Your loyalty scheme isn’t your loyalty strategy

Membership isn’t the same as loyalty

Vanessa made an important qualification during the interview. The people who join a loyalty programme are likely to be some of the business’s more loyal customers anyway.

That sounds obvious, but it is worth remembering when we look at the numbers. If loyalty members visit more often or have a higher average transaction value than non-members, we should not automatically assume the scheme created that difference. Someone who already likes a garden centre, visits regularly and spends heavily there is also more likely to join its loyalty programme in the first place.

Vanessa talked about well-performing programmes seeing substantial differences in average transaction value between members and non-members. That is useful evidence, but the more interesting commercial question is what the business does with the relationship once it has identified those customers.

Can you encourage somebody to visit four times instead of three? Can a plant customer be introduced to the café? Can a customer who bought a rose be helped to get a better result from it, through being introduced to the feed or treatment they may need next? Can you notice that one of your most valuable customers has broken their normal visiting pattern before they disappear altogether?

That is where a loyalty programme starts to become more than a reward mechanism. It gives the business a way to understand behaviour, then decide whether there is something useful it can do to influence what happens next.

The useful bit happens after the scan

Vanessa describes customers who visit without identifying themselves as ‘silent footfallers’. They come in, buy something and leave. The retailer knows a transaction happened, but very little about the person behind it.

Once the customer uses a loyalty card or app, individual purchases begin to join together. You can see what they buy, when they visit, how often they come back and how that behaviour changes over time.

That can become incredibly valuable, but data on its own does not create a relationship. A database can tell you a customer bought a rose. It cannot decide what that information should mean.

Vanessa gave a simple example. A garden centre identified customers who had recently bought roses and followed up with care advice, relevant product recommendations and an incentive to return within a limited period. The communication started with something the customer had actually done, rather than whatever product happened to be on promotion that week.

In Vanessa’s example, 45% of the people who opened that communication visited within the timeframe, and 25% of that group went on to make two more visits within the following month. It is one example rather than a universal benchmark, but it shows why relevance is commercially interesting as well as nicer communication.

The commercial objective is still there. The retailer would like another visit and another purchase. But the reason for contacting the customer makes sense from their point of view too. They have bought a rose. Here is something that may help them look after it.

That is a very different experience from receiving another generic email announcing 20% off plant food this weekend.

The offer might ultimately involve the same product. The context changes how it feels.

Personalisation without being creepy

There is an understandable nervousness around personalisation. Done badly, it can feel intrusive. The customer becomes very aware that a business has been watching what they do.

Vanessa told a story about her local veterinary practice that shows the opposite effect. They send vaccination reminders about her dog Jasper, including his photograph, his name and information relevant to his age and breed. She knows there is technology behind it. Nobody is individually composing every email. But that is not how the communication feels.

It feels as though the practice knows Jasper and cares about what happens to him.

That distinction is important. Good personalisation says: we know enough about you to make this more useful. Bad personalisation says: look how much data we have about you.

The aim should not be to prove how clever the database is. It is to make the customer’s next interaction more relevant.

That also means knowing when not to personalise. Just because a business has a piece of information does not mean it needs to appear in every communication. The customer should feel the benefit of the data without constantly being reminded that the data exists.

Product brands could be doing much more with this channel

It wasn’t a point Vanessa developed in the interview, but her rose example made me think about another opportunity that garden retail could make much more of. It involves the product brands sitting on the shelves.

Garden-centre marketing teams are under constant pressure to come up with useful things to say to customers. They need seasonal advice, project ideas, inspiration, reasons to revisit, event content, product education and communications that are more interesting than another blanket offer.

At the same time, many of the brands supplying those centres have a considerable amount of expertise sitting behind their products. They know when something should be used, the problems it solves, the common mistakes customers make and how to get a better result. They may already have photography, video, how-to content, technical information and people within the business who genuinely understand the category.

Those two things ought to fit together rather better than they often do.

Take Vanessa’s rose example. The garden centre knows who bought the plant and when. It owns the customer relationship and can identify the right moment to communicate. But a rose grower, plant-care manufacturer or feed brand may have the specialist knowledge that makes that communication genuinely useful.

The same principle could apply across the store. Someone who has bought a barbecue may appreciate a useful maintenance guide before winter. A customer switching to peat-free compost may benefit from practical advice on watering and feeding. A new lawn owner may need a simple seasonal plan. Someone buying biological controls may need reassurance about what to expect and when.

Product brands can help create that content. Short films, demonstrations, troubleshooting, seasonal reminders, project ideas, complementary-product advice or invitations to useful in-store events could all give a retailer something more relevant to put in front of the right customers.

There is an obvious benefit for the brand. It gets another opportunity to engage with somebody who has already demonstrated an interest in the category. But there is a benefit for the retailer too. Instead of trying to fill a loyalty programme with an endless stream of discounts and generic newsletters, it has access to useful specialist content that gives people another reason to open the email, use the app or come back into store.

The relationship still belongs to the retailer

There is an important boundary here. I would not advocate garden centres handing customer data over to suppliers so brands can start marketing directly to people who happened to buy their product.

The retailer has earned that customer relationship and should remain in control of it.

The opportunity is collaboration, not data sharing. The garden centre understands the customer and decides who should receive the communication. The supplier contributes knowledge, assets or an idea that makes the communication stronger.

And brands need to earn the right to speak.

A loyalty database should not become another media channel where suppliers simply buy their way into the next email. If every communication turns into ‘Brand X wants to tell you about…’, customers will tune out very quickly.

The test is much simpler: does the supplier’s contribution make this more useful, interesting or relevant to the customer?

If it does, everybody potentially benefits. The customer gets better advice. The garden centre gets stronger content and another reason for engagement. The brand gets closer to someone actually using its product, without taking ownership of the retailer’s relationship.

For garden brands in particular, I think there is something powerful in looking beyond the sale. A lot of supplier marketing support naturally concentrates on getting the product bought: packaging, POS, promotions, displays, advertising and launch activity. But many gardening products have a knowledge requirement after purchase too.

Helping the customer succeed with the product can be just as commercially useful as persuading them to pick it up in the first place.

Loyalty shouldn’t become a discount channel

Once you have a direct route to customers, the easiest thing to send them is an offer.

Sometimes that is exactly the right thing to do. Vanessa talked about using vouchers to encourage a return visit within a particular period, giving customers a reason to change their normal pattern.

But if every visit requires money off, we risk teaching people something else: wait for the incentive.

The more interesting use of loyalty is working out what might make the next interaction worthwhile for that customer. Sometimes it will be a discount. Sometimes a free coffee. Sometimes early access, useful information, an event, a reminder or simply something relevant enough that the customer is pleased to receive it.

Vanessa used the familiar phrase ‘surprise and delight’. It can sound like marketing language, but the underlying idea is sound. Occasional recognition can have more emotional value than mechanically accumulating another handful of points.

People do not experience loyalty as a spreadsheet. They experience it through lots of small interactions with the business.

The numbers can still mislead you

One of Vanessa’s observations concerned the temptation to celebrate the size of a programme. A garden centre might proudly report that it has 10,000 members. Her response is essentially: how many of them are active?

Membership totals are seductive because they tend to move in one direction. They are easy to put into a report and easy to understand.

Customer behaviour is messier.

Somebody joins and never returns. Another visits every fortnight. Someone makes a large one-off purchase and disappears. Another spends relatively little but comes constantly, uses the café, attends events and recommends the centre to friends.

Calling all of them ‘loyalty members’ tells us very little.

Vanessa segments customers according to how frequently they visit and how much they spend, then treats those groups differently. The labels themselves are not particularly important. The useful idea is that different patterns represent different relationships with the business, so they probably should not all receive the same communication.

It is also why the people on the shop floor matter. If staff do not ask customers to scan their card, the picture quickly becomes incomplete. If they see the loyalty scheme as another annoying till process, it will behave like one. Vanessa talked about loyalty champions and training staff so they understand what the programme is trying to achieve, rather than merely being told to increase sign-ups.

Technology can help a business recognise customers. People still determine whether they feel recognised.

The programme should still feel like the brand

One of Vanessa’s phrases from the interview was that a loyalty programme is ‘not an island off the coast of the brand’.

I like that because loyalty can easily become a parallel marketing operation. The main brand has one personality. The social channels have another. The in-store experience feels distinctive. Then the loyalty database sends generic automated vouchers that could have come from almost anybody.

If loyalty is supposed to deepen the relationship between a customer and a business, it should probably feel more like the brand, not less.

A garden centre known for horticultural expertise might use the programme to help customers become more successful gardeners. One known for hospitality and community might create reasons for people to meet, eat and spend more time there. Another might have a particularly strong family, local or environmental proposition.

The programme does not need to invent another reason to choose the business. It can reinforce the reasons people already value it.

And the same applies when product brands become involved. Their content should add to the retailer’s relationship with the customer, not interrupt it.

A loyalty strategy changes what you do

I think that is ultimately the distinction Vanessa’s conversation brought into focus for me.

A loyalty scheme can record transactions, distribute points and send vouchers. There is nothing wrong with any of those things. Customers understand them and, when they are well run, they can provide a useful reason to identify themselves when they shop.

But the more valuable opportunity sits underneath the mechanism.

The data can show which relationships are strengthening, where behaviour is changing, which customers are disappearing and where there may be an opportunity to make the next interaction more relevant. It can help a garden centre decide what to say, when to say it and, importantly, when a supplier might be able to contribute something genuinely useful.

The difficult bit is not collecting the information. It is deciding what to do differently because you have it.

That might mean changing the communication, creating a better offer, asking for feedback, training staff differently or collaborating with a product brand to help the customer get more from something they have already bought.

At that point, the loyalty scheme stops being a database with rewards attached, and starts becoming part of how the business understands its customers and creates reasons for them to come back.

That feels much closer to loyalty.