Ecommerce tools have made it easier than ever for businesses to create and manage loyalty programs. But creating a quality loyalty program is not as easy. Sure, a store can create a program that offers points or deals to frequent customers, but the question remains — is the loyalty program serving its true purpose? That is, does it engage customers and give them a reason to keep coming back?

According to the COLLOQUY Loyalty Census, the average American household is enrolled in 29 separate loyalty programs — yet they only actively participate in about 12. With more choices than ever available to customers, it's critical to create a loyalty program that actually incentivizes each person to participate. 

Read on to learn four ways you can create a successful loyalty program.

In a noisy digital world, it's more challenging than ever to engage with customers, give them a positive experience and cement a lasting brand-customer relationship. Consumer behavior has changed — and now most customers prefer companies that understand who they are as individuals.

Years ago this would have been nearly an impossible ask. But with the advancements in marketing technology, it takes less time, effort and manpower to understand who your customers are. Read on for three ways marketing technology can help improve your customer relationships.

That’s a wrap! Season one of the J&See: Views on Marketing podcast has officially come to close. Since its inception in May, the podcast has grown into something bigger than we could have imagined. The goal was to get listeners to see how everyone is a marketer in some way or another. To do this, we searched for experts across all industries to show how companies and individuals employ very different — and useful — marketing strategies. Take a look at our season one line-up below — and subscribe so you're one of the first to hear season two. 

Often times companies — especially start-ups — compete in a crowded space with competitors who have similar messaging, services or products. They end up trying to outspend the competition in the wrong places. But you can set your business apart when you know what you're doing. How? SEO, or search engine optimization. SEO is about knowing what your customers are searching for and connecting them with your goods or services.  

In this episode of J&See: Views on Marketing, Meg Goodman speaks with Grant Simmons, a digital marketing expert who specializes in SEO. Grant and Meg break down what exactly SEO is, how it differs from SEM and how companies can take advantage of these each to drive meaningful traffic to their sites. Read on for a few helpful takeaways from his interview. And make sure to subscribe to J&See: Views on Marketing to hear a conversation about marketing like this once a month.

As we head into a new decade, we look back on how marketing has become more digital and more difficult to navigate than ever before. As words like “artificial intelligence” and “big data” enter the conversation, it can be hard to know how these concepts fit into your own marketing strategy. Lucky for us, we have Danny Flamberg, a marketing consultant who specializes in leading businesses into the new, digital age. His book, Dancing Through the Digital Revolution: A Marketing Playbook, serves as a guide for marketers looking to take advantage of the digital marketing wave. In this episode of J&See: Views on Marketing, Meg Goodman talks to Danny about the balance of personalization versus privacy, how data is more than a magic word and the impact of AI on our future. Read on for a few excerpts from their insightful conversation. And of course, make sure to subscribe to J&See: Views on Marketing to hear a compelling interview like this once a month.

Marketing and communications are in a rapid pace of ongoing transformation. Not only is that transformation from offline to digital, it is also growing beyond its traditional role. What was once made up of direct marketing, sales promotion and PR has now grown to include augmented and virtual reality, messaging bots and artificial intelligence. Marketing is shifting from “demand generation” to focusing on user experiences. One of the more recent aspects of the user experience is the focus on personalization. The task becomes: how do we leverage data to deliver individualized experiences that create value for that specific person — without crossing the line and abusing data at the expense of that person’s privacy?

Nonprofits have the same goal as any company: to increase their reach and spread their message. Normally, that’s what a marketing team does for a company. Large corporations typically rely on an in-house team with a massive budget or an outside agency to build the company brand. Nonprofits have none of that. A nonprofit is expected to create effective campaigns to achieve their mission with a fraction of the budget that corporations have. Most of the time, they don’t even have a marketing team, the work simply gets unloaded onto other positions in the company. So how do they do it?

To answer the question of “how," Meg Goodman spoke with Brooke Wiseman. Brooke is the CEO of Blessings in a Backpack, a charity that mobilizes communities, individuals, and resources to provide food on the weekends for elementary school children across America who might otherwise go hungry. Brooke explains how nonprofits leverage corporate partnerships, volunteer evangelists and social media to compensate for the lack of resources available to them. Read on for a few excerpts from their insightful conversation. And of course, make sure to subscribe to J&See: Views on Marketing to hear a compelling interview like this once a month.

Even as the use of social media and email push us further from written communications, direct mail is still one of the biggest marketing channels around. But as the world of marketing hurdles into a new digital age, direct mail has to adapt. To do that, marketers are now using customer data to personalize the user experience. Ron Jacobs, CEO of Jacobs and Clevenger, recently spoke on the Marketing Over Coffee podcast. In this episode, he talks about how brands must start hyper-personalizing in order to keep the attention of their customer base. Listen to the whole episode to hear Ron’s conversation with John Wall about direct marketing.

Customer experience (CX) has become a key differentiator among businesses — and that’s across all industries. With fierce competition and disruptive startups, your business needs to give customers a reason to make your brand their first choice… and foster loyalty so they come back, too.

But how important is customer experience, exactly? To understand the impact it has on your bottom line, you have to understand what customers think. This infographic shows a few statistics that shed light on why customer experience matters now — more than ever.

Customer experience (CX) has a huge influence on the way customers perceive your brand. But what exactly makes up customer experience?

Well, it’s not just one thing. It’s formed by every customer touchpoint: how consumers discover your business, how your website looks and functions, the shopping experience (either online or in-store), the purchase and payment process, how and when your product is delivered, customer service interactions, product usage and performance and post-purchase communication. All of these steps along the customer journey impact your customers’ perception of your brand — and ultimately determine if they come back or not.