Loyalty for luxury brands – honestly

If you’re representing a luxury brand there are probably few marketing phrases that make your hair stand on end:

Let me begin by suggesting a few of them:

• Buy One Get One Free
• Discounts
• Loyalty

At Strand, we were busy running loyalty programmes for typical high street retailers but the luxury retailers couldn’t see the fit between issuing plastic cards that collect points and their own business. And they were mostly right. But to us, loyalty is like an anthropological science, and there are lessons to be learned and opportunities to be explored for every brand.

So with the risk of looking like I’ve lost the plot, I’m going to try to explain the service we’ve just developed for luxury retailers. I’ve already mentioned briefly that most businesses can learn from loyalty marketing. I believe some of the key lessons are:

• How to persuade your customers to visit more often

• How to encourage your customers to spend more

• Gaining an insight into your customers’ behaviour

• Targeting your marketing for reducing your costs and improving results

• Running pilot marketing campaigns (to see if they work on a small scale), before investing in a full rollout.

Strand has been working with a number of luxury brands this year and applying these theories in practice. We’re really rather excited to announce that what we’ve managed to develop, as a result, is a luxury loyalty solution.

We’re taking all the principles and the technology behind a typical loyalty programme and hiding them in a cupboard. The result for the distinguished clientele is that they begin to experience a level of customer service bordering on the telepathic, without experiencing the promotions, discounts and general sales promotions usually associated with a programme.

Let’s take a quick look at some of the side effects of our treatments:

• Customer receive relevant email communications that focus on products that fit the customer profile

• Retailers see that clients who were beginning to disappear are starting to come back again

• Luxury brands begin to understand who their clients really are. We create segments for each customer group, sending targeted messages that hit the right buttons

• Customers begin to feel more appreciated and listened to

• Marketing activity begins to come with reports attached measuring the financial success as Return on Investment, but the customer doesn’t see anything.

No ‘Sign up now! Ask me how!’ No ‘Earn one point for every one point spent’. No ‘ Spend £1000 and get the chance to win an iPod’.

None of that. In fact, if we get it right, the customer probably won’t notice that anything has changed. All we’re doing is changing the retailer’s approach to marketing.

We’re putting together a demonstration of our luxury loyalty solution at the moment. Let me know if you’re  interested in seeing how ‘nothing’ can make a difference.

I think there are some observations that are worth sharing with readers of my blog, so I’m afraid, for some of you, this might have been a repeat.

(Featured Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash)