The company sells its products and services through a combination of direct-to-consumer sales and via specialist doctors and other medical providers in a highly competitive market. Unlike a typical rewards program – such as for meals or hotel stays that are relatively low-cost – the products and services this company provides are relatively expensive.
Despite that, the rewards program had been reasonably successful, with more than 3 million members, and generating up to $15 million annually in incremental sales. But the company was looking to do better and engaged with Antuit to further drive the program’s success.
Antuit began by developing sophisticated algorithms to enable personalization based on where a given individual was in their customer journey. Whether the focus was on keeping a certain customer, cross-selling or up-selling that customer, Antuit developed lifetime value models.
By focusing on segmentation, Antuit was able to help this company understand how its program members were consuming products and what their motivation was for choosing a particular product. This has been incredibly useful as a guide to improved engagement, in terms of reaching the right people at the right time, with the right product message.
The analysis revealed “motivation profiles” that indicated which customers used the products to make physical changes – perhaps fixing one small perceived flaw – or to boost their self-esteem, age gracefully, or primarily maintain their current looks and image.
Antuit has also provided the tools for the company to leverage the analytics and execute its campaigns. This has been the first step in an evolution that will involve eventual use of artificial intelligence to drive even more customer personalization throughout the rewards program.
Since engaging with Antuit, this company has seen significant growth in the value of its rewards program. Despite the sizable number of individuals in the program – more than 3 million – only about half were active participants. Analyses demonstrated that patients in the program are typically 50 percent more valuable than the company’s patients who are not loyalty members, so the push has been to derive more value from current program members.
The company is on track to increase its incremental program value to $50 million annually, a more than three-fold increase from where it is today.
What this engagement has demonstrated is that whatever the nature of customer engagement, sophisticated personalization algorithms can be highly effective. Retail or restaurant rewards programs, for example, are considered low consideration and high impulse, due to the cost of the products. But this company’s products are at the other end of the spectrum, with high consideration and a lower impulse factor.
In either case, the algorithms that Antuit builds are successful at delivering vast improvements in customer engagement and loyalty.
