Customer Loyalty with Lia Grimberg

On January 20th, during our Digital Media Marketing Seminar, we had the pleasure of meeting Lia Grimberg, who had a workshop with us about customer loyalty and insights.

Lia Grimberg, Divisional VP, Customer Marketing

Lia is a marketing industry professional who has extensive experience in working on loyalty programs across several companies like Sears, Loblaw, and now The Bay. Lia began to grow her online presence on LinkedIn. By doing so, other companies were able to reach her and recognized her skills and interest in marketing. She was offered various positions in the marketing industry, which lead to her current position as the Divisional VP at The Bay, which is the Hudson's Bay online e-commerce platform.

Lia's focus for this workshop was loyalty, specifically loyalty programs, and how it can change a company's brand identity and increase sales. Before we begin, let's clarify:

What is loyalty?

Loyalty programs are used as an invitation to a mutually beneficial long-term relationship.

Why do companies need loyalty?

Companies like The Bay use loyalty programs to connect the various siloes the company may have to strengthen their customer database and customer retention. Loyalty programs are a method to link together contact data, service data, brand interaction data, and purchase data, to have a single view of the customer. This is done by assigning a unique identifier to each customer, whether it is done through their email, phone number, or a client ID, each customer is assigned a client ID so that companies like The Bay can track the customers interests, and understanding what the customer values. Through the loyalty program, the company can provide a clear line to communication to the customers, and provide special offers and promotions that are relevant to the customers’ interests to increase sales and increase customer retention.

Next, we focused on the foundation of loyalty programs, known as the "Four R's" of Loyalty.

The “Four R’s” of Loyalty are known as Recognition, Reward, Relationship and Relevance.

This framework that Lia outlined is used to drive specific customer behaviour to meet the company’s objectives to reach their goals.

Recognition is mean for a company to understand which customers are the best, or known as “high value” customers, how they can retain them, and how the company can direct them into a specific area of their brand.

Reward is quite self-explanatory, where the loyalty program is used to provide rewards to customers. The rewards system is used to drive sales and to obtain specific behaviour from the customers.

Relationship is meant to create a long-lasting relationship with customers to retain the business and grow the customer database. This is done by offering special promotions, discounts, and exclusive offers to the high value customers.

Relevance is using customer personalization strategically to offer the customer products, offers and other communications that are relevant to the customer’s behaviour. This can be done by analyzing the client’s click through rate, previous purchases, previous searches, etc.

If a company has a loyalty program that manages to incorporate relevance, recognition, reward, and relationship, this is the perfect recipe towards a successful customer data base. A successful loyalty program will translate to more high-value customers, increase in sales, and better customer retention.

Main Takeaways

It was so interesting to listen to what Lia had to say about her experience with loyalty programs.

Lia explained that loyalty programs are not just about the “cash-back” rewards for the customers, but about what the consumers value. She recommended us focusing mostly on relevance from the “Four R’s”. I agree with her because as a company, you can try as hard as you can to strengthen you relationship, recognition, and reward in your loyalty program, however if the products or services you are recommending to the client are not relevant, they will not be interested in your products/services. Thus, this customer will not convert into making a purchase. Relevance is key in growing your business and keeping an honest, strong relationship with your customers. Offering your customers relevant products and/or services shows a level of mutual understanding between the company and the customer. Relevance is an important step in creating a strong, trustworthy relationship with your customers.

Among all the thing we learned in this workshop with Lia, my main takeaway was that it is so important to challenge yourself to see what you’re capable of. This little piece of advice really resonated with me. By taking that step out of your comfort zone, you are opening yourself up to newer opportunities that may be better than you anticipated. This advice somewhat reminded me of the song "Push It To The Limit" by Corbin Bleu (my fellow 90's babies would understand). You may even discover new interests that you want to expand on that you never thought you would enjoy. Everyone owes it to themselves to become the best version of themselves they can be, and the best way to do this is by challenging yourself and choosing to step out of. your comfort zone. Lia's workshop for this Seminar was mentally stimulating and highly engaging. It was great to hear some advice on career choices as many of us in this program will be entering the work force this spring for the first time specifically in the marketing industry.