The vast majority of loyalty programmes reward customer purchases – and nothing more.
White Label Loyalty founder Achille Traore says this is a fundamental problem within the industry.
“The transaction-based system means you only get rewarded for what you spend,” he tells BusinessCloud. “There is little innovation in the market: it’s basically ‘one size fits all’.
“But if you fail to innovate, you die – like Blockbuster did against Netflix.”
The former footballer founded White Label Loyalty – initially known as Perks Loyalty – in Leeds in 2015 to solve the problem.
“When I was playing football, it was amazing to see the passion the fans had for the clubs. I wanted to create something that brought that same kind of loyalty into brands,” explains Traore.
“You need to really understand how loyalty works – it’s not because the season tickets are cheap, it’s because it’s an emotional connection. There are elements available to decode how to create emotional loyalty.
“Things have changed: people expect you to create a personal relationship with them in exchange for their data. And that’s what we enable with our platform.”
MarTech 50 star
Traore says that 75% of loyalty programmes fail. White Label Loyalty, star of our recent MarTech 50 ranking, seeks to solve this with a flexible, modular, ‘events-based’ approach which allows scaling companies to reward customers for all activity – for example spending time in an app, referring friends or even performing physical activity – which can be layered on top of legacy programmes if necessary.
An events-based system records every customer interaction as an event, effectively gamifying the experience. The White Label Loyalty engine can then use that data to generate a reaction – for example, sending them a voucher.
The system is most suitable for high-growth data-driven companies and mid-size to enterprise-level businesses, rather than early-stage startups. Among White Label Loyalty’s global client base are PepsiCo and Burger King: its loyalty engine is embedded into the latter’s app.
Pepsi
“Pepsi doesn’t have any stores. It doesn’t know who its customers are,” Traore explains. “They want to understand who is buying their product and why, so they use our technology to collect that first-party data.
“For example, it may ask you for proof of purchase to enter a competition: once you’ve scanned your receipt, our technology will pull in that receipt, identify the product and enter the competition.
“Dubai Holding is using our solution to create one of the largest loyalty schemes anywhere, thousands of merchants across various industries. As a customer, when you download that app, you link your bank card – and then when you transact anywhere in Dubai, in participating venues, you get cash back and points.”
White Label Loyalty serves more than 10 industries including B2B, retail and FMCG. In essence, the platform doesn’t dictate which customer activities are rewarded and how – it gives clients the power to make any customer action rewardable.
‘The team is vital’ – former footballer on growing his startup
“If you want to build something that ambitious, you need to start completely from scratch – and that’s what we did. So it took some time to develop it – we spent a lot of time iterating,” said Traore.
“We realised that some of the ways that we wanted to solve the problem were not always possible with enterprise businesses because they are sitting on a lot of legacy platforms – no matter how easy we made it for them, it wouldn’t be completely frictionless.
“So we created models that could supercharge what they already do; allowing them to work within their own infrastructure then bringing through that transformation.”
Series A on the horizon?
White Label Loyalty is a profitable business which employs a little more than 30 people. “”We’re still quite small and a tight team,” says Traore. “We raised early pre-seed investment, but haven’t needed to raise since.
“We’re now potentially looking to secure Series A funding – it’s all about getting to the next level now. We don’t need just the money – we need someone who really understands software-as-a-service, CX and can contribute in other ways.
“We have the growth; we have the product; we have the market. It’s about how quickly do we want to scale?”
Leanne Bonner-Cooke MBE: I saw greater opportunity with e-bate