Tandym

As brands shift focus from consumer acquisition to retention to increase lifetime value (LTV) rewards and loyalty programs are an important marketing lever. BeautyMatter's Cristina Montemayor rounded up 7 loyalty integrations for beauty brands - Catch, Smile.io, LoyaltyLion, Yotpo, Stamped, Tandym, TOKI https://lnkd.in/eVHh52jB #loyaltymarketing #beautybusiness #loyaltyprograms #marketingtrends2024

A focus on “efficient growth” is the most common theme we're seeing as we’re out meeting with brands. The days of blitzscaling and growth-at-all-costs are over. There are plenty of buttons to push when it comes to delivering profitable growth, but how do you know which ones can drive the biggest impact for your business? I’ll be joining industry experts from Justuno, Refresion (by Pantastic), Andzen, and Stamped next week to share insights on this topic. You can RSVP at the link in the comments below. It’s free, and I guarantee™️ you’ll walk away smarter or you get your money back (ha).

That's a wrap on BFCM 2023 at Tandym. While it wasn't technically our first BFCM (we launched last August), it certainly felt like our first true test with a much larger brand and customer footprint than 2022. A subset of interesting data from last week: * 100% platform up-time with NO outages * Zero degradation in application performance .. decisioning times remained consistent with pre-BFCM levels * ~2X lift in new account originations on Black Friday alone * ~20% lift in AOV compared to pre-BFCM All in all, we saw a ~3X lift in total GMV running on our rails compared to a normal week. Oh, and our killer Program Success team (shoutout Ryan Frew, Jorge Sikaffy, and Erik Johnson) even managed to squeeze in the launch of a new brand on Monday right before the holiday .. go check out All Citizens Pay!

For most of our brand partners, between 60-80% of their revenues come from 20% or fewer of their customers. While I see a lot of energy put into new customer acquisition, I see a fraction of that devoted towards managing this very REAL revenue concentration risk. Maybe brands think they’ve “solved” retention with a generic loyalty program. But the offer isn’t at all differentiated for the most loyal customers vs transient, one-time shoppers. Everyone gets the same thing, which ultimately makes it less valuable to the best customers. Exclusivity is a powerful thing. So how do you create that exclusivity? It’s not like customers are telling you they're going to be in your top LTV decile when they land on your site for the first time so you know to treat them differently. My view: brands need to create gates that help them identify their best customers so that they can a) treat them better; b) unlock leverage in their economics; and c) know which customers they should spend to retain vs be okay with attrition. I love Inveterate, Inc because it’s a creative gate that achieves all three of the objectives above. Turns out that customers who will pay you to join a club REALLY love your brand! Branded payments (like what we power at Tandym) are another such gate. Customers who are willing to adopt a payment method with the brand’s logo also REALLY love your brand. It’s one of the highest ROI ways to invest in your best customers because of the underlying physics. The cheaper processing fees + lift in customer LTV >>> cost of loyalty and perks attached to the program. The right setting for the investment dial isn’t all the way at “new customers” nor is it all the way at “existing customers.” But, it seems that most merchants today are leaving easy money on the table as they chase new customer ROAS.

Shopify’s new 1-page checkout experience is 🔥 for alternative payment methods. With the old framework, alternative payment methods (e.g., Affirm, Klarna, Tandym) were relegated to the final page of the checkout flow. Shop Pay did a great job capturing customers with a really slick CX at the very top of the funnel which meant that a good chunk of customers wouldn’t ever reach that last page. We have some very colorful terms to describe this internally at Tandym 🙂. With the 1-page checkout that all stores are moving to, all payment methods are on a single page. Express payment options still get preferential treatment with placement above the fold, but alternative payment methods are much easier for customers to find. Check out the CX below from one of our recent launches with LONG—WKND (and shoutout to Nik Sharma on the recent brand launch .. what a killer site!).

Two separate, but related things I see *constantly* in DTC e-commerce. 1. I hear all the time from merchants we meet with that they’re unhappy with their rewards program. Plenty of reasons given as to why, but at the end of the day they don’t believe it’s driving value for them. 2. Most DTC merchants with loyalty programs have very generic setups. It's the same ten actions to earn points (share on social, birthday, etc.). The headline offer is usually 5% or 10% back in points with zero qualification criteria. The customer just has to provide their email address. So, the merchant is basically haircutting their margin by as much as 10%. The customer feels no attachment to the rewards because they didn’t have to do anything to earn them beyond share their email. And merchants wonder why these programs aren’t driving value… 🙃

Branded payments create a huge competitive edge for merchants who use them. Check out David Anderson's recent post that explains how Target generates 30% of their quarterly EBITDA from the RedCard program.

There’s a small, elite group of merchants that don’t hate swipe fees (at least not as much as everyone else). We’re talking 10-15 of the largest retailers in the country, and by extension the world. That’s because they’ve negotiated sweetheart deals with Visa and Mastercard. Remember when Amazon had a spat with Visa a couple years back? Amazon levied a customer surcharge on Visa cards in Australia and Singapore, and they threatened to stop accepting Visa cards in the UK all together. Amazon was risking real harm to their reputation with end customers to prove a point to Visa — customers have deeper affinity for Amazon than they do for the network logo on the front of their credit card. Amazon was willing to take these risks because the prize was massive. They wanted to secure a better, exclusive global deal on swipe fees. As a result, Amazon pays a swipe fee on Visa transactions that’s well below 1%. Compare that to the average of 2-2.5%+ that every other merchant pays. The next time you read headlines about Visa and Mastercard increasing fees across their networks, just remember that the biggest players have secured special exemptions for themselves. Hardly seems fair .. because it isn’t.