What If Improving Your Loyalty Strategy Didn’t Mean Starting Again?

By Sarvesh Seetaram, Managing Director – South Africa, TLC Worldwide

There’s something about marketers that means they’re rarely happy standing still.

By nature, we’re constantly looking for ways to make things better. Perhaps there’s a campaign that could perform more effectively, an experience that could feel more relevant, or a customer relationship that could be stronger.

Most brands already know there is always more they could do to engage customers, strengthen retention, and give people more reasons to come back. They’re looking at their existing programs and asking: “How could we make this more relevant?”, “Could the benefits work harder?”, “Could the experience feel more distinctive?”, and “Could we create more value for our customers?”

That instinct to keep improving is exactly what good marketing is all about. The challenge comes when improving loyalty starts to sound like starting again.

Suddenly, something that started as “how can we give our customers more reasons to engage with us?” starts to feel like a major transformation project. A ‘heavy lift’.

I see this a lot in South Africa, where many brands already have established loyalty programs and long-standing agency relationships. The appetite to improve customer engagement is there, but the appetite to start another major project from scratch is understandably less appealing.

But what if improving loyalty didn’t mean starting again?

When we talk about improving loyalty, it’s easy to jump straight to the big questions.

• Do we need a new platform?
• Should we change our technology?
• What happens to our existing tech stack?
• Will IT need to get involved?
• How long will implementation take?
• What will it cost?
• Do we need to create our own rewards network?
• And what happens to everything we already have?

These are all valid, sensible questions, but they can also make loyalty feel like an all-or-nothing decision.

Either the existing program stays as it is, or the whole thing needs to be redesigned.

I’m not sure it has to be that way.

After all, marketers don’t approach every challenge by throwing everything away and starting again. We optimise, we test, we add, we refresh, we find the part that isn’t working hard enough and look for a way to improve it.

So, why should loyalty be any different?

An established loyalty program is an asset. It has customers, data, communications channels, technology, a customer journey that people already recognise.

The question shouldn’t always be: “How do we replace it?”

Instead, focus on: “What could we add to make it better?”

Perhaps customers need a reason to engage more frequently, the reward proposition has become predictable, or the program works well for existing customers, but there’s an opportunity to make acquisition more compelling too. Maybe a particular audience needs something more relevant, a seasonal campaign needs a reward that feels more exciting than the usual offer, or perhaps the brand simply needs some fresh thinking that deepens the emotional connection with your audience.

None of those challenges necessarily require a new loyalty program, they might just require the right addition.

This is particularly relevant in markets where customers have become used to seeing the same propositions again and again.

In financial services, cashback and vouchers can be effective, but when competing brands are offering similar incentives, differentiation becomes harder.

In telecoms and utilities, acquisition offers can win the initial sale, but the bigger question is how to keep creating value once the customer has joined.

In retail, discounts can drive transactions, but brands are also looking for ways to build frequency and give customers reasons to buy again, beyond margin-eroding price.

And in FMCG, a promotion might only run for a few weeks. There may be no reason to build a completely new loyalty infrastructure for it – but there may be a very good reason to give the campaign a more relevant reward, experience, or mechanic.

There’s an opportunity to make what already exists more relevant to the customer and the moment.

Rather than completely overhauling an existing program, what if you could lean on the expertise of global loyalty specialists who specialise in giving customers a reason to choose you – and keep choosing you?

What if they had deep consumer insights, globally, and they had a ready-made idea that will resonate with your audience? A fresh layer of content, a new reward, a more relevant benefit, a memorable customer touchpoint, a new mechanic.

And a curated ecosystem of experiences and rewards built around a particular audience.

What if all of this could work with what is already there?

That means a brand doesn’t necessarily need to change its platform, replace its agency, or embark on a lengthy technology project simply because it wants to improve one part of the customer experience.

It can effectively ‘plug in’ what it needs, exactly where it needs it.

Of course, the idea only works if the addition is genuinely valuable – adding another generic voucher to a program isn’t going to transform customer engagement.

The reward or experience needs to feel relevant. It needs to give customers a reason to act. And ideally, it needs to do something that competitors aren’t already doing.

This is where I believe TLC Worldwide has a particularly useful role to play.

Our experience across global markets and sectors gives us access to a broad ecosystem of rewards, experiences, and partners. But more importantly, we can curate that ecosystem around the audience, the objective and the ethos of the brand we’re supporting. We move quickly too – it’s what we’ve been doing for 30 years, and often, activation timescales are tight.

For the world’s largest building society, Nationwide, we introduced a £10 monthly JustEat voucher – in addition to a £100 cash bonus – for GenZs opening a FlexStudent account, recognising that this may appeal to the thousands of hungry young people embarking on their next chapter of life, away from home.

We developed the YouTube Partner Perks program using surprise-and-delight mechanics to recognise content creators’ ongoing achievements, big and small. We engaged 100,000 content creators globally, generating a 95% uplift in intention to continue producing content for the next six months.

In the UK, Go.Compare competes in an insurance market built on finding the cheapest deal. To stand out, it gave every customer a £50 travel incentive, turning a functional insurance purchase into something to look forward to. So far, over 250,000 customers have qualified.

For telecoms giant Three, TLC added everyday rewards into the existing Three+ loyalty app, giving customers more frequent reasons to engage. Three+ Eats offers £5 off at more than 3,500 restaurants, while the most recent award-winning £1 Local Coffee Network gives customers access to over 1,000 cafés nationwide. Rather than rebuilding the loyalty proposition, these always-on rewards have become part of it, bringing useful, repeatable value into customers’ everyday lives.

In Portugal, a concept to reward Decathlon customers for being more active, has grown to become one of the largest and most successful loyalty programs in the country. Aligning with the brand’s core purpose of getting people moving, Clube Decathlon rewards exercise, sustainable life choices and other engagement behaviours, rather than purchases alone. Providing qualifying customers with access to high-value experiences across wellness, adventure, sports and dining categories, the program attracted more than 100,000 unique visits in two months, tens of thousands of vouchers were redeemed, and 30,000 previously inactive customers re-engaged.

For MediaWorld, the opportunity was to evolve an established loyalty proposition that had become heavily focused on discounts and promotions. TLC added a richer layer of personalised, experience-led rewards to the MediaWorld CLUB, from welcome gifts and birthday treats to monthly campaigns, instant wins and special events. The result has been 33% average engagement and a 61% increase in purchase frequency.

I don’t think the answer to every loyalty challenge is a new program.

Sometimes it is.

But sometimes what a brand really needs is much more focused, whether it’s a better reward, a new engagement layer, more relevant content, a fresh mechanic, or a different experience at a particular point in the customer journey.

And that’s an important distinction.

Because if we assume that improving loyalty always means changing the technology, changing the platform, changing the agency, and rebuilding the program, it becomes very easy to put off the change altogether.

The alternative is to think more practically.

• What’s already working?
• Where is the gap?
• What would make the biggest difference to the customer?
• And then, what could we plug in?

Cue the ‘Loyalty Plug-In’.

Not to replace everything you already have.

Not to create another transformation project for your teams to manage.

But bringing in the experience, rewards, content, and ideas that can make an existing program work harder – quickly, flexibly, and around the needs of your customers.

Sometimes improving loyalty doesn’t require starting again.

Sometimes, you just need to plug in something better.