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The Power of Loyalty Partnerships

The Power of “N-squared minus N”: the number of connections in a Partnership network

Loyalty Partnerships are a popular and effective way to enhance customer value propositions and to drive outcomes for all parties involved in influencing customer loyalty. They help in at least these 4 areas.

Promotion

Partner promotion opportunities include advertising and branding cooperation, product placement and joint marketing such as events and content. Partnering increases the reach of brand messages and promotions. They can reach customers you do not know, and vice versa.

Tangible Benefits

Partnerships can increase the suite of benefits offered to your customers, allowing benefits to be richer and more diverse. This can also include discounts, giveaways, and experience. Plus, novelty and variety in your marketing appeals directly to an important group of customers who will otherwise disengage, and partners let you ‘mix it up’ for them.

Product / Services

Consider product co-development opportunities with your partners including complementary offerings and product/service bundles.

Extended Capabilities

Partnering can also provide operational benefits such as shared resources across marketing efforts, technology, and operations. Joint venture opportunities also may exist. Share data (preserving privacy) to establish a hub of collaborative commerce, exploiting the network effect to each Partner’s benefit.

What are the benefits of acquiring Partners?

Better customer insight through richer customer data from multiple sources.

Exposure: Reach a new customer base, this provides many opportunities to communicate to a larger audience.

Revenue: Create new streams of income through partners.

Uplift: Drive increased spend and retention through network effects and communicating to more customers.

Efficiency: Leveraging common resources such as marketing and technology to create cost savings.

Brand: Leveraging brand synergies can help strengthen all parties brand positioning and awareness.

3 key steps to developing partnership opportunities

To start your partnership strategy, consider these three steps …

Step 1: Identify by creating a longlist of candidates and categorise them by value to you and your customers

Create a longlist of potential partners in the market and categorise according to complementary value and attractiveness of their customers.

Step 2: Define a range of opportunities

Apply a decision framework to identify specific partnership opportunities and align on objectives.

Step 3: Validate and assess the viability of the opportunity

Evaluate. We recommend a Balanced Scorecard approach with multiple perspectives including financial, customer, processes, resources, and assets / systems. This provides a comprehensive view of the partnership viability

Characteristics of successful loyalty program partnerships

A partnership strategy is one component of the overall loyalty initiative. Ensure that your program:

Is integrated into the full experience

Uses data to drive insights

Solves customer pain points

Maximises perceived value

Allocates loyalty investment

Aligning partnership initiatives to the overarching brand message will help create a successful customer loyalty strategy. Customers love the idea they can earn rewards in lots of places.

Measuring your Return on Loyalty®

With all loyalty investments, it is important to clearly measure and improve the ROI (return on investment) of your customer investments.

We are Ellipsis, the Customer Loyalty Experts. We help businesses thrive through solving complex customer problems. Please get in touch, we’d love to talk.