Salesforce Debuts a DIY Loyalty Platform

Need to Know

• Loyalty Management will allow companies to build and manage their loyalty programs within the Salesforce platform.
• The tool offers pre-built templates, data models, and business processes for the vertical industries that Salesforce supports, which include retail, travel, and hospitality.
• Companies that don’t use the Salesforce CMR can integrate Loyalty Management into their customer data or content management platforms via API.
• The platform is set to launch next month.

Analysis

As more companies depend on loyalty programs to retain customers, Salesforce has introduced a new product to help businesses manage and monitor programs seamlessly and accurately.

Loyalty Management, which is built on Salesforce’s Customer 360 Platform and is integrated with Digital 360, Service Cloud and Tableau, will allow businesses to look across the entire customer lifecycle in order to better tailor and target their loyalty programs.

“Customers join loyalty programs for the promise of a more personalized, relevant experience but too often encounter a generic approach that is broadly applied to every member,” David Schmaier, CEO of Salesforce Industries, said in a statement. “Loyalty Management allows companies in all industries to evolve their loyalty programs from a transactional to a human-centric approach capable of creating personalized, relationship-building moments with each customer.”

Through Loyalty Management, businesses are offered a number of tools, including management and support of individual and partner accounts, pre-built templates, tracking, and analytics. Businesses will also be able to integrate Loyalty Management into their CMR or CDP via an API, if they are not Salesforce customers.

While loyalty programs are a useful tool in retaining customers — who are often more valuable than one-time customers — they often fail: according to a Salesforce blog post announcing the launch of Loyalty Management, “77% of rewards-based loyalty programs fail within the first two years, and 89% have negative social media sentiment.” Loyalty Management aims to increase the success of a business’ loyalty program by offering a big picture, one-stop-shop platform where loyalty programs can be tweaked and targeted according to evolving retention goals.

A number of businesses have committed new resources to their loyalty programs, especially as customer retention and loyalty has proven a strong marker of fiscal success during the COVID-19 pandemic. These include Home Depot, which revamped its app in October to focus more strongly on its loyalty program, Pro Xtra, and McDonald’s, whose loyalty program, MyMcdonald’s, is a cornerstone of the restaurant chain’s digital growth strategy. Meanwhile, big-box retailer Target’s loyalty program, Circle, hit 80 million loyalty program users in November, just one year after its launch.

The launch of Loyalty Management comes a few months after Salesforce announced it would be integrating a COVID-19 vaccination tool into Work.com. That tool will help local, state, and federal governments monitor and manage COVID-19 vaccine programs by tracking dosage, inventory, syringe supply, and refrigeration capacity, among other data sets.

Loyalty Management will be available next month.