Ascendant Loyalty knows that to build a successful customer engagement and loyalty program, it’s important to personalize communications using data-driven insights, strategic messaging, and multi-channel marketing while continuously refining through testing and analysis. Offering experiential rewards, fostering strategic partnerships, and ensuring seamless fulfillment can elevate program effectiveness, driving deeper customer relationships and long-term brand advocacy.
Communications
When building a personalized communications plan that truly resonates, it's essential to leverage the data you have—especially customer preferences—to meet the growing expectation to "show me that you know me." Crafting the right message starts with a strategic roadmap that outlines how, when, and where to engage customers in ways that feel relevant and drive meaningful action. We work closely with your creative team to:
- Define clear goals for each communication - action-based, promotional, informational, nurturing, etc.
- Analyze, segment and build your campaign audience based on demographics, past and predicted behaviors, and shared preferences. Choose your channels, frequency and timing based on observed behavior such as response, open/click rates, website visits & depth of page views, conversion rates and mobile engagement.
- Develop brand right messaging that clearly communicates & reinforces the value proposition. Ensure that all calls to action are clear, motivating and relevant.
- Incorporate best practices for direct mail, email, mobile marketing, and social media marketing.
- Establish test and learn methodologies with holdout groups based on campaign type, geographies, member vs. non-member, channel and more. Ensure you have the right methodology to assess return on investment and attribution. Refine over time with a commitment to hindsight analysis.
Offers/Benefits
Benefit strategy and design is one of the most essential elements of a loyalty program. To members, the benefits are the program. To build a winning approach, we work with you to consider:
- Margins on goods sold to determine the optimal funding rate for the program - how much the member receives in return for exhibiting the desired behavior.
- Customer valuation or value segmentation to inform the stratification of benefits, and if member tiers are viable.
- Importance of rewarding non-spend behavior such as social engagement, product reviews, referrals.
Partnerships – Uniting Loyalty®
Is your program lacking engagement? Is enrollment below expectations? Partnerships might be a solution. Partnerships allow you to expand your program offering and the value you provide your members. With strategic, brand-right partners, you can:
- Acquire new customers at no cost
- Enhance value to members with interesting and relevant offers
- Lift overall engagement and satisfaction
We have a proven partnership identification, marketing and onboarding process, Uniting Loyalty®, that turns partnerships from opportunistic to strategic. We determine the most appropriate partnership opportunities, market these opportunities to prospects, and help finalize and onboard partners.
Journey Mapping
Journey mapping is essential to achieve a highly satisfying customer experience, especially as it relates to digital UX/UI. We help develop personas that align with both demographic and psychographic profiles. Each persona represents a segment of your customer base that has unique needs and wants that influence how they interact with your brand. We create detailed journey maps from a user-centric perspective, focusing on what users think, feel and do at each step of their journey.
Experiential Rewards
Most loyalty programs still follow a transactional "give and get" model—spend money, get rewards—a structure rooted in the original frequent flyer program launched in 1981. For over 40 years, consumers have been trained to exchange data and trackable behavior for savings. But expectations have evolved. Today’s members still want to be rewarded for their spend, but they also crave experiences, personalized service, recognition, and deeper brand relationships. We design programs that go beyond discounts by leveraging what you already do well—highlighting existing experiences and services—and, where needed, bringing in partners to enhance value and strengthen emotional connections over time.
Creative Development
Driving customer engagement and loyalty takes more than a single tactic—it requires an integrated, multi-channel approach. We specialize in building programs that align with your current channel strengths while identifying opportunities for growth through gap analysis and strategic planning. Our goal is to evolve your communications approach in a way that meets both customer expectations and program objectives. To support this, we've partnered with a network of top-tier digital experts who deliver high-performing campaigns and cost-efficient tools to create seamless, custom UX/UI experiences that elevate engagement and performance.
Rewards Fulfillment
Our global fulfillment network delivers what today’s customers expect—personalized experiences, rewards, and recognition tailored to their preferences and aligned to their value to your business. Through highly customized incentives and understanding tier value, we help turn high-potential customers into long-term brand advocates. We've learned that financial planning is essential to any B2C or B2B program structure involving rewards, ensuring both seamless fulfillment and sustainable performance over time.
- Provide rewards early in the engagement flow so members understand how the program works and generate immediate satisfaction
- Make it free or a combination of currency + payment so members get what they want
- Find ways to give rewards & recognition to everyone so they achieve more, spend more, advocate more, review more, etc.
- Offer sweepstakes with attention-getting prizes or experiences
- Find partners to offer prizes and benefits, which help them acquire new customers, creating a win/win
Training/Change Management
To truly deliver on loyalty, your brand’s front line customer service reps or in-store associates must have access to each customer’s profile, including their status, eligible offers, and hidden benefits. With the right tools embedded in your program architecture, your frontline team can deliver personalized, proactive service that delights and drives deeper engagement. Today’s consumers expect this level of informed support—and the brands that do loyalty best are fully committed to delivering it. When launching or re-launching a program, we collaborate with field operations and internal communications teams to create clear, effective training materials that ensure every associate or call center rep is confident in explaining how the program works, what’s new, and why it’s worth joining.