Ditch the distributors and start your data collection in-house
When you’re just getting your business up and running and you can’t afford a larger team just yet, you’re most likely going to outsource other businesses to meet all your needs. A lot of companies do it: from externally managing social media accounts to set up a website using a development company; businesses find that looking towards the outside is much cheaper and more efficient in the long run.
Businesses without loyalty programs most likely fall under this category. When you simply can’t afford your own loyalty program, you usually rely on the distributors of your product to collect your data because you can’t do it in-house. This creates a kind of dependent relationship between the brand and their distributors: they start to rely on them to know what their consumers like, who they are, where they’re located, what they purchase, etc.
It’s easy to just throw the brunt of the work on to someone else and not have to worry about it for a long while. In fact, it really does save you a lot of work, but the real question is: is it really worth it in the long run?
Short answer: no. In addition to setting up your business to be dependent on others from the very start, you’re also excluding yourself from the data collection process. It’s like walking into a room of people you’d love to meet blindfolded and hoping for the best. Relying on your distributors can pose a number of issues, besides the inability to oversee the data collection process, such as the inability to check insights on-demand or alter the data collection process at will. Your data is virtually in the hands of somebody else, and as a business, is that really where you want it to be when it can be safely stored at home?
Digitizing your loyalty program is an innovative solution to start gathering data in-house. When you have your own loyalty program set up, this data is a mere click away from you, able to be accessed at any different point to observe how your business is operating and how you can build a more loyal customer base. Having this data collected in-house automatically gives you an advantage over your competitors because you are removing one added layer of separation between you and your consumer. Rather than having to go through your distributor, you’re now as close as you could possibly be to building a personal relationship.
Any business needs a customer loyalty program because it has a major impact on your business. A loyalty program that works helps you collect data & tap into the key drivers of customer loyalty: 74 percent of today’s shoppers love working towards a goal or reward, and that’s just what loyalty programs offer. In fact, 79 percent like knowing that being loyal to a brand will gain them points, and they don’t hesitate to trust their data to the brands they love.
