Support for loyalty/rewards programs is emerging as a CDP business use case. 

A loyalty program helps you build relationships with customers leading to improve retention, encourage repeat transactions, and reduce churn rates. 

Key Capabilities for a Loyalty Program

Some core CDP capabilities can help support a loyalty platform:

• Unified user profiles, so you can uniquely identify a user and take this burden off your loyalty technology
• Ability to track transactions and interactions across channels and devices
• Segmentation and Personalization, so you can align your loyalty segmentation and offer strategy with your non-loyalty engagement initiatives
• Analytics, so you can track different user metrics and take make appropriate offers
• Packaged integration with loyalty and rewards technology platforms

All these capabilities are really foundational, but like other activation areas, the CDP may or may not provide explicit loyalty services, such as:

• Creating, managing, and administering rewards and offers
• Executing this in a multi-tier, multi-device, and omnichannel  manner
• Ability to create and manage customized reward behaviors (e.g., offering reward points for uploading restaurant receipts)
• Reward stores with self-service capabilities for redeeming reward points
• Linkages to wallets and partner rewards
• Loyalty-specific Analytics

As always, you need to decide whether your CDP-based data layer is the right tier to house these programmatic services.

How Do the Tools Fare

Loyalty Management — along with capabilities such as campaigns, reward points, offers, coupons and discounts — is emerging as a major use case for CDP platforms. Several CDPs are now beginning to offer some capabilities in this area. Recall MasterCard’s SessionM and Oracle’s CrowdTwist acquisitions of loyalty solution providers.  

Therefore, in our most recent update of CDP evaluations, we have added this as a separate scenario and will be evaluating vendors against these capabilities.

Again, do give consideration to an important decision: should loyalty (like personalization or analytics) reside natively in your CDP or run outside of it? RSG research subscribers can check in with us on the latest thinking here.

RSG's research can help you with your analysis. If you subscribe, you can use our RealQuadrant Shortlist Generator to find out which CDP vendors excel at this scenario. RSG's evaluations also call out specific capabilities for this scenario for each CDP vendor.