Articles Tagged with: Customer Loyalty

Feasting on a long-lasting connection with your customers

Feasting on a long-lasting connection with your customers

Sundeep Keramalu

Director, Marketing Content | January 27, 2022


According to Oxford University researchers, a tiger’s brain is sixteen percent larger than a lion’s. As a result, Tiger is now widely believed to be the jungle king, contrary to what we were taught in school.

Just as people have traditionally believed that the lion was the king of the jungle, brands have always assumed that customer acquisition was paramount, and that customer retention was irrelevant. The reality, however, has been quite the opposite.

Businesses in the United States lose $136.8 billion annually due to poor customer retention.

Customer retention isn’t hard to achieve; it’s just that brands rarely put up the effort to hit hard where it counts.

When you don’t prioritize customer retention, you’re a sitting duck waiting to get devoured by your competition, who, by the way, has been listening to the sounds of the jungle and is ready to attack when you’re least expecting it.

Have a tiger in your tank.

Customer loyalty initiatives that delighted Baby Boomers and Generation X are not enough to excite the brands’ generations. Today’s loyalty programs perform better when tailored based on previous transactions and customer data. Sixty-four percent of customers expect personalized customer experiences based on previous transactions.

That is precisely what Perx Platform enables you to achieve. To begin, it detects the specific customer behaviors that contribute to your revenue. Second, it finds the incentives that will motivate your customers to take action. Third, it transforms your static digital efforts into dynamic, interactive, data-driven experiences. Finally, gamified rewards make customers feel good about what they do right away.

Don’t have a tiger by the tail.

Companies are frequently attracted to build software in-house to address complicated business challenges. However, while cost, control, connectivity, and maintenance are all reasons why businesses choose to develop software in-house, this is not always the prudent course of action. According to Gallup, one out of every six IT projects had a cost overrun of 200 percent and a schedule overrun of about 70 percent.

Perx is aware of the issue. That is why its industry-leading approaches such as Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), automation testing, and dockerization have become industry standards in the SaaS arena. At Perx, we take innovation and delivery to the next level by setting up our technologies and teams and rapid development procedures. We take pleasure in co-innovating to solve difficulties for our partners and clients in a matter of weeks.

When in doubt, ride a tiger.

Customers are more likely to leave if you take a reactive rather than proactive strategy. Find out what your lost customers are complaining about, and modify your product, pricing, or positioning to address their concerns. Analyze the trend if many people leave at a given moment. Collect feedback, centralize it, and figure out why most of them are going.

Fifty percent of millennials said they dropped out of a loyalty program because the rewards took too long to accumulate. In a fast-changing digital economy, traditional static loyalty and rewards programs are no longer effective. They are expensive to maintain and have become a liability for companies worldwide, negatively impacting profitability.

Customers today have a lot of expectations. Perx believes that how businesses interact with consumers and ecosystem partners needs to be rethought as their behavior constantly changes. Perx’s LMP is built to help brands move from being short-term and transactional to delivering meaningful relationships to millions of customers and partners worldwide.

If you want to be the new king, don’t just roar, roar to conquer.

70% of brands having a loyalty program do not allow customers to choose their favorite reward.

When you reward a customer, you are appealing to their emotional side. By doing so, you begin the process of developing a bond. As time goes on, they’ll regard you as more than just a product! As a result, it increases customer loyalty, encouraging repeat purchases that increase your revenue. This means you have to give them what matters to them and not what matters to you.

The majority of loyalty programs have the same goal: to keep consumers, increase customer lifetime value, and demonstrate appreciation. The customer’s last-mile journey is crucial to any engagement strategy. Finally, the platform extends this last mile by engaging customers in dynamic, gamified, and incentive-driven engagements that encourage them to do the actions and transactions they were truly aiming for. Additionally, Perx has established the Rewards Marketplace, which features an extensive curated range of retailer rewards that are linked with the digital consumer’s lives. Brands can respond to the quick gratification trend by rewarding customers for their behaviors through customized lifestyle rewards in only three simple clicks. Furthermore, organizations that want to launch their own in-app mobile commerce store and create a new revenue stream can do it without making significant investments or allocating essential resources.

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Global businesses have driven over 5 billion customer-brand interactions on Perx.

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The Road To A Brand’s Victory

The Road To A Brand’s Victory Is Paved With Small Wins For The Customer

The Road To A Brand’s Victory
Is Paved With Small Wins For The Customer

Sundeep Keramalu

Director, Marketing Content | December 16, 2021


You know I was thinking about what would be a wonderful approach to draft an article about gamification. I mean, isn’t it ironic? Gamification is the pinnacle of engaging someone in the way you want them to be involved in achieving a goal. And I am attempting to do so using a bunch of words. I will not deny it. This will be an arduous task. What say you? Allow me to open a fortune cookie and see what awaits me before I proceed. Let us see what my fortune cookie has to say.

Feed the ants in the anthill before you conquer Everest.

Yeah.

That was intense. Just the kind of motivation I needed. Thank you very much fortune cookie. I understand exactly what you mean!

If you want customer stickiness, you better not just have a glue gun, you got to own the whole damn glue factory!

Remember, you may have a fantastic product that offers excellent quality and unequaled convenience, and most importantly, a great value at a great price point. However, suppose you focus on all the fundamentals. In that case, you will ignore the “non-essentials,” such as customer engagement and retention, which, ironically, are the essentials that drive a brand’s growth and market share. It generates sales when you properly engage your customer. It boosts your brand’s visibility and loyalty. Above all, it helps with retention.

Existing customers are 60-70 percent likely to make a purchase. Unfortunately, the possibility of a sale with fresh prospects is only between 5% and 20%. As a result, customer retention and keeping your customers hooked are critical.

The Road To A Brand’s Victory Is Paved With Small Wins For The Customer

Nov 7-13 was #InternationalGamesWeek.

If you want a one-of-a-kind customer loyalty, you must give your customers a one-of-a-kind treatment.

When StarHub, a leading South-East Asian telecommunications company, wanted to cut through the competition in the post-pandemic market and make an impact on modern-day consumers, it went on a mission to build a unique one-of-a-kind digital rewards program for its customers.

To accomplish so, StarHub needed first to grasp the current trend, which saw a rising number of customers incorporating digital technology into their daily lives.

Second, StarHub is evolving from a telecom to a full-fledged digital life and digital services provider, offering customers the most rewarding connectivity, entertainment, and other lifestyle experiences, as well as innovative business solutions, all with seamless digital engagement at its core.

The Road To A Brand’s Victory Is Paved With Small Wins For The Customer

The Perx platform allows you to plan, customize and deploy campaigns on a whole new level.

Third, StarHub was aware that the telecom business had a high churn rate, despite telecom companies consistently offering attractive deals to entice new customers and retain existing customers. As a result, it was clear that it needed to address the significant issue of customer retention.

If you don’t want your brand’s growth to be static, you need to have a dynamic rewards program.

Once StarHub had finished understanding and analyzing their challenges, as well as having an unclouded vision of where they wanted to go, they partnered with Perx and established a dynamic rewards program, where customers could receive incentives digitally, seamlessly, and most importantly, instantly through the MyStarHub App.

When you transform a static customer-brand engagement strategy to a dynamic one, the journey of the end consumer is sprinkled with personalized rewards and gamified engagements that nudge actions along the way. As a result, making everything simple to absorb and digest for the end user is critical for customer adoption.

The Road To A Brand’s Victory Is Paved With Small Wins For The CustomerEvery Saturday from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., customers could spin the Wheel of Treats for a chance to win at StarHub Snapping Saturday.

Consumers were divided into three membership tiers based on their minimum monthly spending:

Green (less than $200)

Gold (more than $200 for six months)

Platinum (more than $200 for six months)

Green members were given fewer chances to spin the Wheel of Treats, while gold and platinum members were given more chances.

What was the outcome of the treat wheel?

The Road To A Brand’s Victory Is Paved With Small Wins For The Customer
The customer received a star each time the treat wheel was spun. The stars were treats. With 20 stars, a customer could enjoy a pastry. If the customer liked pizza, he/she could collect a few stars and exchange them for a pizza.

If you want to shine like the brightest star, you need to make your customers feel like stars.

Perx made sure StarHub’s rewards were not solely based on instant gratification. In the reward configuration, Perx designed it so that StarHub could reward its customers on specific days and at specific times. The date-bound and time-bound rewarding mechanism included special days too such as birthdays, anniversaries, and festivals.

The gamified rewards were tailored to each customer segment’s lifestyle preferences.

Personalized rewards are a surefire way to win your customers’ hearts. For the first time, like your customers, your loyalty program (if it had a soul) would thank you for resurrecting it from being just a glorified bookkeeper of points to enabling it to actively engage with your customers. Customers are more likely to join your loyalty/rewards program and adopt your products or services if you offer incentives. For the customer, the more individualized the incentives are, the more appealing they are.

The Road To A Brand’s Victory Is Paved With Small Wins For The CustomerIf you want customers to adopt your brand, you need to adapt to their lifestyle choices.

According to Epsilon research, personalization increased purchase intent by 80%.

Brands must keep in mind that the notion of rewarding customers should not appear to be a charity or feel impersonal. Instead, by understanding your customers’ requirements and lifestyle preferences, you can customize your rewards to fit their lifestyles, and that is when you have a winning formula.

In the customer engagement space a winning strategy is measured by customer adoption. StarHub’s previous customer acquisition goal was to onboard 10% of existing StarHub Singapore households into the New Rewards Loyalty Program within 30 days of introduction.

With Perx, StarHub had surpassed its goal by more than 100%, onboarding 20% of StarHub households in 30 days. This figure has climbed from 20% to 50% of all StarHub Households in Singapore in a few months.

Thanks to Perx’s unique mix of next-generation in-app customer experiences, dynamic incentive-led campaigns, and injecting the concept of gamification into every last-mile customer connection on the MyStarHub App, 4,465,889 rewards have been issued to customers at the time of writing this article.

Even though the fortune cookie I had at the beginning of the story was imaginary, the fortune cookie remains one of the most impressive innovations. It could have simply been a regular cookie. But here is a cookie that can tell you your fortune. It is not like you are going to sue the cookie if what the cookie predicts doesn’t come true. It is the intention that counts. The cookie gives you something to look forward to when you are going to eat it. Isn’t that delightful? See? That is all you need to focus on. You must provide something that your clients are not anticipating. This is the essence of gamification. It is not some esoteric jargon. It may be something simple, effective, and beneficial for both the customer and you, the brand.

Customers have the power to make or break a brand. Even if you are a brand that is made, you will still have your milestones to achieve to get to the next stage. Whether you are a new or established brand, we must not make the mistake of assuming that a consumer will continue to pay for our goods regardless of how we treat them – which is to say, by not treating them. There is, quite frankly, no better way to reward your customers in this era driven by instant gratification and smartphones than through gamification. To put it another way, give them something to do that fits their lifestyle choices, and they will gladly pay for your goods even if they had the option to go with your competition. They win, you score.

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Global businesses have driven over 5 billion customer-brand interactions on Perx.

Ready to join them?


How Retailers Can Win The Holiday Season By Truly Going Customer-First

How Retailers Can Win The Holiday Season By Truly Going Customer-First

How Retailers Can Win The Holiday Season By Truly Going Customer-First

Sean Foo

MarTech Blogger | December 06, 2021


As a retailer, the holiday season should be a cheery time of the year where stores would be packed and products flying off the shelves.

However, the current pandemic has changed customer behavior forever, rendering the time-tested marketing strategies of retailers to become increasingly obsolete.

How do you compete in an environment where margins are razor-thin and customers are notoriously fickle?

The solution lies in genuinely understanding what your customers desire, engaging them directly one-on-one, and influencing their decisions to drive what really matters — sales.

The First Step Is To Analyze Your Customer Data

How well do you really know your customers?

While many retailers can easily cite the customer demographics and the products or services that contribute the most revenue, knowing the exact preferences of your shoppers is essential.

Starbucks, for example, utilizes the data collected from their rewards program and mobile app to understand the purchasing habits of their millions of users. The rewards themselves, represent over 36% of US company-operated sales in 2017.

The data intelligence gathered allowed them to better personalize the Starbucks experience for their mobile app users, suggesting highly relevant products and new offerings that each customer might be uniquely interested in.

Through your point-of-sale (POS) system and loyalty programs, you can also start to build preferential data points around customers, segment them into distinct personas and let your customer engagement campaigns deliver a personalized treatment.

This allows you to recommend the right types of products they might be interested in instead of simply broadcasting a message that might reach everyone but pleases no one.

Engaging Your Customers Where They Are, Is A Must

When was the last time you made a conscious effort to go window shopping around a mall, hoping to spot the latest and most fantastic deals?

Sure, the Christmas trees on display in the mall might attract shoppers, but it is undeniable that retail store footfall has been steadily decreasing globally, and the pandemic has all but slowed it down to a trickle.

Online shopping & the digital floor space has taken over.

Most shoppers today live on their smartphones, and retailers will need to capitalize on this by engaging with them where they spend much of their attention.

Through targeted campaigns with highly personalized offers, brands will be able to actively engage their prospects to increase foot traffic to their physical stores or digital storefronts.

How Retailers Can Win The Holiday Season By Truly Going Customer-First

The Perx Loyalty and Engagement Platform allows retailers to target the right audience and hyper-personalize how your brand engages with your customer to influence the shopping cart naturally.

Imagine, your customer getting a digital scratch and win card just before Christmas that entitles him or her to claim their favorite drink from your cafe. The experience is unique, it is gamified and it is instantly gratifying.

It is how one retail chain in the Philippines managed to achieve a 700% increase in customer engagement on their loyalty program and how Thailand’s largest mall operator experienced a double-digit rise in footfall and revenue.

Solving Cart Abandonment Is Mission-Critical

Customers today enjoy an abundance of options; you are not the only retailer in town with a unique brand or quality products.

All too often, this leads to shopping cart abandonment that spikes to an all-time high, especially during the holiday season, where customers are being blasted with a continuous stream of offers and promotions.

How Retailers Can Win The Holiday Season By Truly Going Customer-FirstIn fact, a 2019 research has found that the average shopping cart abandonment rate is an astounding 69.57%.

From a long checkout process to the allure of comparison shopping and the lack of additional last-minute discounts, many factors could suddenly spur a prospective customer to abandon their purchase.

While it is impossible to eliminate cart abandonment fully, you will have to go beyond just optimizing the checkout process and removing roadblocks to a swift conversion. The key is to engage your customers both on-site before they leave and off-site should they exit your checkout page.

By analyzing your customer data and engaging them during the checkout process, you will be able to trigger excitement and influence your prospect towards the sale.

A first-time customer at your checkout page? Let them spin the wheel to win an additional 10% off their first purchase.

A loyal customer about to checkout? Let them shake a virtual tree and reward them with a sweet discount on their next purchase in the same shopping session!

A prospect that left the shopping session prematurely? Engage them through your store’s app with a reminder tied with gamified rewarding experience.

By sprinkling dynamic engagements within a single shopping experience, you will increase your brand touchpoints in an authentic way that influences their decision to purchase by incentivizing it.

This will allow you to reduce your cart abandonment rate and upsize the shopping carts to drive even more revenue per customer and increase the share of wallet.

Fight Against Lowered Margins With Hyper-personalized Offers

As a retailer, you know the drill when it comes to holiday promotions.

1-for-1 deals, 30% off store-wide and flash sales are classic promotional strategies retailers use to drive revenue and stand out amidst the fierce competition.

Sure, these deep discounts are great for your customers but a nightmare to your margins! Furthermore, relying on the loss-leader strategy is not always sustainable and does not guarantee additional purchases once you grab your customers’ attention.

What is more powerful (and profitable) is to hyper-personalize your offers and engagements to the right audience at the right time.

Amazon, for example, uses its customer purchase history and buying behavior to recommend the right promotions and products that matter to the buyer instead of a blanket discount.

You can do the same, too, by leveraging your customer data and sending personalized offers just as the holiday season begins!

A terrific way to gamify and personalize such an experience is a 12-days of Christmas scratchable calendar that can be integrated with your customer loyalty programs.

This allows customers to wake up and anticipate a new ‘present,’ which could be a targeted promotional product or a gift that they love, throughout the Christmas period.

Instead of just slashing prices store-wide, retailers should aim to gamify and personalize their customers’ shopping experience to increase their brand touchpoints while preserving their margins naturally.

Place Your Customer & Their Experience First This Holiday Season

Discounts and promotions alone do not win the day; prioritizing your customer experience and their needs do.

By leveraging your customer data and crafting interactive experiences that blend well with their lifestyle, you will be able to create unique brand touchpoints that go beyond just mere suggestions and indeed influence their purchasing decisions.

Ready to transform the way you engage with your customers this holiday season?

Learn more about the Perx Loyalty and Engagement Platform and how we have helped brands elevate their customer engagement strategies, transforming them from just another brand into an influencer in their customers’ lives.

Get in touch for a tailored demo and discover how you can influence and drive customer actions today.

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Global businesses have driven over 5 billion customer-brand interactions on Perx.

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Drive MAU Through Aha! Moments With Gamified Customer Touchpoints

Drive MAU Through Aha! Moments With Gamified Customer Touchpoints

Drive MAU through Aha! Moments with gamified customer touchpoints

Grace Alexander

MarTech Blogger | November 23, 2021


Building a strong MAU base is crucial to growing your brand. Your MAUs (Monthly Active User) are your most interactive customers, but if you are not providing them with continuing opportunities to engage, you could be missing chances to convert.

By creating a road map that anticipates and proactively encourages customer behaviors, brands can continually prompt engagement and keep the customer journey active, leading to more and repeated conversions.

What is Your MAU Ratio?

The effective reach of your brand is determined by the number of active users measured over time. Your daily active user (DAU) number counts how many unique users were active in the span of a single day.

Your monthly active user (MAU) number measures how many unique users were active at least one time within the one-month window.

The relationship between these two numbers — DAU divided by MAU — provides the MAU ratio. The higher the percentage, the more people your brand is reaching consistently (stickiness). A 20% ratio is an acceptable range for many industries. A brand like Facebook has a (self-reported) MAU ratio of 50%.

Each wow moment provides an opportunity to encourage a customer to perform a trigger event.

Monthly active users are important because they are consumers you can reach through lifestyle marketing. Think about Facebook. How many users get up, check Facebook, and maybe play a round or two of a game on the platform before work? Facebook has become part of their lifestyle.

From Wow to Aha! and Beyond

Customer journeys consist of multiple touchpoints. When a customer’s journey ends, so does their engagement with the brand. Brands must then work to restart a customer journey or create a new one.

By creating a road map that anticipates and proactively encourages customer behaviors, brands can continually prompt engagement and keep the customer journey active, leading to more and repeated conversions.

Gamification delivers instant gratification through hyper-personalized rewards through customized engagement mechanics that drive the customer journey from one micro-experience to the next.

Each touchpoint provides an opportunity for customer engagement and a wow moment. So, what is a “wow” moment? It is when you offer a pleasant surprise for your user and exceed their expectations, even in a small way.

In gamification, this can mean giving them a free powerup for the next game round or extra points just for logging in. For a bank, you might provide a stamp every time your user checks their balance. For a retailer, you could award points when they click to view the day’s deals.

Every Aha! moment reinforces your value to the customer and encourages them to keep engaging with your brand, performing actions that directly correspond to increased revenues.

Each wow moment provides an opportunity to encourage a customer to perform a trigger event. Maybe it’s just playing another game round. Perhaps it’s clicking to compare rates for their insurance coverage. It could even be agreeing to take a short, two-question survey that provides your business with beneficial data on consumer wants, needs, or behaviors.

Every trigger event provides the opportunity to wow the customer again. When they complete the desired action, they receive another reward or incentive. This could be a special offer, extra points that can be banked toward a tangible reward, or a discount code. Every action they perform and every reward they receive helps to establish the lifestyle ecosystem you are building.

When the customer is wowed repeatedly, they can experience an Aha! moment. This “Aha!” moment is when the customer realizes and understands the value of your product/service, and becomes both more loyal to your brand (and more likely to share it with or recommend it to others).

When nurturing customers through multiple micro-experiences leads to Aha! moments, brands never miss a chance to interact with customers and drive revenue-connected actions. Every Aha! moment reinforces your value to the customer and encourages them to keep engaging with your brand, performing actions that directly correspond to increased revenues.

CX + UX = Success

Customer experience (CX) is the journey, touchpoints, and milestones your customers progress through via engagement with your brand. User experience (UX) is how easy the environment your users interact within makes completing various actions.

Perx ties the two together, making every customer interaction with your brand easy, fun, and part of a larger plan to drive revenue. Gamification delivers instant gratification through hyper-personalized rewards through customized engagement mechanics that drive the customer journey from one micro-experience to the next.

By streamlining and aligning both CX and UX, you create a continual customer journey user experience that can do all of the following:

  • Acquire new customers, whether through referral or introductions to your gamification experience through a business app or an ad.
  • Activate these customers by incentivizing them to perform their first action, giving you the opportunity to wow them.
  • Retain your new customers by keeping them engaged with continued incentivized touchpoints and wow moments.
  • Drive revenues when your customer reaches an Aha! moment after continued rewards tied to desired behaviors.
  • Attract new customers thanks to the referrals your existing customers generate for your brand.

Gamifying each touchpoint on the customer journey allows you to keep customers engaged. When you track your customers and analyze their behaviors, you can identify important milestones at which your customer is ripe for a nudge.

Using push notifications via SMS or email when a customer has nearly achieved a milestone gives you the ideal opportunity to incentivize the desired action.

For example, an active customer with 8 stamps out of 10 can be provided with an opportunity to perform an action that wins them two stamps instead of just one, allowing you to wow the customer by boosting them to reach their goal, and guide them toward an Aha! Moment.

By unearthing deeper insights into customer behavior and creating additional customer-brand touchpoints, you can stay top-of-mind as you build your brand’s tribe and gamify critical journey milestones to increase campaign completion and engagement rates.

The cycle of action and reward can be repeated over and over. The customer becomes accustomed to participating in your gamification as part of the lifestyle environment. Continued interaction and revenue-driving actions increase their lifetime value (LTV) to your brand, and prepare them to be brand ambassadors, ready to act as an organic recruitment arm.

Perx Bridges the Gap One Micro Experience at a Time

Most rewards, loyalty and incentive programs are transient, meaning they do not have a strategy to maintain continuous engagement with the customer. They are also highly transactional, lacking a meaningful connection to the customer.

Your company needs to shift from these transient and transactional engagements to continuous and meaningful engagements. Making that change requires the ability to streamline the customer journey user experience and make each engagement personalized for the individual.

Perx makes it possible to string multi-action engagements into a seamless customer journey, combining specific customer actions with collaborative or competitive challenges to increase stickiness. As a result, each micro experience is a potential wow or Aha! moment.

By unearthing deeper insights into customer behavior and creating additional customer-brand touchpoints, you can stay top-of-mind as you build your brand’s tribe and gamify critical journey milestones to increase campaign completion and engagement rates.

The proof of what Perx can do to unify your customer experience strategy is undeniable. See what we have already done for our partners:

  • Leading telco: enjoyed 50% customer acquisition in 8 months and increased net new revenues by 100%.
  • Popular retail company: drove transactions worth $34M in the first 60 days after launching the campaign and acquired 225% unique customers.
  • Mobile-first bank: reached a 99.8 last-mile redemption rate, with 601K users engaged and 2.5M rewards redeemed.

Want your business to be predictably successful? Watch this short video of how Perx uses gamification to drive MAU and schedule a demo.

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Global businesses have driven over 5 billion customer-brand interactions on Perx.

Ready to join them?


How the World’s Most Popular Game Failed to Put a Smile on its Players’ Faces

make your customer smile

How the world’s most popular game failed to put a smile on its players’ faces

Sundeep Keramalu
Director, Marketing Content | October 01, 2021


The primary lockdowns in 2020 were hard for all of us. Numerous brands reinvented themselves and achieved extraordinary success. And some became extinct in a matter of days during this time. Then some outliers created solutions and products to capitalize on the possibilities and dominate the market in response to disruptions in consumers’ lifestyles.

What is the point of being tall if you are not going to make the people who made you tall sit on your shoulders and feel elevated?

Genshin Impact (GI), an action role-playing, free-to-play (F2P) game, having only launched in September 2020, profoundly affected the whole gaming industry. For a world that had been shut down, an open-world game appeared to be a faraway universe’s answer to a desperate cry from the heart.

GI became the only game in history to earn a billion dollars in just six months. The gamers were crazy about the game, and the game developers made sure their game was incredibly good to keep the players from getting enough of the game.

Each time it released a new character pack, the most obsessed players generated a cool $12 million (in a single day) in revenue for GI.

Everything in the GI universe was going fantastic, until GI decided to celebrate its first anniversary, at which point things became real… and ugly!

When brands re-energize their customer engagement strategy and loyalty initiatives by aligning them with the everyday life choices of their consumers, they increase retention and create superfans.

Fans of the game expected great prizes for their dedication on the game’s first anniversary. Instead, GI offered only a quarter of a gacha doll’s price. What is the point of being tall if you are not going to make the people who made you tall sit on your shoulders and feel elevated?

When players started complaining about the measly rewards from GI on the official forum, the game’s publisher deleted the complaints. This led to the players expressing their frustrations on the app’s review section on the Google Play store, plunging Genshin Impact’s score from 4.5 to a meagre 2.8.

If GI could have duly, appropriately, and timely rewarded its players, it might have deepened its emotional ties with them.

It is a terrible irony that a gaming company that excels in enticing players to purchase fantastical accessories and levels fails to amaze where it counts most – ensuring that hooked users stay hooked through meaningful engagement strategies.

Steps that could have kept GI on its exponential trajectory

If GI had implemented tailored rewards for its estimated three million users through gamification, it would have had happier players and not disappointed fans on its anniversary.

GI failed to go the extra mile. It was the occasion to make its players happy by circumventing the rules, adding extras, or offering contextual rewards for their in-game actions. If GI could have duly, appropriately, and timely rewarded its players, it might have deepened its emotional ties with them, transforming happy users to a loyal tribe.

Maintaining a transient and transactional relationship with customers is no longer sufficient. GI is no doubt an awesome game. However, did it perform admirably when it mattered? Not at all.

A brand is only ever truly happy when its customers are genuinely happy.

Never too late to course-correct your engagement strategy

Brands must go above and beyond to maintain meaningful engagement with customers, from the first to last touchpoint. This can happen through hyper-personalization, dynamic engagement mechanics, advanced gamification and focusing on data-in-motion rather than data-at-rest. When brands re-energize their customer engagement strategy and loyalty initiatives by aligning them with the everyday life choices of their consumers, they increase retention and create superfans.

Not only does that make customers happy, but it also makes the brand happy. And we all know, a brand is only ever truly happy when its customers are genuinely happy.

Perx Loyalty and Engagement Platform has helped brands transform their customer engagement strategies and actively contributed to their topline growth by increasing customer engagement by up to 12x. Connect with us to learn how you can influence and drive customer actions in the instant gratification, mobile-first economy.

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Global businesses have driven over 5 billion customer-brand interactions on Perx.

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Is Loyalty dead, or does it just need a defibrillator?

Is Loyalty dead, or does it just need a defibrillator?

Is Loyalty dead, or does it just need a defibrillator?

Amrith G
VP, Marketing | June 28, 2021


Okay, so that is not entirely true. Customer loyalty isn’t really dead – it’s still a top priority for marketers and brands world over.

Only thing is, it’s vastly different now.

For one, brand-centric loyalty metrics like the recency, frequency, and monetary value (RFM) of customer spends aren’t relevant anymore. Instead, today, loyalty is all about how well your brand fits into each customer’s life, powered by emotions.

In 2021, if you want customers to continue buying from your brand, just showing up with good products or services isn’t enough. You need to offer additional value, and it has to be personalized to fit each individual customer.

Which brings us to the most important portion, “lifestyle marketing”.

In a world where technology has drastically altered consumer lifestyles, it is the panacea to your customer loyalty conundrum. It involves building brand affinity by offering content and experiences that your audience doesn’t want to live without. This is why, today customer loyalty can be built through wholesome experiences, enhanced by instant gratification and hyper-personalization.

But, first, let’s unpack the reasons for the evolution of customer loyalty to what it is today.

Why customers deserve their pound of flesh in the digital era

Today’s customers are a mobile-slinging, well-informed, and dynamic bunch. They are switching between channels, devices, and sites as they shop. At the same time, they are spoilt for choice, constantly being bombarded with targeted messaging, on their smart devices.

Technology has also lowered switching costs. So, while starting a new business and acquiring new customers has become easier, so has losing customers. Especially considering it costs 5 to 10x more to acquire a new customer, your efforts need to be focused on retaining loyal customers.

All of this has completely shifted the power dynamics. It’s the customers, and not brands, that wield the real clout and they are demanding their pound of flesh. They want a relationship that is more than just basic transactions.

To stay relevant, brands not only need to innovate beyond traditional offerings but also need to transform their loyalty programs into customer engagement engines. By embracing lifestyle marketing brands have started to place customer engagement at the core of any customer-brand touchpoint.

This is why you will find B2C and B2B2C businesses trying to become lifestyle brands. For instance, several insurers are venturing into fitness and wearables. Traditional banks are emulating a super-app-like ecosystem of digital lifestyle services within their banking apps or jumping on the Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) bandwagon. Speaking of wagons, something core to people’s daily lives such as owning and fueling an automobile to move from point A to point B is shifting from a single price tag to a subscription-based service offering a lifetime of energy in form of battery swaps (electric cars).

But four fundamental questions remain!

1. What is the purpose of a business?

Contrary to popular opinion, brands shouldn’t be only about making profits and providing employment. These are merely by-products of doing business. Instead, your focus needs to be all about offering customers ‘real’ value by addressing their needs and solving their problems. The idea is to keep them constantly engaged. Ultimately, this value exchange creates a sense of emotional loyalty and shared purpose amongst your customers.

2. How to run loyalty programs right?

Loyalty programs have become a hygiene and a prerequisite. Today, successful loyalty programs run by Starbucks and American Express are considered the gold standard.

The only issue is that they are not very well thought-out. Mostly, they are just knee-jerk reactions to a competitor’s customer retention efforts.

To create loyalty programs that offer more strategic and long-term value to customers, you can follow these strategies:

  • Deliver additional customer value, be it functional, emotional, social, aspirational, or psychological, above and beyond the core offerings. Customers really value such add-on benefits. This is why ‘Paid Loyalty’ programs (like Amazon Prime) are becoming so popular.
  • Harness customer data smartly to offer hyper-personalized and authentic appeals to the head and heart. Thus, actively giving customers a reason to earn and burn their loyalty points.
    Is Loyalty dead, or does it just need a defibrillator?

    Source: McKinsey & Company – Preparing for loyalty’s next frontier: Ecosystems

  • Balance monetary rewards with experiential offerings such as exclusive events and early access. After all, 72% of millennials prefer to spend on experiences vs products.
3. What is the purpose of customer engagement?

The goal of customer engagement is to secure top-of-mind recall for your brand. This can be achieved by delivering customer value through interactions across varied channels that strengthen the relationship with customers.

The only problem is, nowadays, the focus of customer engagement and loyalty programs have shifted AWAY from customer value. Customer engagement strategies are disjointed from consumer lifestyles.

Luckily, Perx lifestyle marketing solutions resurrect loyalty as a concept for brands. We help by building data-driven engagement opportunities, targeting customers, and rewarding their actions. Growth in customer engagement rate by up to 6 – 12x compared to what you are experiencing now with traditional digital marketing.

4. What exactly is customer value?

Customer value is the satisfaction a customer experiences (or expects to experience) by taking an action relative to the cost of that action. To deliver real customer value, be sure to get regular customer feedback. Find out what the customer considers important and deliver better on these factors than the competition.

Tying all of it together

Any customer engagement strategy or loyalty program has to be centered around consumers’ lifestyles. Why? Because as individuals and as a society, our needs have evolved over time from the tier-1 physiological needs to the more sophisticated cognitive and self-actualization (emotional) needs.

Is Loyalty dead, or does it just need a defibrillator?

Source: 1 Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs

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The real cost of standalone loyalty programs

The real cost of standalone loyalty programs

The real cost of standalone loyalty

The real cost of standalone loyalty programs

Martech Influencer, CEO of Esco Media | June 29, 2021


How are top enterprises leveraging loyalty programs? And more importantly, what is the cost and benefits of such programs?

Before we answer that question, let’s first align on what is a standalone loyalty program?

A standalone loyalty program is one that is static and transactional. Such programs only get triggered with the purchase and ignore all other actions taken in a customer journey.

An integrated program is dynamic. It aligns with every action a customer takes in a journey, rewarding him/her for specific ones that matter.

Integrated programs have traditionally been a win-win for both customers and brands. In fact, 58.7% of internet users believe earning rewards and loyalty points is one of the most valued aspects of the shopping experience.

And for brands, over 70% of consumers are more likely to recommend a brand if it has a good loyalty program.

Now that we’ve covered the benefits, what are the costs?

Hidden Cost Of Standalone Loyalty programs

Even though it takes substantial time and effort to build the network and rewards, the outcome and ROI don’t justify the efforts put in.

Some of the other challenges standalone loyalty programs pose include:

  • Limited area of operations

    Standalone loyalty programs can work with specific geographical locations. Therefore, they limit your marketing reach. If your business needs to expand into another market, for example, then you’ll have difficulties implementing the standalone program there.

  • Brand liability

    Loyalty program liability is an actual liability for brands in their financial books. A static, standalone loyalty program only enables customers to earn points. All of a sudden, a few million points accumulate with little to no burning of points by customers (e.g. redemption of rewards and services, etc). Why is that? It’s because of the nature of a standalone program, that focuses on being a mere ledger of points and not one that actively engages the customers nudging them to burn and redeem services and rewards.

  • The tipped scale of efforts and benefits

    The tipped scale between the efforts that go into building the program is so much that it outshines the benefits for a brand. For instance, a 4 – 6 member team may spend roughly 1,000 hours collectively each year to scout, shortlist, partner, negotiate and procure rewards and reward partners.

  • No scope for growth

    Due to their inefficiencies, many standalone loyalty programs fail to trigger customer actions (or additional purchases). For example, customers may find it frustrating when they aren’t able to redeem their loyalty points on other platforms. This may negatively impact their repeat purchases.

From Cost Centre To Cost Saver

Here are just three ways to cut costs and drive revenue with AI-enabled automated and personalized loyalty programs.

  1. Generate new revenue streams with m-commerce in-app reward stores.

    You can instantly set up your own m-commerce in-app reward stores and create a new revenue stream. The in-app reward stores could help you develop your own marketplace, where customers can trade in points or rewards.

  2. Choose from curated rewards tailored to your customers’ lifestyles.

    Rewards can be filtered based on location, popularity, categories, expiry, availability, and price. For example, the rewards for newly introduced products could be different from older products.

  3. Reduce time spent on manually identifying, procuring, and managing rewards.

    Businesses spend a lot of time verifying and reimbursing rewards. Moreover, manually managing vendor relationships, as well as identifying and procuring rewards can be costly and time-intensive. Instead, your resources can be redirected towards additional activities such as optimizing campaigns.

The time and costs saved by replacing manual processes with personalized and dynamic customer engagement can boost your productivity and revenue.

How Top Brands Are Reinventing Their Approach To Building Loyalty

Here are just a few Asia Pacific-based brands that are modernizing their loyalty program.

  • Singapore’s leading telecom company achieved around 27% growth in monthly active users or MAU with the help of dynamic customer engagements.
  • A Philippines-based leading electronics chain was also able to improve their conversion rate by almost 90% with loyalty programs.
  • A leading global bank used gamification to achieve credit card spends in excess of USD200 million.
Loyalty Marketing For The Mobile-First Economy

It is clear standalone loyalty programs do just that – ‘stand alone’. They are expensive to run because of their inefficiencies. So, it is important to look for a viable solution as you update your customer rewards strategy. For more information, click here to learn more about how you can resurrect your loyalty or rewards program in your pursuit of building customer loyalty.

Ready to transform your rewards, loyalty, and customer engagement strategy? Get in touch for a tailored demo today, and add it to your marketing toolkit!

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Global businesses have driven over 5 billion customer-brand interactions on Perx.

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Welcoming Banks to the mobile-first instant gratification economy

Welcoming Banks to the mobile-first instant gratification economy

Amrith G
VP, Marketing | February 13, 2020


Too late! That is how large enterprises traditionally have responded to disruptions.

If you look at historic data just from the last 60 years, the least critical way of answering this question would be ‘not quite effectively’ Richard N foster in his book, ‘Creative Destruction’ proves the same by quoting ‘The life span of a company back in 1958 was 61 years and in 2018 it reduced to 18 years.’ In the next 7 years 75% of companies in the S&P 500 index are expected to be replaced by new emerging challengers in each industry.

The category of companies in the crosshair of displacement are the large B2C enterprises who serve the millions of end consumers – the you and me of the world.

Focusing on the Banking industry. 47% of key banking transactions such as C2C and C2B payments, funds transfers and personal loans have been executed by fintechs and digital payment gateways. The wedge that the Apple and Google Pays of the world have pegged between the banks and their millions of end customers is a sizeable one and if not addressed it is only bound to grow exponentially en-route to erode a bank’s profit margins, 1 micro percentile at a time.

In the era of fintechs and the shift towards digital and virtual banks, the one who holds the key to last-mile customer data becomes the victor by default. Last-mile customer data is the new oil, and the trick to master and acquire it is in how closely you position yourself as an enterprise to your consumer – This translates to how much of the customer’s mobile mindshare does your brand, products and services enjoy? With over $100B invested in existing and new mobile-first fintechs globally every year, the wedge between traditional banks and their customers will turn into a larger crevasse.

So how can banks respond to these disruptions? The customer engagement and loyalty platform from Perx enables large B2C enterprises across Banking and other core verticals to reduce this wedge. With the majority of Perx customers represented by Banking & FSI, Perx facilitates them to get back in the driver’s seat by intelligently incentivising its customers for every action and interaction they have with their bank. Let’s face it, in this instant gratification mobile-first economy, the one who conquers your smartphone has the map to succeed.

By arming marketers in the banking industry with a platform that drives not just vanity metrics such as likes and shares but ‘true top-line growth’ through revenue generating customer actions, Perx enables banks to conquer last-mile customer data and interactions – reversing the growing wedge into a disappearing crack.

The Perx-Oracle partnership delivers the sharpest tool in the marketing armoury that banks have long needed.

Leandro Bark, Head of Partnerships, Perx

Perx’s partnership with Oracle and its Open banking APIs initiative helps address and solve this problem at lightning speed. With over 1200+ global banks trusting Oracle Core banking systems, they now get a chance to take the fight back to disruptions such as the mobile-first customer, fintechs and the rest of the herd.

The Perx platform integrated with Oracle open banking APIs allows banks to instantly drive customer transactions, increase credit card spend, reduce loyalty debt and drive meaningful customer engagement all with instantly rewarding customers for doing so.

Our partnership with Perx enables banks to conquer the elusive last-mile in customer engagement.

Sanjay Mathew, Senior Director, Oracle Financial Services

Singapore’s largest bank drove S$ 24 Million in net new credit card spend on a single customer engagement onboard the Perx platform in a matter of 14 days. The largest bank in Philippines drove $64 Million in net new transactions over a week through a dynamic, gamified customer engagement campaign, and one of Singapore’s largest telco increased its daily engaged customers by 110x in the first 60 days of onboarding Perx.

Learn more about Perx. Connect with us to find out how Perx + Oracle can help you drive top-line growth for your company.

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Global businesses have driven over 5 billion customer-brand interactions on Perx.

Ready to join them?