Our Top 5 B2B Loyalty Marketing Trends for 2022 

By Ko de Ruyter, Debbie Keeling and David Cox, the Loyalty Doctors

Continuing with our crystal ball gazing, what else is in store for the loyalty marketing space in 2022. Here’s the second of our loyalty doctors’ five forecasts for the ‘para-Covid’ era. 

Trend 2 - Plan for a hybrid delivery model. 

Loyalty programs and most likely your core offerings have pivoted really quickly from tangible to digital.  In 2022, for your program, the next frontier will be to offer the best member experience in terms of the optimal combination of physical and digital delivery. 

It all starts with the realization that your program needs to develop from an omni-channel program design, in which multiple channels proliferate, to an integrated and member-centric hybrid experience. Planning for such a model will involve making trade-offs based on member profiles. You will need to understand how, when, why and where your members prefer to interact with you. It is great to have AI-fuelled conversational agents to help you answer FAQs, but their roll-out will not result in a one-size-fits-all member experience. 

• Find out whether members prefer always-on, easy-access chatbots or an app for point balance information and member status queries or whether they wish to speak to a live person in case of point redemption issues. 

• Similarly, will you be planning for online member events alongside offline ones?

• In terms of member enablement, will you go with web-based sales training versus classroom instruction? Or a mix of the two? 

There is no mixed message here, the trend is clear; hybrid delivery based on member preferences is the way to go in 2022. In planning for hybrid delivery models, it is vital to map personalized member preferences throughout the customer journey. This is how Amazon and other online giants discovered the importance of ‘the last mile’ as a competitive differentiator by allowing customers to plan digitally for a physical delivery. Mark our words, it will be likely that this will be the gold standards for reward fulfilment practices in loyalty marketing.