Over the past few years, the market has seen many challenges, yet companies’ faith in loyal customers has never wavered. However, leaders face a more complex decision-making process than ever. Due to the ongoing economic downturn, they must analyze financial constraints, ROI potential, changing consumer behavior, competition, and sustainability factors for their loyalty programs. No matter whether you are launching a loyalty program for the first time or you have several revamps under your belt, a careful and strategic approach is a must.
If you wish to make the most out of this article, make sure to download Antavo’s Global Customer Loyalty Report 2024 beforehand, and cross-reference each section to get the full context!
Everything You Should Know About the Global Customer Loyalty Report 2024
The Global Customer Loyalty Report 2024 is an industry-defining report that analyzes customer loyalty trends from an insider’s perspective. It dives deep into the current landscape of loyalty programs, dissects the most noteworthy investment opportunities, and presents the most prominent market strategies.
The data in the report comes from three sources:
- a survey of 600 corporate survey respondents from all regions of the world
- the analysis of more than 30.5 million member actions tracked via Antavo’s Loyalty Management system
- 1,500 minutes of interviews with renowned industry experts in customer loyalty.
- expert insights from three partners: VML Consulting (formerly Wunderman Thompson), Epam, and frog (part of Capgemini)
As such, this report is meant to showcase loyalty program trends from the standpoint of current and future loyalty program owners, industry experts, and third-party tech providers.
How Has the Loyalty Landscape Shifted in Recent Years?
Operating a loyalty program is a long-term commitment and requires a complex decision-making process. But, when implemented with a strategic approach, loyalty programs are quite valuable.
Regarding the current state of loyalty programs, we learned the following:
- 55.8% of loyalty program owners are satisfied with their loyalty program.
- 60.3% of loyalty program owners have made significant changes to their program in the past two years, a 3.3 percentage point increase from last year.
- 65.4% of program owners classify their loyalty program as more rational than emotional.
- 81.4% of program owners confirmed that their loyalty program was helpful during the economic downturn.
- 49.8% of rewards are redeemed, on average, in a loyalty program.
How Are Companies Investing in Customer Loyalty?
In addition to understanding current loyalty trends, we also looked at new opportunities. We started by looking into companies’ investment strategies.
- 27% of a loyalty program’s marketing budget, on average, is dedicated to customer loyalty and CRM.
- 9 out of 10 companies have reported a positive ROI. For those with a positive ROI, the average ROI is 4.8X.
- 67.0% of companies plan to increase investment in retention during the economic downturn, while only 31.2% plan to invest more in acquisition.
- 9 out of 10 companies with an existing program plan to revamp it in the next three years. Last year, this number was 8.
- 6.5 out of 10 respondents want to change their loyalty strategy and technology together.
Exploring Loyalty Strategies that Offer an Optimal Cost-Benefit Ratio
The core message of this report is that companies should invest in loyalty programs, but they need to invest wisely. Otherwise, they won’t achieve the best possible results. To help current and future program owners identify the best opportunities out there, we explored the impact of popular loyalty program strategies.
Strategy 1: Micro-targeting
- 87.7% of survey respondents think micro-targeting has a positive impact on customer retention and satisfaction.
- The average annual spend of members who redeem personalized rewards is 4.3X higher than those who redeem non-personalized rewards.
Strategy 2: Diverse reward options:
- 78.1% of respondents think diverse reward redemption options have a positive impact on customer retention and satisfaction.
- 46.9% think diverse reward redemption options pay off. These respondents stated that the benefits are greater than the costs.
Strategy 3: Premium loyalty programs
- 21.6% of businesses offering a loyalty program currently run a premium loyalty program.
- 26.0% of companies stated that they wish to introduce some form of premium loyalty program in the next two years.
- 47.6% think premium loyalty programs have a positive impact on customer retention and satisfaction.
Loyalty Empowers!
Naturally, the 2024 edition of the Global Customer Loyalty Report features many more statistics, as well as additional context and takeaways regarding the findings. It also has case studies, expert panels, and direct quotes from many of the experts we interviewed.
If you feel ready to take the next step and push your company’s loyalty strategy to the next level, the experts at Antavo are more than happy to showcase how our technology can help. Just book a demo or send us an RFP.
And if you haven’t already, be sure to download our Global Customer Loyalty Report 2024.
