Marketers have long leveraged loyalty programmes to retain customers and drive spend – typically through personalised discounts and rewards. Customers are increasingly seeking out rewards programmes, with 79% of British people now in at least one programme (+9 percentage points vs 2022) and the average Brit signed up to six (Mando-Connect & YouGov).

While discounts continue to be the primary motivation for customer participation (Merkle Loyalty Barometer) and short-term sales benefits are proven, there is a much greater role that loyalty can and should play for brands in 2025. To stay ahead, marketers must go beyond the transactional approach typically associated with customer loyalty programmes and build enhanced experiences that deliver emotional connection and solve real-life pain points for customers. 

Let’s explore how your brand can develop a future-proof approach to loyalty and harness growth through a distinctive, end-to-end brand experience.

Customer and brand loyalty definitions  

In this context, customer loyalty refers to the ongoing commitment customers show towards a brand, resulting in repeat purchases, positive word-of-mouth, and long-term transactional relationships. Brand loyalty goes beyond this as a deeper, emotional connection to the brand -driven by trust, values and brand experience. That means a customer usually remains loyal to a brand in the face of competitors’ lower prices.

Beyond transactional programmes 

Building a sustained, mutually valuable relationship between consumer and brand is the key to a successful loyalty strategy. Customers are increasingly aware of the value of their data to brands, and concerns around privacy still linger for many. Therefore, delivering a meaningful value exchange has never been more important. 

Whilst discounts and transactional rewards remain a popular incentive and may be enough to secure an initial sign-up from someone already strongly considering (re)purchasing from the brand, to deliver long-term value brands must curate an elevated value exchange that goes beyond the transactional. 

This could be through providing the customer with an innovative take on emerging cultural trends, hosting exclusive events or content partnerships, launching gamified activations, or partnering with causes that are meaningful to the customer and enabling them to contribute. The proposition must be authentic, connect distinctively to the brand message at large, resonate with the target audience, and ultimately spark emotional interactions. Loyalty strategists should work closely with brand teams to develop the platform and activations, leveraging customer insight. 

This concept of a value exchange is central to our own Sanpo Yoshi philosophy, in which sustainable growth is driven by ensuring our work delivers not just for businesses, but for customers and wider society as well. 

Building customer loyalty as part of total brand experience  

79% of CMOs agree that brands today are built through experience (Dentsu Creative, 2024 CMO Report). Transactional discounts, points and tiers have a role to play but are not going to deliver transformational loyalty or growth alone. Instead, brands should make their loyalty offering an intrinsic part of the product or service itself, via experience. They should leverage insights gathered from known customers to understand what a great product or experience means to their them and deliver on that – making loyalty offerings the gateway to the best experience with the brand. 

The integrated work of Dentsu Creative and Merkle with Burger King is a great example of a successful loyalty programme. Royal Perks, a programme offering exclusive benefits and offers, free menu items, and play to win experiences, was designed to excite Burger King’s more than 11 million daily diners. With Braze, we built personalised customer journeys to improve engagement, and the result in under eight months was a 500% app download increase and a 900% boost in loyalty programme sign-ups. In addition, the partnership brought in a wealth of data for Burger King, opening the door for further personalisation to drive even deeper customer loyalty in the future.  

Connected loyalty campaigns have since been successfully based on the resultant customer insight. For example, our 2024 campaign, BK Footy Royale, saw us leverage the summer of sport – and the insight that football was a passion point for BK lovers – to create a gamified campaign that tripled target sign-ups and drove the best CRM engagement that BK had ever seen. The key takeaway here is that embedding an insight-led loyalty strategy as part of an overarching, distinctive brand experience delivers best-in-class results. 

A successful experience-led loyalty strategy should tell the brand story at every touchpoint. To drive growth, we recommend that you:  

• Use insight gathered from known customers to understand what exactly great experience means to them – hyper-personalisation, entertainment, speed, “concierge-style” support and so on – and develop the loyalty experience around this.
• Don't only cater to only existing members or purchasers – tap into culture at large and put loyalty at the heart of the brand conversation – giving wider audiences (outside your customer base) a reason to pay attention and engage with your brand messaging.
• Design a loyalty proposition with a low barrier to entry; allow non-transactional interactions with the brand that nurture relationships over time.

Focus on enabling teams to deliver customer-centric planning

Keeping all of this in mind, a clear vision, strategy, and seamless planning across every customer touchpoint has never been more crucial. Brands thrive when content, culture, and community are interconnected, as customers expect a cohesive story. Every interaction with the brand is a moment to either engage or lose them. To succeed in building customer loyalty, brands must have:  

• A well-curated data strategy and insight loop, connecting customer knowledge across touchpoints. 
• A clear and consistently used audience framework, from broad brand audiences to loyalty segments, accounting for scale.  
• Clearly defined brand behaviours along with distinctive and dynamic assets – showing up across carefully mapped touchpoints. 
• Measurement tools and data connectivity to accurately understand the impact of activity across the funnel, including halo impacts.

Loyalty should be at the heart of the modern brand experience. As customer journeys get more complex and expectations heighten, marketers must adapt and leverage the power of data and AI to expand on the traditional definition of loyalty, embedding it as a total brand asset.  

Building trust is hard – and loyalty requires trust. This is where we can help. We currently have over 250 million active loyalty members from Merkle-driven programmes. With over 2,500 loyalty, promotions, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and B2B ABX (Account-Based Experience) experts on our team, we can help your brand to deploy innovative loyalty programmes that grow brand love.  

If you want to learn more about our loyalty offering, take a look at our Merkle Engagement & Loyalty solution page. Or, to get in touch, click here.