Two-thirds of UK consumers say they’ll pay more for brands they trust — not because the concept is flawed, but because the strategy is. According to Harvard Business Review, loyalty programs only accelerate profitability when they’re part of a larger, long-term loyalty strategy.
In this on-demand session, Roger Williams, Head of Loyalty at Marigold, and Lisa Hake, VP of Marketing and Communications at Great Clips, reveal how leading brands build loyalty programs that last and the four critical steps you can take to do the same.
What you'll learn: Four steps on the path to customer loyalty
- Uncover loyalty’s best-kept secret. Learn why loyalty is often “backward” — overloaded with discounts and points but missing the fundamentals of acquisition, retention, and incrementality. Roger walks through questions brands should be asking, like whether you’re enrolling more members than you’re churning, if your evergreen onboarding journey actually works, and how over-discounting can quietly erode both margins and brand value.
- Turn zero-party data into a loyalty superpower. See Marigold’s proven zero-party data model in action: engage and collect customer preferences through quizzes, sweepstakes, and profile-building experiences; integrate those preferences with first-party data to trigger personalized messaging; and analyze and refine over time. Great Clips shows how campaigns like their back-to-school quiz and national sweepstakes drive new opt-ins, capture meaningful preferences, and fuel more personalized offers.
- Master long-term customer migration. Explore how Great Clips segments customers by visit frequency and uses lifecycle-aware tactics to earn just one more visit per customer. You’ll see how Marigold ROI Framework connects data/opt-in, conversion, engagement, growth, advocacy, and win-back into a repeatable path from first visit to loyal advocate.
- Build the foundation for "irrational engagement" to drive lasting value. You'll learn how to use points and rewards beyond pure discounts: recognizing members, reinforcing the value proposition, and rewarding non-transactional behaviors like completing challenges or clicking an email. You’ll see how concepts like the RFM shift, so-called "golden moments" right after redemption, and member health help brands create habits and emotional attachment that keep customers coming back.
This is a proven path to launching and scaling a loyalty strategy that fuels growth and deepens customer relationships.
Expert insight: Turning "one more visit" into lasting loyalty
“We measure new customers, better customers, good customers, and great customers based on the number of visits they have in a 12-month period. Our goal is to really get one more visit per customer. Because once you’ve missed a haircut [visit and sale], you’ve missed that haircut — you have to wait until it grows out again [before you have another chance to earn that revenue]. So it’s really important that we get all the share of haircuts, get those return rates going, and get that frequency across all those segments.” — Lisa Hake, VP of Marketing & Communications at Great Clips
By anchoring their loyalty strategy in visit-based segments and incremental behaviors, Great Clips shows how to connect everyday decisions — like when a customer books their next haircut — to long-term retention, higher share of visits, and deeper brand loyalty.
See how Marigold helps brands turn everyday customers into loyal advocates →
