With only 44% of consumers having remained loyal to their favorite brands during the pandemic, it’s more important than ever to assess how your loyalty program is providing a competitive advantage against loyalty leaders and consumer expectations. The Merkle Human Loyalty Maturity Assessment is a tool that can help. This is a five-stage directional scale based on our decades of expertise in creating loyalty solutions for brands across many verticals. The scale can be used to plot your brand’s level of advancement in loyalty and engagement, as well as become a guideline for optimizing your loyalty strategy and developing your martech stack to support your long-term vison for customer identity and loyalty.

The five stages fit along the scale of entrant to most advanced and are framed around key attributes we believe are needed to deliver enduring loyalty: valuable, experiential, personal, and emotional. Here are some highlights from the five stages:

STAGE 1:

You are in the early stage of loyalty maturity in your organization. Your program is transactional in nature and likely operates as a stand-alone marketing tactic used to identify unknown customers.

STAGE 2:

You are building your loyalty footprint and your program relies on transactional components to drive frequency and engagement. You may be testing non-transactional activities and segmentation approaches that guide one-to-many personalization efforts.

STAGE 3:

Your program is focused on building engagement and you are likely investing in your martech infrastructure to meet your organization’s long-term vision for customer identity, data-driven personalization, and loyalty.  

STAGE 4:

Your program is increasingly sophisticated, and you are delivering scaled customer value. In addition, the program is woven into key moments in the customer journey.

STAGE 5:

Your program is highly mature and integrated into your business strategy. You are building loyalty throughout the brand experience and using technology to scale and deliver customer-centric, individualized moments that meet customer needs.

The short assessment asks ten questions about your program structure, rewards offering, engagement and personalization levels, program operations, and more, and it will help you understand your program’s comparative level of maturity against approaches embraced by loyalty leaders today. You may use the assessment to help you identify opportunities for program investment and enhancements as you develop strategic plans for your program and your brand. Take the assessment today.