Atomic Rewards and Loyalty 2.0
Brand loyalty programs have so far been linked to money and transactions. I have proposed a new idea – Loyalty 2.0 which can be linked to time, attention and sharing personal data. Time can be thought of as a non-monetary resource. It is valuable, and is as I have argued previously, upstream of transactions. If brands can get us to spend more time with their content (solving for attention recession) and collect more data volunteered by us (solving for data poverty), they can build a better relationship with us – right messages, right time, right channel.
The problem has been there is no reason for us to spend more time with the brand other than when we are planning a purchase. In that period, we are searching and asking around. What if brands had hotlines with us so they were top-of-mind? What if brands got our 10-15 seconds daily which helped strengthen their relationship with us – a sort-of mental billboard? What if brands can nudge us to share our experiences with our network or voice our opinion publicly? Each of these actions ‘costs’ us time. If brands are ready to reward us for our money, can they consider doing the same for our time?
This is where the ideas of Atomic Rewards and Loyalty 2.0 come in. Emails can be excellent carriers for these incentives. This is what I wrote in my Email 2.0 essay (Part 9): “Atomic Rewards bring gamification to emails. They are micro-incentives to help marketers get attention, drive engagement, nudge behaviour and create habits. Think of Atomic Rewards as a loyalty program – linked with attention (time) rather than transactions (money). Atomic Rewards offer the perfect solution to Attention Recession; these rewards can be embedded in AMP-enabled emails or in Ems to reward streaks. Atomic Rewards will work best when they are offered across brands because no single brand can offer enough to make it exciting. Rewards filling the email inbox is when we will get a mindset change from “delete” to “delight”. Atomic Rewards make perfect economic sense for brands – for a small cost, they can ensure the hotline to the customers stays active because if the customer becomes inactive or churns, the cost for the same attention will be many times higher via the adtech platforms.”
I wrote about Loyalty 2.0:
The starting point needs to be at the top of the funnel in the brand-customer relationship: with a customer’s attention and data. Attention is critical for everything else that follows. In a world of too much information, individuals can be lost; messages find it hard to get through; connections cannot be easily established. To instil loyalty, brands must solve the attention problem. This means building a pipe, a hotline to their customers. This is where the loyalty app comes in – an app which, crucially, rewards them for their time and data. As I have written earlier: to get customers to pay for their attention, pay them for their attention – else the brand will end up paying Google and Facebook (Meta) 100 times more for the same customer’s attention. There is no loyalty program anywhere in the world for attention.
After attention comes data. Brands need to understand their customers better. While they can decode actions of individual customers on the website and app, the better approach is to simply ask customers and incentivise their actions (in this case, the data being provided voluntarily). How many brands ask us? How many brands offer us incentives for giving information about ourselves? In this case, the additional benefit is that we will also benefit from the personalisation in the offers that we receive. We want to be shown opportunities that interest us, that speak to us. Revealing ourselves is both an opportunity to earn points and to ensure future communications are targeted for our particular tastes.
What better mechanism to get attention and collect data than an AMP email? Gamify it with Atomic Rewards and there is the foundation for a hotline! Into this mix let’s bring in the idea of “Performance Email.”
