Attracting digital natives in a mobile-first, instant gratification economy

Grace Alexander

MarTech Blogger | June 6, 2022

Connections between companies and their customers are going digital. This isn’t the kind of shift that business can or should try to counteract — rather, they should start searching for the best ways to make these mobile-driven online connections flourish.

Both sides of the customer-business divide are digital natives. Today’s young consumers have grown up in a connected world, able to search out any information they need from their smart devices. Start-ups, too, have come of age in a digital world, rising rapidly using cloud technology and often preferring to market their products and services via mobile means.

The fast-moving world of always-on connectivity and instant gratification is the new battlefield where companies have to compete for consumers’ loyalty. Organizations that are able to adopt this mindset and give customers the compelling digital experiences they’re looking for are well equipped to become leaders in their fields.

Attracting young customers’ attention

Using a smartphone to interact with a brand isn’t like sitting at a computer. While today’s phones are capable of delivering powerful web browsing experiences, the sheer fact that they’re portable means people will often interact with them for short moments in time.

Picking up a smartphone while riding public transit, walking or getting lunch may lead to a very short interaction — if an activity takes a long time to accomplish, a phone user may skip it. This means that bands hoping to reach young consumers primarily through mobile devices must focus on memorable experiences that can be completed in seconds.

Getting a brand’s audience to commit to an ongoing loyalty and rewards program when interactions are so short and attention spans are so fractured is a unique kind of challenge. Making a positive first impression on customers is a key best practice in this regard.

What should that first interaction entail? The consumer should receive a reward or incentive they actually care about, something that has value. Even though it may seem tempting to give out very small amounts of points at first, to ensure consumers have to come back and earn more, such a withholding approach may simply cause customers to become bored and disengage.

In addition to having value, the engagement should also be gamified. This means it will have some fun, game-like characteristics, such as making progress toward an objective or earning a spot on a public leaderboard.

Finally, every quick interaction should be part of a unified customer experience. CMSWire noted that when brands take their CX seriously, they build long-term connections with their audiences. People who receive consistent messaging from a brand through every channel — in-person, online and mobile — will feel more comfortable continuing to engage with that business.

Keeping digital natives loyal

Once smart device users have had one good interaction with a company, it’s up to the brand to keep bringing those consumers back for more. They can make this easier by not creating barriers between audiences and the business

If people have ways to keep interacting with companies in ways that don’t involve spending any money, that helps the connection between the two parties flourish. This may mean granting badges, and allowing consumers to rise in rankings and creating gamified point systems that reward touches and engagements rather than purchases.

In addition to creating more possible engagements, customization may be a key part of the ongoing interaction between consumers and brands. MasterCard noted that in the digital age, people are not as willing to select rewards from a long list — this is a time-consuming interaction, and it may drive customers away. Rather, brands should be using the data generated by interactions to personalize rewards individuals will like and offer those.

Distinctive, customized interactions leading to personalized, data-driven digital rewards are the backbone of a loyalty program that can win over young, digital-native consumers.

Turning loyalty into ROI

Ongoing, non-monetary contact with customers doesn’t automatically turn into value, but businesses that commit to such a strategy can use it to nudge their audiences in the direction of a purchase. One of the valuable traits of a data-driven and automation-heavy digital rewards program is that it evolves over time. This can culminate in suggesting more direct commercial engagement.

A gamified customer journey that starts with simple mobile interactions can lead to a more all-encompassing connection between shopper and company. As Mondia Digital CEO Paolo Rizzardini suggested on his LinkedIn blog, gamification can set the stage for a long-term bond between these parties, with the highly engaged consumers speaking positively about the brand and reengaging often.

A loop of positive engagements, powered by evolving rewards, can build up loyalty and keep customer relationships strong over time. Rizzardini pointed to the Nike Run Club app and the Starbucks loyalty points system. Both programs use gamified interactions to keep users’ attention for the long term.

The common thread between compelling customer loyalty programs in the digital age is that they don’t demand much of consumers. Interactions with companies’ mobile-first digital tools are fun and enjoyable, and often don’t require a purchase. Audiences can stay in touch with the businesses, earning customized rewards and building positive associations — then, when it’s time to buy, they know where to turn.

Perx is the right rewards platform for digital natives

The right rewards platform is an essential piece of technology to connect digital-native companies with digital-native consumers. The Perx Loyalty Engagement Platform is the right solution for the modern, fast-moving customer relationships because of its comprehensive, future-minded feature set.

From gamified experiences and non-monetary rewards to powerful automation tools and a high degree of customization, the system is a compelling choice for businesses hoping to become more tech-forward and mobile-centric. Campaigns can naturally evolve over time, keeping users interested with fun interactions, then guiding them to commercial sites when the time is right.

In a world of short attention spans, it is possible to hold customer attention for a long time. Businesses simply have to know how to string countless small moments together into ongoing relationships. Request a demo to learn more.

Recommended for you

What Messi’s New Club and a Digital Bank Teach About ‘Aha’ Moments

What Messi’s New Club and a Digital Bank Teach About ‘Aha’ Moments

Blogs, Customer Engagement, Game Theory

Customer Retention Strategies for Banks That Work

Customer Retention Strategies for Banks That Work

Blogs, Personalization, Customer Retention

Design customer centric campaigns for enhanced Loyalty

Design customer centric campaigns for enhanced Loyalty

Customer Acquisition, Engagement, Personalized Rewards

Attain customers through individualized perks

Attain customers through individualized perks

Customer Engagement, Customer Acquisition, Digital Banking

Seamless Digital Customer Onboarding – Why are banks still dreaming of it, in 2022?

Seamless Digital Customer Onboarding – Why are banks still dreaming of it, in 2022?

Blogs, Digital Onboarding, Digital Transformation

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

Ready to join them?

Financial Brand Loyalty Marketing: It’s All About Gratification

Financial brand loyalty marketing: It’s all about gratification

Instant. Constant. Consistent. Paving the way for true top-line growth

Grace Alexander

MarTech Blogger | May 4, 2022

Loyalty marketing for financial brands can be a tricky thing. Banks are inherently distrusted by one set of consumers, typically younger generations who view them as self-serving and unsupportive of their goals. In contrast, fintechs are given the side-eye by older generations who value longevity and a track record over digitized, mobile-first interactions.

Both sets of consumers want a financial brand experience driven by transparency and a clear motive to gratify their needs and wants. Whether they are traditional banking institutions or budding fintechs just getting a foothold, brands that achieve this will be able to drive top-line growth and lasting, active, and engaged brand loyalty.

Properly done, financial brand loyalty marketing boosts earnings, increases sales, and enables long-term expansion. A well-planned and implemented loyalty and rewards program can assist you in retaining existing customers, attracting new customers, and growing revenues. This happens through last-mile engagements, which can rise by 12 times with a modern and tech-driven program.

Brand Stickiness vs. Brand Loyalty

Any brand that caters effectively to the needs of its customers enjoys some level of free customer stickiness and retention because switching brands — especially financial brands — can be a hassle.

However, most brands take this free element and don’t build on it to lasting advantage. For example, banks have incredibly high customer stickiness, but very few implement effective customer engagement marketing to transform that stickiness into true brand loyalty.

On the other hand, fintechs may be knocking it out of the park when it comes to customer engagement, but haven’t sufficiently aligned their messaging and brand loyalty marketing to lock in their more fickle customers and make them truly stick in the face of an ever-expanding market of options.

Instant Gratification in Your Bank Loyalty Program

Today’s banking customer expects and demands instant gratification at each touchpoint. You can leverage these opportunities by providing instant gratification, so that interacting with your financial brand becomes a normalized part of your customer’s lifestyle.

The rewards offered at these interactions should be flexible to provide customer choice and match each consumer with a personalized bonus. In addition, these instant rewards should be visible to other members of the person’s social circle, keeping the brand top of mind and providing a positive incentive to come back and earn more.

Account opening

Customers want instant access to benefits, from a ready-to-use ATM, debit, or credit card to loan application and line of credit options.

Potential reward: An instant large reward (a one-time reward for each account opened, the scale of which may vary based on the opening deposit amount.)

Account balance checks

Customers expect instant information without jumping through hoops to access their accounts and repeatedly prove who they are.

Potential reward: A token or bonus reward if over a certain balance (a recurring reward, given every day checked, the amount may vary based on target balance tiers.)

Account transactions

Customers desire the ability to complete a deposit, transfer, or bill payment instantly and receive real-time confirmations and notifications.

Potential reward: An instant reward given when a predetermined milestone is hit (a recurring reward, given every time a new milestone is achieved, the amount may vary based on milestone type and size.)

Set up direct deposit

Customers want to take advantage of time-saving benefits and receive their reward (typically a discount on bank fees or a cash bonus) right away without waiting for 30, 90 or 120 days.

Potential reward: An instant reward is given when a new direct deposit is set up (a one-time reward for each direct deposit, the size of which may vary based on the average deposit amount.)

Check or cash deposits

Customers demand instant availability of funds without waiting for them to clear. This includes funds from regularly scheduled, automated deposits that fall on weekends or holidays.

Potential reward: A token or bonus reward every time a deposit over a certain amount is made (a recurring reward, the amount may vary based on the amount of the deposit)

Referrals

Customers want immediate rewards for “helping their brand out” by referring other people who become customers as part of a customer loyalty scheme.

Potential reward: A large instant reward (a one-time reward for each successful referral, the amount may vary based on the type of account opened or amount of initial deposit.)

These interactions provide the ability to add touchpoints to an ongoing customer journey and provide instant gratification as part of a customer rewards and brand loyalty program.

Constant Gratification in Brand Loyalty Marketing

Don’t drop the ball. You have your customers’ attention, and the way to keep it is through constant, consistent reiteration.

The customer journey is ongoing

You can’t depend on “set and forget” vanity programs that simply count shares and likes. Every time you have the chance to reach out to a customer, whether it’s to congratulate them on hitting a new milestone or encouraging them to complete a journey leg, you need to take it.

The customer journey is unique.

Personalized experiences require constant monitoring, tracking and check-ins to drive additional opportunities for engagement, and data analysis to ensure you are providing ultimate rewards customers actually want to collect.

The customer experience should be fun!

Add gamification for an even more engaged customer base. You don’t have to build everything in-house to develop customer experience ecosystems with which your customers will love to interact.

Consistent Gratification in Customer Engagement Marketing

Banking customers are discerning and aware. Customer loyalty systems and rewards programs that aren’t consistent will soon be dismissed. It’s a big mistake to offer a 100-point incentive for an action one time, then offer half the incentive a few months later. Be consistent, and constantly improve and expand.

How Perx Drives Bank and Fintech Brand Loyalty Marketing Via Experiences

The Perx Loyalty and Engagement Platform (LMP) transforms how banks and fintechs engage with their customers, and helps you instantly, constantly and consistently provide gratification through personalized experiences and rewards.

With this platform, you can maintain customer engagement marketing as you scale, bringing in new business and retaining high-value customers while driving revenue-generating actions. It allows you to:

Prevent waste associated with legacy brand-building and marketing.
Make the customer journey frictionless, instantly gratifying and socially viral.
Provide rewarding experiences that drive real revenue and keep brands top of mind.
Create a seamless and gratifying online to offline customer experience.
Automate processes so loyalty processes can evolve with minimum time and labor.
Design programs that allow legacy organizations to compete with mobile-first and digital-first financial brands.

Your financial customers are waiting to be wowed by your commitment. Are you ready to take your brand loyalty marketing to the next level? Ask for our free demo today.

Recommended for you

The Privacy Paradox: Balancing Convenience with Data Protection

The Privacy Paradox: Balancing Convenience with Data Protection

Strategy Insights, Blogs, Retailers

Navigating the Marketing Landscape: Trends to Watch in 2024

Navigating the Marketing Landscape: Trends to Watch in 2024

Blogs, Digital Marketing, Customer Retention

Transforming Digital Banking: A Success Story & Our New Partnership

Transforming Digital Banking: A Success Story & Our New Partnership

Blogs, Cookieless Future, Customer Retention

Beyond the Cart: Strategies for Customer Retention in Every Retail Channel

Beyond the Cart: Strategies for Customer Retention in Every Retail Channel

Blogs, Cookieless Future, Customer Retention

Navigating the AI Revolution: Standing Out in Today’s Digital World

Navigating the AI Revolution: Standing Out in Today’s Digital World

Blogs, Retailers, Customer Retention

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

Ready to join them?

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.
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.

Source: 1 Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs

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.