Partnering with other brands offers countless opportunities to drive growth. You can:
- Partner with brands to give members exclusive perks, like American Express did for card holders attending Coachella.
- Acquire new customers by offering exclusive discounts to employees of companies, like Verizon does through its Verizon at Work program.
- Integrate your loyalty program with other brands and enable members to earn and redeem rewards across programs, like Delta Airlines and Starbucks.
Brand relationships like these drive engagement. Visual Objects found that 71% of consumers enjoy co-branded strategic relationships. But forging these alliances can be complicated, costly, and time-consuming. This blog identifies the cost-benefits of some of the common approaches—and highlights a new solution that overcomes their challenges.
Weighing Your Options for Forming Brand Alliances
Data Clean Rooms (DCRs)
DCRs are secure environments where a brand can combine its first-party data with a partner’s data to uncover shared audience insights. For example, a streaming media company can partner with a big box retailer and use a DCR to match first-party data and draw conclusions that enable their advertisers to target audiences, based on consumers’ purchasing behavior.
DCRs enable brands to more precisely engage key groups and measure results without violating data privacy regulations or exposing customers’ personally identifiable information (PII). Through DCRs, brands can access valuable insights from walled garden platforms like Google, Meta, or Amazon.
But implementing a DCR can be technically complex and expensive, especially when managing relationships across multiple brands or ecosystems. DCRs don’t integrate well across platforms,and their limited query flexibility and scalability can restrict how insights are derived and applied.
Third-Party Consultants
Using a third-party consultant to develop brand alliances offers several advantages. Consultants bring deep industry expertise and valuable connections, which can accelerate the process of identifying and engaging with partners. They can bring fresh insight to your loyalty initiatives, and often use proven playbooks that can save you time and help you scale collaborations more efficiently.
But working with a consultant can also be expensive, particularly for long-term engagements. And you may have less control over partner selection or messaging strategy, which can result in misalignment with your brand values and goals.
Using in-house resources
Building brand relationships in-house gives you full control over your strategy, partner selection, and messaging, which ensures tight alignment with your brand values and goals. And developing internal expertise and long-term, personal relationships can lead to more authentic and sustainable collaborations. Plus you can save money by avoiding hefty and ongoing consultant fees.
But if you don’t have existing connections and expertise, the process can be slow and consume significant internal strategic and technical resources. The learning curve can be steep and you may have to work hard to overcome competing priorities and get the buy-in you need.
A New Solution for Creating Brand Alliances That Cuts to the Chase
Companies that want to quickly reap the benefits of brand alliances have an easy, cost-effective way to start: SheerID’s Alliance Network. Our Alliance Network facilitates three methods.
Employee Perks
Win and retain new customers by offering exclusive deals and experiences to verified employees of brand partners and nurturing their loyalty.
Membership Offers
Give exclusive promotions to members of organizations that align with your brand and use their verified, permissioned data to retain them.
Loyalty Linking
Create joint promotions with brand partners by linking loyalty programs and verifying membership through a single log-in experience.
When you use our Alliance Network to partner with other brands, you can easily:
- Provide exclusive offers to members of aligned organizations and partner companies.
- Create joint promotions and shared experiences that engage customers.
- Gather verified, permissioned customer data for targeted re-engagement.
How our Alliance Network Can Help You Drive Growth
Streamline and Scale the Partnering Process
Our Alliance Network is a one-stop-shop for forming brand alliances. It enables you to avoid the time-consuming legal and IT resources and the expense of third-party clean rooms. And it uses standardized data matching and privacy-safe data sharing, so you can link programs with each brand partner separately to quickly scale your programs—all without having to pay a consultant.
Create and Own a User-Friendly Customer Experience
With our Alliance Network, you can quickly build custom-branded landing pages that make it easy for customers to redeem your offers. And linking programs is just as easy. Customers simply log into both programs in a unified secure flow and their membership is instantly verified.
Integration between you and your partners’ program is seamless, and the customer data is sent to both you and your partners’ respective martech platforms. This gives you a hassle-free way to immediately start offering exclusive rewards to drive customer engagement.
Simplify Program Maintenance
Our Alliance Network maintains data accuracy with automated updates that ensure real-time synchronization between you and your partners’ systems. Eliminating the need for manual updates frees your team to spend time and budget on what matters most—leveraging your strategic relationships to create rewarding experiences that endear customers to your brand.
Fast Track Your Strategic Relationships
Brand alliances are a powerful way to expand your company’s reach and deepen customer loyalty, especially if you use a solution that’s easy to implement and scale. Our Alliance Network gives you a turnkey way to launch and manage strategic relationships that are secure, cost-effective, and customer-friendly.
Visit our Alliance Network page to learn more about how it can help you collaborate with strategic partners without any compromise.