Every business uses (or needs to use) a loyalty program to build brand loyalty as part of their marketing strategy and your choices are the best CRMs and Enterprise Loyalty Platforms. Building loyalty is important because according to a study by the Harvard Business Review, acquiring a new customer is anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. More surveys show that:
- Increasing customer retention by 5% can increase profits from 25-95%.
- The success rate of selling to a customer you already have is 60-70%, while the success rate of selling to a new customer is 5-20%.
Thanks to the advent of marketing automation, there are a lot of ready-to-use Softwares as a Service (SaaS) based products that help you build and manage excellent customer loyalty programs to make your vision come true and reward your customers the right way. But the changing dynamics of consumer preferences due to the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic has tested the strength and innovativeness of every customer loyalty program and the flexibility of the software that manages it. Hence, let us understand the 5 best CRM and Enterprise loyalty Platforms.
1. Advantages of loyalty program software
While there are many unsaid benefits of using a software or platform to manage your loyalty program, let us have a quick look at a few major benefits.
1.1. Replace Cards with Apps and mobile numbers
The software gives us the flexibility to go headless and manage a customer’s loyalty points using a mobile app or website. This means a customer can say goodbye to physical cards that are either lost, misplaced, damaged, and more importantly forgotten when you need them the most. This ensures maximum convenience and minimum intervention.
1.2. Flexibility and customization
It is very flexible to mold, upgrade and change your rewards programs according to your brand partners, changing with the evolving needs of customers and expanding segment landscapes. It also allows you to set up multiple programs, rewards and reward structures and update the terms and conditions based on the laws of the state.
1.3. Intelligence
Many platforms have built-in intelligence and learning that can understand individual customers’ preferences and behaviors to give them the best-suited choices for them.
1.4. Automation
The major benefit by far, is the ease of distribution, updating, and scalability the software offers at an individual level. These include simple gestures such as sharing birthday greetings, to complex sales actions such as giving customized coupons to cross-sell complementary products. All this while saving you a lot of effort, time, and overall costs.
2. 5 Best CRM & Enterprise Loyalty Platform
The CRM industry is experiencing rapid advancements due to emerging technologies and an increased focus on customer-centric strategies in 2023. Hence, a loyalty platform should have the capability, flexibility, and intuition to adapt to those needs. This is exactly the reason why we have put together this list of the 5 best CRM Loyalty Platforms for your enterprise.
2.1. Open Loyalty
Open Loyalty is the most popular and trusted Headless Loyalty Platform. It has a flexible set of loyalty blocks that allow you to build personalized loyalty programs. It takes an API-first approach and has more than 50 pre-built loyalty mechanics (eg. points, tiers, rewards, coupons, referrals) to help bring your vision to life.
With its guidance, you can quickly introduce rewarding loyalty programs in your brand-specific user experience, at any touchpoint. Open Loyalty has built-in elastic loyalty program tools that give developers the freedom to integrate it with other platforms and guarantee cost-effective scalability.
Open Loyalty is available both in SaaS and On-premise editions that can be deployed depending on the scale of your program and organization. This makes it a go-to platform for organizations of every size and sector such as retail, finance, insurance, travel, convenience, restaurants, FMCG, fuel, automotive, or B2B.
2.2. Ascentis
Ascentis CRM solution easily integrates existing POS systems or other customer acquisition channels. This facilitates the easy identification, capturing and collection of customer information. With the power of this consolidated data collected from various touch points, you can gather insights to satisfy, impress and re-engage not just the loyal customers but customers on every stage of their journey.
Ascentis allows you to engage your customers in real-time with the help of targeted personalized communications through various channels including email, mobile, social media, and more. Executives get a unified customer view that can offer amazing insights to help you use the preferred tools and engagement methods that drive, not just sales and loyalty, but also brand advocacy.
Ascentis has a wide range of APIs available that allow integration with existing applications to give you that single, unified view of every customer’s journey, enabling you to engage them at every step.
2.3. Talon.One
Talon.One was founded in 2015 by people who understand disruptive marketing. One has evolved into the premier promotion engine for growing companies and businesses. Ticketmaster, National Express, Just Eat, JD Sports, and other companies around the world count on it. Marketers and developers alike adore the product they’ve created.
Talon.One is a sophisticated Promotion Engine that allows you to create targeted, personalized marketing and sales promotions based on your customer and session data. All discounts, coupon codes, referrals, loyalty, and product bundles can be created, managed, and tracked in one place. Once you’ve integrated with Talon.One, you’ll be able to personalize promos using the Campaign Manager UI and use the extensive API to get real-time access to any data related to your business.
With Talon.One, you’ll have the flexibility to customize promotions through the Campaign Manager UI and access any data linked to your businesses in real-time through the robust API. By executing highly targeted and personalized promotional programs with Talon.One, you can increase consumer engagement, expand your brand, and reduce promotional spend.
2.4. Birdeye
Birdeye is an all-in-one Experience Marketing platform for multi-location businesses. Every day, more than 60,000 businesses of all sizes use Birdeye to be found online and chosen through listings, reviews, and referrals, engage with leads and customers on the channels of their choice, and provide the best customer experience possible with survey, ticketing, and insights tools.
Birdeye, which was founded in 2012 and is based in Palo Alto, is led by Google, Amazon, Salesforce, and Yahoo alumni. Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, Trinity Ventures, and World Innovation Lab are all investors in Birdeye.
2.5. Influitive
Influitive helps organizations build the most engaging customer communities. This easy-to-use platform is the combination of top-notch customer advocacy tools, intelligent automation based training, expert services, gamification, and personalized features that drive large scale engagement whilst cutting-down the administrative efforts and work time. The customer advocacy tools drive a higher rate of engagement and positive interactions with customers by creating and sharing enriching content. Integrating with CRM and marketing automation platforms, members can easily visualize the activity, get reports and review ROI.
The members can complete challenges, give referrals and product reviews and earn points and badges that can be redeemed as professional perks and privileges. Top organizations in the likes of ADP, Adobe, Cisco, and IBM rely on Influitive for fostering collaboration and building trusting relationships with their customers.
3. Conclusion
Customer loyalty, as we know it, will change in 2023 because customer preferences and habits have changed drastically due to the experiences that were faced during forced lockdowns of the pandemic year. Brands need to stay flexible and on their toes as it’s extremely important to adapt to the new normal in the post-pandemic world. A reliable software development partner such as Kyanon Digital can help keep your loyalty program on track with your customer preferences. We are authorized solution partners for Open Loyalty and Talon.One and have a truly capable team that can build a loyalty platform that meets global standards from scratch if required.
Drop us a line to understand the best CRM & Enterprise Loyalty Platform that can guide you through 2023 and beyond.
