Chinese New Year Special- Customer Engagement Gamification Ideas for Brands

Posted on January 13, 2023 by Aditi Aggarwal

Every year Chinese New Year (also called the Lunar New Year) sets a grand stage for retailers and consumers alike. With the rising population of Asians in every part of the globe and a ubiquitous China market finding a home in every metropolitan city, CNY celebrations have become a global phenomenon. In fact, London is renowned for its magnanimous Lunar New Year Celebrations every year followed by California which is all set to embrace this tradition in Disney California Adventure Park this 2023. Last year, some fashion brands across the US and the UK too embraced this tradition by incorporating festive elements into their collection.

This year is more special as it marks the year of the ‘Wood Rabbit’ – which happens once in a 60-year cycle. Being the year of the Rabbit, the Chinese New Year 2023 does bring in wit, luck, and optimism for everyone. Starting on January 22nd this year, the celebrations will last till February 1st and some of the most inspiring brands have restructured their marketing and engagement strategies to woo a larger global audience now. Since gifting is a very crucial and the most common part of the Lunar New Year tradition practiced by Asians, global brands have stepped up to raise their quarterly sales despite the 2-week-long shutdown in some of the popular Asian markets. In this blog, we will take a look at the top 5 brands from different industries that are all set to win and engage customers with Chinese New Year gamification ideas. These can be looked at as ideas for other brands to spin up innovative customer engagement campaigns during festivities:

1. Food & Beverage: Lurpak’s Digital Engagement Strategy

Spinning in the gamification engagement strategy well in time is Lurpak, bringing in a treat for all the home bakers with its Bake Up Prosperity – Spin, Win, and Ong this Chinese New Year (also see an introduction to gamification in reward programs). Customers stand a winning chance to take home some of the sure-shot prizes such as Branded Electric Oven, RM8 Credit Limited Edition TnG Card, Thermal Cooler Bag, and other RM8 CNY E-Angpow Rewards. They have also broadcasted a super cool video of home bakers to connect well with their audience and create brand awareness during this time.

2. Luxury: GUCCI raising the stakes on hyper-personalization

When it comes to luxury and fashion, GUCCI never disappoints. Like every year, this year too GUCCI launches its spring collection with colorful rabbit imprints on knitwear, t-shirts, shoes, and watches with exclusive pieces for men, women, and kids exhibiting unique geometric graphics and contrasting hues. Available in select stores, customers can also send a personalized e-card using the festive elements from the curated selection of GUCCI to their loved ones.

3. Hypermarkets: Giant’s in-store weekend bonanza

Giant – Malaysia’s grocery veteran with over 46 stores spread across the peninsular region has packed a special Lunar New Year Hamper during this period. Besides running regular offers and discounts every single day starting January 2023, customers with a minimum purchase of RM88 (on a single receipt) get a chance to spin the brand’s Wheel of Fortune at some of the selected stores in the city during weekends. This is a great crowd-puller for weekends thereby increasing the overall footfall of the store and keeping up with the festive spirit at the same time (check out Capillary’s solutions for retail).

4. Electronics: Apple’s emotional connection with customers

Never failing to strike an emotional chord with customers is Apple who launched its exclusive Chinese New Year homepage to welcome the Lunar New Year celebrations – offering a wide range of special discounts on their bestselling products during this time in some parts of the globe. Just a month back, Apple released Rabbit AirPods Pro with a rabbit engraving on it giving a perfect opportunity to its customers for gifting during this period.

5. Café & Restaurants: Starbucks for hearty Lunar New Year treats

The globally renowned American multinational chain of coffee houses – Starbucks is all set to dazzle its customers with the launch of 2023 Chinese New Year collection. At the onset of every lunar calendar, the brand offers a range of assortment in the form of mugs, tumblers, jars, cups, and gift vouchers – this year with Rabbit as the Chinese Zodiac imprint on its merchandise. Their range is not just restricted to merchandise but also food as they include cookies, breakfast, and beverage lineup tweaked to suit Lunar New Year festivities.

Check out Capillary’s Loyalty+

How marketplaces also run the show during Lunar New Year

While offline stores have created their story, online marketplaces shine with soaring sales during this time. Online sellers like Shopee, Lelong, Lazada, and Aliexpress have often mentioned that the sales during Lunar New Year are quite similar to the sales observed during other holiday seasons like Thanksgiving and Black Friday. In fact, one of the most incredible statistics is that in 2021, online retail sales were 821 Billion Yuan during the Chinese New Year, despite the pandemic. Owing to the brief migration of a large Asian population, marketplaces often become easy access to send and receive gifts.

Irrespective, of whatever medium your brand chooses to sell your product or service on during this celebratory period, make sure you do not forget to engage with your customers at the right time and at the right place with the most befitting loyalty and engagement strategy. Start gamifying your brand for Chinese New Year!

Capillary’s Secured Identity Management For Your Loyalty Marketing Programs

Posted on January 10, 2023 by Jubin Mehta

Data Privacy, Security, and Identity Management have become increasingly important in today’s digital world. Customers’ expectations have gone up and at the same time, customers have become more private about their data. Plus, with data laws (GDPR, LGPD, ePrivacy, and others) becoming more stringent, it seems like everything is stacked against the marketer. But if one looks at this objectively, the fundamentals remain the same.

Customers are looking for a great experience wrapped around a product/service and if a brand provides that, the chances of a customer remaining loyal to a brand are much higher. And this is exactly what a brand wants. To achieve this, brands need to be mindful of the data privacy laws of the region and use that to arrive at a seamless experience along with building flexibility within the system so that processes can change.

What is Identity? And components of Identity Management

Firstly, we need to understand what we mean by identity and its components. Identity can be looked at as a sliding scale of attributes varying from person level (individually addressable) to non-person level (not individually addressable).

There are various kinds of data: zero-party data, first-party data, second-party data, and third-party data. The first three of them would fall under individually addressable data and then there are- cohort & segment-based audiences and contextual audiences.

An advanced CDP (consumer data platform) like Capillary’s CDP+ is a secure way to resolve identities and help marketers get the best out of their customer data. But before we get there, there are several factors with identity management that have to be considered in the context of loyalty management software.

Challenges with identity and customer data for a loyalty marketer

Ensuring the accuracy of customer data: It’s essential to ensure that customer data is accurate and up to date to provide a seamless experience for customers and prevent issues such as incorrect points balances or rewards.

Maintaining data privacy and security: Protecting customer data is crucial in order to maintain trust and prevent data breaches. This includes implementing measures such as secure authentication and access controls.

Managing multiple customer touchpoints: Customers may interact with a company through multiple channels, such as in-store, online, and over the phone. It’s important to be able to seamlessly connect these interactions and maintain a consistent view of the customer across all channels.

Dealing with incomplete or incorrect data: It’s not uncommon for customers to provide incomplete or inaccurate information, either intentionally or unintentionally. This can make it difficult to accurately identify and track customers, leading to issues with personalized communication and marketing efforts.

Integration with other systems: In order to provide a comprehensive view of the customer, loyalty management software may need to be integrated with other systems such as financial, marketing, or HR systems. This can present challenges in terms of data compatibility and security.

How can a CDP or software help with identity management

Now, when you’re selecting a platform to run efficient and secured loyalty programs, here are some things that a platform can help you with.

Implementing secure authentication: This can include methods such as multi-factor authentication, which requires users to provide additional proof of identity beyond just a username and password.

Encrypt sensitive data: Encrypting data makes it unreadable to anyone who does not have the proper decryption key, protecting it from being accessed by unauthorized parties.

Use secure servers: Storing customer data on secure servers, such as those that use firewalls and intrusion detection systems, can help prevent unauthorized access.

Regularly update security measures: It’s important to keep security measures up to date in order to stay ahead of new threats. This can include installing software updates and patches as they become available.

Educate users: Providing users with information on how to protect their own identity, such as using strong passwords and being cautious of phishing attacks, can help prevent identity theft.

Monitor for suspicious activity: Regularly monitoring for suspicious activity, such as unexpected login attempts or unusual data access, can help detect potential identity theft and allow for quick response. (read about Capillary’s Fraud Detection for loyalty programs)

Capillary’s Product Suite comes with Built-In Identity Resolution

At Capillary, the heart of the platform is CDP+ where all consumer data securely resides. On top of CDP+, our flagship product Loyalty+ helps marketers execute some of the best loyalty programs (250+ brands use Loyalty+ to reach 875mn+ customers). Because to deliver a successful marketing program, a customer data platform alone is not sufficient. All this data has to be meaningfully resolved to deliver a highly personalized experience.

With Capillary’s technology, marketers can build a unified customer profile across all touchpoints by connecting identities, engagement data, customer orders, loyalty, marketing journeys, and privacy management. Capillary uses advanced resolution capabilities like fuzzy matching to reconcile identities through standard (common) ID to build unified profiles.

With these unified profiles, it becomes possible to not just make 1-1 relationships possible but deliver a true “1-You” experience where each experience is tailored for that particular customer in their context.

5 Ecommerce Trends That Will Kickstart 2023 With Profitable Growth

Posted on January 4, 2023 by Aprajeeta Singh

In 2021, ecommerce accounted for nearly 19 percent of retail sales worldwide. Statista’s forecasts indicate by 2026, the online segment will make up close to a quarter of total global retail sales.

The COVID-19 pandemic proved to be one of the key reasons behind the surge in ecommerce. As the situation made many offline retail businesses go online, many stayed there, looking at the benefits of going digital. With customers’ changing shopping behavior, even offline shoppers move to online shopping. At present, it’s hard to decide which approach can be best to get more customers. And, with increased competition, it turned more tricky.

That’s where constantly monitoring competition and ongoing trends is needed to run your e-tail business successfully. To make this strenuous task easy for you, we made a list of gripping ecommerce trends you can try to skyrocket your business growth in 2023.

1. Expedite your Sales with Mobile Commerce and Social Commerce

In 2021, net sales via mobile devices accounted for $359.32 billion and this figure is expected to get doubled by 2025. The figures entail the need for newer ecommerce businesses to go mobile-friendly to make their offerings accessible to a larger audience. Though the revolution started with a mobile-optimized version of websites and online stores, we are far ahead of responsive sites. By adding more and more mobile-friendly touchpoints for your users, you can easily bring more traction to your business.

In addition to responsive sites and m-commerce apps, perform your demographics analysis periodically. It helps you understand the share of young consumers and their channels of interaction with your brand. Since young consumers are changing the business landscape, brands are considering multiple touch points favorable to them, like social media, to create a stronger connection. Young shoppers have a greater inclination towards social commerce.

Clickable Instagram stories, Buy button on Facebook, Instagram checkout and the popularity of Instagram influencers have greatly changed the shopping patterns of audiences.

According to an eMarketer study, the count of social buyers in the US is expected to rise from 60.6 million in 2019 to 108 million in 2025— that’s more than a 75% increase in mobile shopping over just a few years. Learn and use these evolving trends to implement them in your marketing strategy for larger benefits.

2. Personalize Customer Experiences with AI-powered Commerce

80% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company that provides a tailored experience. So, if you are not offering personalized customer experiences, you’re already losing many potential buyers. When ecommerce gives you access to a lot of data, advanced technologies like AI, ML, and IoT give you the power to use it to know your shoppers better. Voice searches, recommendation engines, centralization of engagement channels, rich search experiences, and 360-degree customer journey makes it easier for you to understand the loopholes and fix them in real time.

Leveraging Artificial Intelligence, you can perform shopper’s mood tracking, give smart recommendations to your shoppers, and implement targeted ad campaigns with audience segmentation. Capillary’s suite of products powered with AI has rich search and consumer personalization functionalities covered for all enterprise-grade businesses. You can leverage our modular commerce platform to sell online, drive customer engagement, personalize your interactions, and earn loyal customers. Our intelligent aiRA framework based platform can keep all operations of your e-tail business aligned and capable to take your customer experiences to the next level.

3. Improve your Conversion Rates with Omnichannel Customer Experiences

Some customers love shopping online, while others prefer comparing products online to shopping offline. You better be available both in the digital and physical worlds when you don’t want to miss out on any of these two types of shoppers. Though customer shopping patterns changed a lot post-pandemic, we’re witnessing significant growth both for showrooming and webrooming. With rising customer acquisition costs (CAC), creating an omnipresent brand can favor your conversion rates rather than siding with one channel.

Build a consistent experience for your customers across all channels & platforms. Even the leading brands, like Saudi Arabia’s QSR are taking an omnichannel approach to drive crazy profits to their business. Adding multiple touch points will help you not to leave a vent to lose on shoppers. A resilient omnichannel system can keep you connected to your customers even at the times of rapid market shifts. So, you can take make your progressive plan towards building a long-term relationship getting into an omnichannel ecosystem.

4. Grow your Brand Serving a Community

Your business is for the people. In the post-pandemic era, customers are becoming more conscious about global and social causes. The brand’s support for the causes impacts their shopping decisions as well. So, going ahead with the monetary aspect of the business, you need to understand what bothers your customers and the change they like to make a living in the community.

Green consumerism, sustainable business practices, anti-racism community, equality, and several such impact-driven factors are on the rise. As an ecommerce business, you can start with green commerce, define the values your brand supports, and focus on the ones that align with your customers. This will not only delight your customers but will create an emotional connection with your consumers.

5. Bridge the Gap Between the Real and Reel World with Metaverse

Brands are trying multiple ways to convert their digital fans into shoppers. Some businesses are counting on visual commerce – live selling on Instagram and Facebook, while brands like Lenskart are investing in Virtual AR to give a digital try-on experience to their customers. When the ultimate goal is to delight website visitors and convert them to shoppers instantly, many ecommerce giants are investing in trending tech to improvise digital shopping experiences. Amazon’s AR shopping tool – Room decorator, is one intelligent application of AR to let customers shop for furniture and other home decors by virtually placing it in the room.

Taking these experiences to the next level, brands like Nike – Nikeland, Flipkart – Flipverse are leveraging Metaverse to create ‘real experiences in the virtual world. You can reach a wide range of audiences, especially millennials and GenZ, to entertain in the virtual world and boost customer engagement with gamification powered by avatars. Gartner predicts that 25% of people will spend at least one hour per day in the Metaverse by 2026, leaving you with a notion to explore this segment. Is your brand ready for Metaverse? Check here.

Add New Flavors to your Ecommerce Strategy

When the new year is around the corner, it’s time for you to decide the new ecommerce trends in 2023 that you can add to your marketing strategy to boost your profits. You can try all or some of the above-listed trending ideas to kickstart ecommerce growth in 2023 and drive your business’s success.

Want to personalize your customers’ shopping experiences to the next level? We have an all-inclusive ecommerce suite backed with loyalty and engagement solutions to make your brand name a label. Connect with us now to discuss this further.

Top 5 Customer Loyalty and Consumer Engagement Trends for 2023

Posted on January 1, 2023 by Aditi Aggarwal

The stupendous rate at which the customer loyalty market is growing every year has dazzled many industry experts. Daniel Heaf, VP of Nike Direct, says,

Membership is how Nike serves the needs of athletes and cultivates personal relationships with people across the many different experiences we provide. The more we know our members, the better we innovate to create value for them — whether in products, services, experiences, content, or inspiration.

Building customer relationships has taken a leap in every brand’s business strategy and organizations are using multiple customer engagement strategies to excel in this sphere. Let’s take a sneak peek at how the market unfolds in 2023 and what are some of the path-breaking customer loyalty trends that brands will adhere to.

1. The coming-of-age: Digital wallets

Digital payment solutions have evolved in an increasing variety of ways. India’s revolutionary demonetization drive backed by the COVID-19 pandemic’s cautionary advice on digital payment methods has completely metamorphized the way people pay while shopping, not just in India but across the world. Today, 9 out of 10 Americans use some form of digital payment.

McKinsey’s recent survey also predicts that consumers are expected to have at least three or more digital wallets in the coming years. This will seamlessly pave the way for loyalty marketers to incorporate BNPL (buy now, pay later) option in every brand’s strategy. Customers are more at ease to shop and opt for those brands that enable digital wallet solutions. Digital wallets not just offer the option to pay but also integrate customers’ reward points and offer benefits in real time.

2. Gamifying for an immersive customer engagement

Gamification has been a raging trend in 2022, so what’s brewing in 2023? Well for starters, gamification is heavily incorporated by sectors and industries of different interests. Right from the food delivery app you order food from to the luxury holiday you booked on your wedding anniversary, gamification hooks customers like no other. Knowing that reality and virtual worlds are blending to create newer opportunities today, gamification will play a key role in a brand’s business and marketing strategy in order to stay updated with the ‘meta’ world.

Come 2023 and gamification will expand to more sectors, including personalized games for customers to create an immersive shopping experience that engages well with the customers. Many companies have already started foraying into technological advancements to personalize a customer’s journey using gamification as a crucial element. It’s about time that companies need to gamify their App in order to engage better with their customers and ensure retention and stickiness to their brand.

Chek out Capillary’s Loyalty+

3. The advent of Intelligent Brick and Mortar Stores

An interesting fact to be noted was if COVID-19 pandemic closed the doors of offline shops, then many new offline stores were also open. Post-pandemic, the never-ending debate of how online will supersede offline shopping finally came to a pause this year. 2023 will witness brick-and-mortar stores adopting intelligent functionality catering to emerging omnichannel customers.

Enough evidence and data have been collected that clearly point towards how an offline store shopper will be meeting different channels and touchpoints of a brand to finally make an informed purchasing decision. It is thus inevitable for brands to create a seamless connection and interaction between all these channels (including the brick-and-mortar store). Physical stores are also focussing on speed and convenience thereby offering BOPIS (buy online, pick up in-store) and curbside pickup options to customers.

4. Remodeled Consumer Behaviour

The APAC region clearly shows its love for customer loyalty programs with a whopping 92% of customers showing a willingness to shop with a brand that offers a loyalty program. Changing consumer behavior has indeed become a constant post COVID-19 pandemic.

Customers are literally steering the wheel of the brand’s vehicle by expressing their needs and wants and also what are their expectations from a brand. Brands thus need to focus on delivering value and convenience to their customers by simplifying their reward offers and solving customers’ real pain points. In a revealing study, customers have also opined on how they perceive a brand by looking at how a brand treats its customers. Brands must sensitize towards customer sentiments and accordingly roll out their business strategies in order to establish a trust-based relationship with their customers. Some thought-provoking stats here:

84% think about how you treat customers
70% want to know you treat employees well
50% will be scrutinizing your environmental practices
47% consider action on economic injustice important
41% rate you on how involved you are in the community

5. Guarding Data Privacy with value-driven Personalization

Data privacy is big and holds utmost importance to customers across the globe. In a time where countries are emerging with stringent data privacy laws to safeguard their people’s data, customers too are being vigil on whom to share their personal data with. Brands thus need to build a culture of strong ethos and entrust their loyal customers with safety practices that ensure the collected data is used to better overall shopping experience of their customers.

When customers are offered value-driven personalized benefits and services that enable a smooth shopping experience, their loyalty too will last for long. Sending the right campaign at the right time to the right customer is the key to building this relationship. In fact, many global brands like Lululemon have been able to build their own brand community by strengthening customer loyalty and creating brand ambassadors. All this by enabling customer data sets with value-driven personalization.
Speak to a Loyalty Expert and see how Capillary’s SaaS platform can help you deliver excellent loyalty programs for your brand.

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