After winning Corporate Vision Magazine’s 2018 Corporate Excellence Awards in the category of “Best Digital Customer Loyalty & Rewards Platform” we wanted to catch up with The First Club’s founder Jill Goldworn and Denis Huré
What does The First Club do?
The First Club, founded in 2009, was the first global digital rewards platform that addressed the challenges of the ‘engagement problem’. Engaging customers, employees and partners are key challenges that plague thousands of businesses around the world.
In response to this challenge, The First Club reinvented what was taken as ‘common practice’ and decided to offer enterprise-level loyalty solutions that can be seamlessly integrated into existing infrastructure?
What is the impact of Loyalty Rewards Programs?
By using the First Club’s program we’ve time and time again seen significant and observable improvements on engagement and customer loyalty.
Jill Goldworn, Co-Founder and President said:
“We want to democratize loyalty and reward the world. It sounds like a lofty goal but when brands can make rewards affordable, easy to get going from the first purchase, and frictionless to redeem, the customer ROI and engagement skyrocket.
What is truly key to this is that the customer stays engaged with the brand even when they are not interacting with the brand in the primary capacity. An example of primary capacity is hotel stays or credit card usage.
Why Should I Keep Existing Customers Engaged?
The brands that we work with spend on average $300 to acquire a new customer. What is truly interesting about that figure is that they then only spend a fraction of that cost on actually retaining them.
As Marketing Professionals we know that by far the most profitable strategy is to generate repeat purchase from new customers and keep them engaged for as long as is possible.
Denis (my co-founder) and I have shown time and time again that deploying engagement strategies using low-cost, high value, frequent rewards that people really want, is key. This personalized approach shows customers that the brands truly care about them and has helped our clients improve the overall frequency of purchase, customer stickiness and increased profits by up to 40%.
The First Club team has a diligent process in place that ensures that the client’s goals align with the core competencies of TFC. It is also important to make sure that they are connected in the most compelling way to drive engagement.
Before we even think about customized bespoke integration on behalf of our clients we make sure that we identify a number of important factors including:
- Desired program outcomes
- The existing journey of the customer
- Technical requirements from your brand
- Strategies to improve the overall experience
These four key areas inform the mutual agreement regarding the budget and scope for every project.
What is unique about The First Club’s Reward Programs?
Loyalty programs are not an exclusive market, as Jill and Denis know. We asked them how the First club is different from the competitors.
Jill explains that “The First Club is not just a rewards platform but in fact a full enterprise loyalty system. To ensure our clients are always happy we provide broadest and largest selection of digital entertainment content in the industry. We have millions of options that can be instantly delivered to almost any device in the world. We also provide comprehensive communication tools, transactional and analytical data to make future interactions matter.
The First Club is a completely customizable and flexible platform to make sure that we can co-create a system that works. Our clients can add their own rewards while we can manage the point’s bank and all customer-facing communications. This allows us to provide our service to any size organisation for their most valuable customers and employees.
Here Jill says is an important factor about The First Club. We can use the same system to reward both employees and customers. Jill explains, “There is no need to build out two different platforms. With our technology, we can re-purpose the same program for employees. This allows them to become more familiar with their own rewards platform and more passionate about its capabilities.
Technology Moves Fast
Jill said, “We understand better than anyone how fast technology moves. As a tech platform, we are passionate about employing and researching new trends. The First Club makes sure to adapt trends we are seeing to consistently improving our platform and user experience.
We always add the latest categories of rewards and make sure we are providing better ways to deliver the content. We also constantly focus on how to make the customer journey frictionless.
Giving brands the ability to take action to give rewards to clients we can help them grown sustainably. We use AI to mine for data and communicate what their value proposition is, especially in highly competitive markets.
Ultimately we have revolutionized the rewards and customer loyalty sector. We have provided a scalable, practical end hugely effective solution to one of businesses’ biggest challenge. We know that modern trends have made instant gratification the norm and this plays in very well to our model.
The strategy they provide is very effective and truly fit-for-purpose.
Find out more about The First Club’s Enterprise solutions here.
