In episode 10, my guest Ryan Linders provides a rare glimpse into the initial phases of building a customer loyalty program from scratch. You’ll learn how Linders got the program off the ground and how Sally Beauty provides value to customers and gets it back in terms of membership fees and on-going purchase loyalty.
What’s particularly instructive is how Sally Beauty uses email with a genuine sensitivity to customer needs. While the tendency of the direct marketer is to push out offers at a heavy frequency, Ryan and his team temper their efforts to make sure they aren’t overwhelming their valued customers and or interrupting their natural purchase cycle. Part of the solution here is to make sure in addition to email address, you have purchase data that will allow you to segment the database and increase the relevance of each interaction.
Meet the Guest
Ryan spent the better part of his career in retail, including an 11-year stint at Chuck E. Cheese’s as well as stops at JC Penney and Pier 1 Imports. Late last year, he was recognized by The CMO Club with its Rising Star Award. At Sally Beauty, he is responsible for providing strategic leadership for the CRM team to deliver multi-channel CRM programs to maximize customer value and brand engagement.
Here are just a few of things on Ryan’s to-do list as lifted from his LinkedIn profile:
- Establishing key results reporting KPI criteria and continually optimizes the CRM strategy based on test and control learnings.
- Leading the strategy for Sally Beauty loyalty program and continually drives innovation in the program to keep it fresh and relevant for the customer to retain existing customers and acquire new customers.
- Owning the customer database and direct and oversees the management and improvement of the customer database to ensure that it is accurate and effectively and efficiently used to support marketing goals and functions.
- Developing best in class, quantitatively-derived and insight-based targeting strategies based on robust analytics to define and prioritize the highest potential customer and deliver measurable ROI. Leads and oversee the optimal contact strategy to determine “who gets what, when and how.”
- Collaborating with the global strategic team lead for CRM and Loyalty across all Sally Beauty Holdings companies.
What You'll Learn
- What it takes to get a customer loyalty program off the ground.
- Why loyalty programs don't have to be free.
- How SalesForce and Conversant fit into loyalty programs.
- Why being able to segment your loyalty program database is essential.
Quotes from Ryan Linders
- I think were at a place where everything is driven by the customer and driven by data.
- We definitely tested what are the right things to say to our customers over the course of multiple emails.
- I think as we think about our customer, we have to come at this as -- why Sally Beauty?
- We see about a 60% match of our email addresses to custom audiences within Facebook.
- Don’t underestimate your data infrastructure.