welcome to this week’s short episode of Let’s Talk Loyalty, where I’m looking back on an interview from late 2020 with Mala Raj, a seasoned and highly respected loyalty consultant. Working with Strategic Caravan in India. I had noticed a LinkedIn post by Mala on World’s Statistics Day, which was celebrated on October the 20th of 2020 as an initiative by the United Nations to connect the world with data we can trust.

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00:00:58
What I really liked was Marla’s clarity on what loyalty statistics she believes are the most important to track and her estimates of what success might look like to start off the conversation. Marla told me a lot about the loyalty landscape in India, and it’s definitely a country I’m not familiar with. Professionally. Marla mentioned some of their key clients and how huge the customer numbers are for some of the most popular programs with a population over a billion people. Some key programs have membership bases in the hundreds of millions.

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00:01:42
Marla shared her six favorite key loyalty statistics. And we had a quarry conversation about them. First, we covered member activity level and Marla’s view was that in general, 60 to 70% of your member base engaging is good. This is a very widely used statistic, of course, and that number really will vary across verticals. But I do agree it’s a bulls-eye KPI that companies should focus on a second statistic that Mala shared is the lift in member value, which she says should be seven to 9% over under both the natural growth of the company in year one.

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00:02:27
It’s really hard to get figures like this, of course, and perhaps in India, natural growth is easier to come by, but particularly this uplift is really important to understand measure and be able to attribute to your loyalty program. Thirdly, we discussed a reduction in member churn. Marla says programs should see a 10 to 12% reduction in member churn. Within the first couple of years, we agreed that loyalty is an increasingly accountable discipline and it varies hugely across verticals.

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00:03:08
Churn is coasting monitored in some industries, but in others like retail, for example, member activity levels need to be assessed with some understanding of how often people typically shop with you in any given calendar year. We also talked about a shift or new customer acquisition and making sure you can measure if your member base is growing faster than your customer base. Another one, that’s hard to benchmark, especially across industry. In my experience, I have talked a lot with convenience retailers and I found that they were very different even to grocery retailers, even though they really do sell similar items, identifying customers with game-changing technology, like my own favorite cold card linking does make it easier to engage more consumers.

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00:04:03
But Marla pointed out that India in some ways is still less advanced and many retailers still use very basic identifiers like phone numbers. Second to last, we talked about redemption rates. Marla told me that she believes program operators should target at least 80% of points issued being redeemed. Anything less means your program is just not engaging enough. Marla’s advice was that it’s important to take care of both the redeemers as well as the long-term savers. And I know in lots of categories, I’m a long-term saver for example, with airline miles, but it’s also important to delight every type of collector, especially those who do like to redeem more frequently.

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00:04:57
Lastly, we covered program penetration of total sales and the statistic Molly used. What was that your program should account for 70 to 80% of your total sales? Of course, it sounds like quite a high target, but I do believe your offers should be so compelling that your customers not only want to be involved, but as Jeff B-cell said about Amazon prime, it should be actually almost irresponsible not to join my conversation with Maharaj was really interesting. And I really hope her statistics are useful to all of you listening around the world.

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00:05:38
If you want to hear the detailed conversation, please do listen to the original interview which you can find at Lets Talk Loyalty.com forward slash 66. Finally, I invite you to join me tomorrow and again on Thursday this week tomorrow, I will be talking about all the loyalty industry in Poland and on Thursday, you’ll hear from Billy Loizu, from Cheetah Digital, talking about why loyalty is perhaps the most important tool for any market here in 2022. This show is sponsored by The Wise Marketer, the world’s most popular source of loyalty marketing use insights and research.

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00:06:28
The Wise Marketer also offers loyalty marketing training through its Loyalty Academy, which has already certified over 245 executives in 27 countries, a certified loyalty marketing professionals for more information, check out thewisemarketer.com and loyaltyacademy.org. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Let’s Talk Loyalty. If you’d like us to send you the latest shows each week, simply sign up for the Let’s Talk Loyalty newsletter on LetsTalkLoyalty.com.

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00:07:12
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