[00:00:00] Jennifer Landreth: Great. Let’s get into it. Welcome, everyone. We’re so excited to have you all here and to talk about how to unlock collaborative loyalty in ways that partnerships can help you achieve this. I wanted to note that we will be recording this session and following up with you all with the recording so you can listen to it, share it with a colleague, um, basically do whatever you want with it. Um, also as a reminder, we will have the Q&A function on this Zoom available to you all to drop any questions in there and we will do our best to answer them.
[00:00:41] Jennifer Landreth: Great. So, I would love to take some time to introduce all of us, um, starting with Alessandra. She is our VP of Product Management and Operations who joined SheerID this year. Um, Emily du Luart, our Head of Global Solutions and Consulting, who is based over in the UK and has been at SheerID for just over two years. And I am Jennifer Landreth, a Product Marketing Manager here at SheerID, and I just recently hit my two years at the company.
[00:01:14] Jennifer Landreth: Awesome. Let’s go over our agenda before we get into any content, so you know what to expect over the next 30 minutes. Um, I will start with an overview of what loyalty means, how we typically build it, and some compelling stats around loyalty and partnerships as well. Next, Emily will go into some of the ways in which you can leverage partnerships and achieve that collaborative loyalty. And then Alessandra will go over some of the challenges that may arise when attempting to collaborate and how SheerID can solve those problems for you. Lastly, we will end with that Q&A portion that I mentioned above.
[00:01:52] Jennifer Landreth: All right, let’s get into the content. So, let’s talk about loyalty, the reason that we’re all here. Um, it is defined—loyalty is defined as something earned through consistent value and genuine connection. There are three main pillars to building loyalty. First, consistent excellence, built by regularly delivering high-quality products, services, and seamless experiences to your customers. Next, connection, creating—created mainly by making customers feel seen, valued, and understood through personalized interactions. And, of course, last but not least, trust and reliability. That is built through consistently proving that your brand is dependable, honest, and stands by its promises. And traditionally, brands achieve this through those—achieve these three pillars through their ethos, through their loyalty programs, and any other initiatives that they may implement. But, what you’ll see on the next slide is that while all of this is critical in building the foundation of loyalty, in today’s landscape of economic uncertainty, which we’re all familiar with, brands must take it a step further to truly capture that long-term loyalty.
[00:03:04] Jennifer Landreth: So, to set the scene here with some stats, um, we believe that, um, there’s proof in partnerships here. So, 50 to 60% of companies in consumer-facing industries likely already have formal partnerships in place today out in the marketplace, and it’s even higher in top sectors. We know that loyalty programs have high participation; over 90% of companies have loyalty programs already, and the average consumer actually belongs to over 19, and around nine of them are actively being used, so about half. Um, loyal customers are willing to spend more. 75% of program members buy more; 56% are willing to spend more with preferred brands despite cheaper options out there in the market. So, we know that loyal members spend more, we know that they buy more, we know that when they have an affinity to a company, they’re willing to disregard price potentially. But what could take this all a step further? We believe that partnerships are the next phase. It’s not a new concept, but we do know that co-branded programs see up to a 40% lift in usage rather than just your traditional standalone loyalty program.
[00:04:22] Jennifer Landreth: So, to break this up a little bit, we wanted to insert this poll in here because I want to ask you all how many loyalty programs that you all currently belong to. I myself definitely am in that more than 10 category. I belong to a lot, a lot of loyalty programs. But I probably am only using a handful. Some of my favorites that come to mind are Nordstrom, Ulta, Marriott Bonvoy, but I’m curious, Emily, Alessandra, what comes to mind for you?
[00:04:57] Emily du Luart: Yeah, I’m definitely in the more than 10 as well, but certainly the two that I’m most loyal to: British Airways for my travel and Tesco Clubcard for, uh, all my food.
[00:05:07] Alessandra Jacques: I would definitely also be in the more than 10. I would say Delta Airlines because of everything they—everyone they partner with, it feels so easy to earn miles. Um, and Sephora. You know, I don’t even really want that much stuff from there, I just like the free samples, and they’re always tailored to me.
[00:05:20] Jennifer Landreth: [Laughs] Another great loyalty program out there.
[00:05:35] Jennifer Landreth: Okay, so, moving on and now that we’ve validated that you all are—are like the rest of us that are part of the—the majority that actively belong to countless programs but maybe aren’t using all of them because maybe they just don’t, uh, speak to you on a weekly, monthly basis. Uh, let’s rewind a second to those stats that I talked about earlier, um, and really what that poll even told us. And that is that loyalty programs aren’t necessarily failing, but in today’s economic landscape, collaborating with other leading brands can transform stagnant programs into powerful loyalty ecosystems. Really for consumers, when brands genuinely understand them and strategically partner with other like-minded brands, they’re not just implementing another strategy to get customers in the door, they’re really thoughtfully placing customer centricity at the forefront of their entire brand experience.
[00:06:33] Jennifer Landreth: So, now that we’ve covered the power of partnerships, we’ve talked about some compelling stats, and really understand that loyalty is really important in today’s market, um, I want to pass it over to Emily to go into some really tangible ways that you can collaborate and build that collaborative loyalty that we want to talk about here.
[00:06:54] Emily du Luart: Great. Thanks, Jennifer. And it’s great to be here. As Jennifer mentioned, I’m based in London, and what’s really exciting is that largely what we’re seeing here in EMEA is exactly the same as what we’re seeing in the US. So, excited to talk about some of the trends and ways that you can collaborate with partner brands. So, we’ve heard it on this webinar, we know it, loyalty isn’t new. Loyalty programs aren’t new. But this evolution towards what you do with that data and the customer lifetime value is the really key piece here. How do you keep people engaged once they’ve already signed up to your loyalty programs? And that’s where this collaboration piece really kicks in.
[00:07:33] Emily du Luart: So, brands realize that their customers are expecting more. By partnering with membership groups in the first instance of the group we’re going to talk about, this enables you to connect with customers who your customers are going to be interested in. By—by partnering with membership groups, it opens up a whole new interested customer base and creates a hugely positive experience for the consumer and for both of the brands involved: the brand and the membership club.
[00:08:00] Emily du Luart: So, how did we get into this collaborative loyalty piece? Well, in the first instance, a sports retailer here in the UK came to us. They wanted to be able to offer additional cash points to their loyalty base if you had an existing football club membership. And to clarify here, we’re talking soccer. So, if you’re a season ticket holder with Celtic Football Club, for example, they wanted to be able to verify this and offer you additional discounts on team kit and merchandise. In turn, the customer of course benefits, but the club also benefits because they were able to offer these additional perks to their members.
[00:08:37] Emily du Luart: So, why and how did we build this? Well, for SheerID, this was a really cool and unique opportunity for us to collaborate with our loyal customers and build a new product at the same time. As I mentioned, the retailer came to us with this idea, which we worked then hand-in-hand with them to bring it to life. SheerID already managed their student verification program, so we were a known partner, and they wanted to evolve what they were already doing with us to a wider network of members. So, they were looking for a trusted solution to build this out, uh, where they would—they would bring the data via the football clubs and we would verify against it. The retailer needed a way to provide targeted discounts and benefits to their loyalty program members based on your verified football club status. A program and a product that wasn’t in existence anywhere else at the time, so they needed to develop it with us. The seamless integration and user experience was key, but the most important thing was keeping that end consumer in mind. So, they worked with us as a design partner throughout, both as the trusted partner, but also ensuring that it was secure and scalable, some pieces that Alessandra is going to touch on later.
[00:09:51] Emily du Luart: So, we’ve seen this, um, as a single example that came to us originally. But since then, I’m having this conversation a lot on both sides of the pond. With the rise in run clubs, one of the things we’re seeing is—is them wanting to partner with retail brands so that localized clubs, for example, can offer discounts on their favorite brands, on footwear. Um, or in reverse, uh, retail brands are coming to us similar to the story I’ve just told about the football clubs, but wanting to partner retrospectively with the run clubs, sponsoring events together, opening up to a known interested group of—of customers that they didn’t necessarily already have access to. But this of course does go further than sport. Um, any membership and loyalty program can work together, and we’re seeing this, um, in a multitude of different ways as well. For example, a hotel chain like Marriott being able to verify AAA members so that they could get additional points off bookings, uh, really tying brand and membership pieces together.
[00:10:52] Emily du Luart: Secondly, we’re going to talk about brand and brand collaboration. And this is certainly more typical, I would say it’s been around longer. Uh, but really it’s a great way for two like-minded brands to offer—offer their products and their—their offerings to their customer bases. And with that, you are getting a known access to new members who are highly likely to be a valued consumer to you as well through shared interest. These partnerships in turn grow your loyalty further with your consumers who feel valued and heard, but also create that engagement. The piece that we’ve seen is the really important bit for customer lifetime value. It’s all well and good if I sign up, but by partnering with a brand that I’m going to be interested in as well, you manage to keep re-engaging me and get me coming back and being more loyal.
[00:11:42] Emily du Luart: When thinking about brands to partner with, you likely have some in mind, but a great place to start is to consider your own market potential partners who you either do or don’t already work with. Um, but if you don’t know where to start, come to us, we have lots of people we work with. Or a quick search on Google, LinkedIn is great for it, industry events, anywhere where likely and similar brands are going to meet you is a great way to start when you think about collaborating with these partners. When I think about the brands that I’m most loyal to—loyal to, these are brands that don’t just send me blanket offers, they’re sending me considered promotions which includes partners they work with that I’m likely to be interested in. And brand-to-brand partnerships are a great way of future-proofing your engagement with your consumers, to keep them coming back and to keep them engaged. It not only opens up access to new future loyalty members, but also acts as a great way of giving more to your existing base. As a very loyal British Airways flyer, as I just mentioned, um, I’m always interested in offers that they are promoting with their partner brands. The most famous of these is probably the—the Amex BA relationship, um, encouraging users to spend on your credit card to earn your Avios, which in turn you can redeem against the cost of flights. So, this of course drives brand loyalty for the two companies at once, but it’s also a really beneficial consumer experience to me. Ultimately, that’s a win-win-win scenario.
[00:13:11] Emily du Luart: And the third of these that you might not necessarily think about in the same way, but is brand and employee program collaboration. Something we’re talking about more and more at SheerID. A really unique way to—to partner and to work with other companies or other brands is to partner with their employee perk program specifically. So, either you are offering them—them their employees a perk, or a partner company might partner with you to be able to offer your employees a perk or a reward to a select verified audience list. This isn’t just about sales, it’s about strategic growth at the same time. By contributing to a broader benefits package, you’re empowering HR teams and significantly increasing your brand’s reach with future members of your loyalty program. They are a highly engaged and appreciative consumer base while feeling genuinely supported by their companies and by you as a brand. You can create a powerful win-win situation for your brand and for the employees that you are partnering with. A great example of this is a coffee company offering free drinks to verified employees of a beauty brand, who in return are offering the coffee company employees points and money off purchases. Another recent conversation I’ve had on this was with a telecoms company who were wanting to offer special rates to frontline employees of associated first responder agencies. There are a multitude of use cases here, and all of them create a sense of collaboration which goes beyond the wall of your existing customer base. I’m now going to hand over to AJ to talk about traditional methods of partnering.
[00:14:53] Alessandra Jacques: Thank you, Emily. So, as we saw with all the use cases that Emily presented, brand loyalty partnerships are not a new concept, but they are traditionally a fairly challenging one. From a technical perspective, every loyalty program is very different, from how users authenticate to how much data is shared. And this means that to create any type of—of synchronicity between the two, brands often have to put out a pretty significant investment. This investment could be having to hire third-party consultants which, as many of us have probably experienced, is pretty costly and does come with a host of downstream issues such as misalignment, loss of knowledge after the contract ends, etc. And the other option is to build it in-house, which directs resources away from other strategic initiatives. Additionally, data best practices do require very careful handling of that data and, depending on the partnership, a data clean room could be required. And clean rooms traditionally, they—they unlock a lot of different capabilities, but they can be a very costly solution that is overkill for a simple partnership.
[00:15:58] Alessandra Jacques: And then once you’ve solved the technical challenges of partnership, you then have to solve the data handling issues. And as both Jennifer and—and Emily mentioned, the most valuable asset a brand has is the trust of its consumers. So, at all costs you have to protect that trust. And in order to maintain that trust, you need to make sure that your data is of quality. So, any potential differences in formatting or type that come from connecting these various siloed systems have to be resolved before the customer can be affected. You have to create a—a very high stand—high standard of quality and it has to be created before you create error—before you start to have errors in targeting or personalization, which are marketers’ worst nightmares. You need to make sure that all privacy and compliance regulations are strictly adhered to for all of your relevant audiences. And almost most importantly, customers need to be extremely aware and completely in agreement that their data is being shared between brands. So, there’s a lot to this, right? And none of it is particularly easy to implement, and it can require months of back-and-forth to achieve a quality level and a safety level that will protect that ultra-important consumer trust.
[00:17:15] Alessandra Jacques: Of course, all this being said, once you do resolve these challenges, the end state is that your brand has a much more holistic picture of the consumer and it can engage with them accordingly. And so this is where SheerID comes in. As we would watch our customers struggle to solve these partnerships with other brands, the ones that Emily just went over, we realized that we could help. And so we built the Alliance Network to make that collaboration infinitely easier. So, let’s take a look at how it works.
[00:17:41] Alessandra Jacques: Let’s say you have a clothing company called Vertagear that wants to give special discounts to alumni of Barnett College. Traditionally, this would require going through the challenges of a partnership implementation that we discussed prior. But with Alliance Network, we take the—all the work out of it. So, SheerID will take care of all of the data handling and integration aspects and all that Vertagear and Barnett have to do is host a page dedicated to the promotion. From this page, customers can just hit “Get Started” and it will take them to a SheerID-hosted verification form. Here they’ll fill out all of the information that your brand would like to see, from first name, last name, um, year of graduation, major, etc., and SheerID will verify them against Barnett’s alumni records. Once they’re verified, all the customer has to do is click their email confirmation, and then that verification along with all of the collected data will then be passed through to the sign-in page for the brands to collect. After you log in, customers will see that special alumni offer on their Vertagear account. And so with this super simple flow, Vertagear can now better engage directly with a subset of their customers and create that trust and that loyalty by offering them very highly personalized content and products. And with that, Jennifer, I’ll hand it back over to you.
[00:19:01] Jennifer Landreth: Awesome. So, as we’ve taken you through, you know, loyalty, which you’re all familiar with, partnerships, which I’m sure you’re also familiar with, we want to understand if maybe you want to learn a little bit more about the Alliance Network. We can hop on a call, um, we can send you some more information, do any sort of follow-up that you need to—to learn a little bit more about this product. Um, definitely just answer in the chat and we will—we will follow up with you.
[00:19:34] Jennifer Landreth: Amazing. And now we have about 10 minutes for Q&A. Um, let’s see what we have coming in here. Okay. First question, I think this one is for you, Alessandra. Can any two brands partner together?
[00:19:54] Alessandra Jacques: Yes, absolutely. It’s really up to you what brand you choose to partner with, what makes the most sense for your business, for your business. And it looks like with our demo we had a little bit of a glitch, it wasn’t running through, but you can—it’s very easy to do. So, we take all that work out of it and all you have to do is just create some assets that show that there’s collaboration between the two, so maybe some—just a landing page with both of your logos on it. We’ll take care of the rest. We’ll direct those verifications, we’ll, uh, make sure that the—the data pieces verify against each other. You just worry about what makes sense for growing your business.
[00:20:25] Jennifer Landreth: Awesome. That sounds great. And just to note, too, um, what Alessandra said, there was a slight glitch with the demo, but we—we can send you a demo in that follow-up so you can see exactly how easy, uh, the Alliance Network is and really kind of get a feel of what it would look like for you and whatever brands you choose to partner with. So, we can definitely follow up with that. Um, let’s see. Here’s another question, um, Emily, Alessandra, feel free to tackle as you want. Um, do we help brands find partners and do the brands need to be SheerID customers?
[00:21:13] Alessandra Jacques: That’s a great question. So, as Emily mentioned before, you—we can definitely help. We have a whole host of clients, we’re very familiar with our clients, we know how our brands operate, we know their loyalty programs operate. But that—they don’t have to be SheerID clients in order to participate in the Alliance Network. So, if you have a brand that you are interested in participating with and you know they’re not a SheerID customer, let’s talk. Let’s talk to them, it shouldn’t be—that will not be a blocker in any case. Emily, I don’t know if you want to add anything to that.
[00:21:43] Emily du Luart: No, I think that’s a great summary.
[00:21:47] Jennifer Landreth: Great. I have another question that I think, Emily, you might be able to answer. I think this is in your wheelhouse. Um, and that’s really what kind of conversations are we having currently? I know we have a lot of different use cases for this product, so I’m sure you’re having a lot of different types of conversations out there.
[00:22:04] Emily du Luart: [Laughs] Oh, you are putting me on the spot now. Um, I think that customers and that we’re speaking to, prospects we’re speaking to, are interested in niche-er and niche-er audiences. Like, how much more data can they gather—gather? Um, how can they know what platoon of the army you’re in, not just that you’re in the military? How can they know that you’re an alumni, not that you’re just a student? How can they know that you’re retired, not just that you work as a doctor? So, everything going a step beyond what we have done historically and to date is really what we’re seeing in the questions we’re getting asked. And it’s really exciting now that we can open up the conversation and say, yeah, let’s go look at it, let’s discuss with Alessandra’s team, let me take that back to our product team. As opposed to before, we were more confined to the existing audiences we had, which we verified very well, but now we’re able to open that up to a multitude of new and much niche-er audiences. Because customers never seem to surprise me with the request that they get for, can you verify this person or this person?
[00:23:22] Jennifer Landreth: That’s great. Yeah, I love what you said right there. And I think that’s an important kind of factor if you kind of think about it. If you are a SheerID customer currently, or if you know our product, um, it’s basically similar to verifying an audience—our Alliance Network, but it’s really for those niche audiences. It’s almost like a custom data source that you’re bringing to us where you want to really get super targeted and super granular with it. So, really the opportunities are endless, like Emily said.
[00:23:38] Jennifer Landreth: I’m not seeing any more questions popping up. Um, if you guys in the next three minutes have anything that you want to—to throw into the Q&A, we’ll be happy to answer that. Um, but otherwise, that’s all that we have for today.
[00:00:41] Jennifer Landreth: Great. So, I would love to take some time to introduce all of us, um, starting with Alessandra. She is our VP of Product Management and Operations who joined SheerID this year. Um, Emily du Luart, our Head of Global Solutions and Consulting, who is based over in the UK and has been at SheerID for just over two years. And I am Jennifer Landreth, a Product Marketing Manager here at SheerID, and I just recently hit my two years at the company.
[00:01:14] Jennifer Landreth: Awesome. Let’s go over our agenda before we get into any content, so you know what to expect over the next 30 minutes. Um, I will start with an overview of what loyalty means, how we typically build it, and some compelling stats around loyalty and partnerships as well. Next, Emily will go into some of the ways in which you can leverage partnerships and achieve that collaborative loyalty. And then Alessandra will go over some of the challenges that may arise when attempting to collaborate and how SheerID can solve those problems for you. Lastly, we will end with that Q&A portion that I mentioned above.
[00:01:52] Jennifer Landreth: All right, let’s get into the content. So, let’s talk about loyalty, the reason that we’re all here. Um, it is defined—loyalty is defined as something earned through consistent value and genuine connection. There are three main pillars to building loyalty. First, consistent excellence, built by regularly delivering high-quality products, services, and seamless experiences to your customers. Next, connection, creating—created mainly by making customers feel seen, valued, and understood through personalized interactions. And, of course, last but not least, trust and reliability. That is built through consistently proving that your brand is dependable, honest, and stands by its promises. And traditionally, brands achieve this through those—achieve these three pillars through their ethos, through their loyalty programs, and any other initiatives that they may implement. But, what you’ll see on the next slide is that while all of this is critical in building the foundation of loyalty, in today’s landscape of economic uncertainty, which we’re all familiar with, brands must take it a step further to truly capture that long-term loyalty.
[00:03:04] Jennifer Landreth: So, to set the scene here with some stats, um, we believe that, um, there’s proof in partnerships here. So, 50 to 60% of companies in consumer-facing industries likely already have formal partnerships in place today out in the marketplace, and it’s even higher in top sectors. We know that loyalty programs have high participation; over 90% of companies have loyalty programs already, and the average consumer actually belongs to over 19, and around nine of them are actively being used, so about half. Um, loyal customers are willing to spend more. 75% of program members buy more; 56% are willing to spend more with preferred brands despite cheaper options out there in the market. So, we know that loyal members spend more, we know that they buy more, we know that when they have an affinity to a company, they’re willing to disregard price potentially. But what could take this all a step further? We believe that partnerships are the next phase. It’s not a new concept, but we do know that co-branded programs see up to a 40% lift in usage rather than just your traditional standalone loyalty program.
[00:04:22] Jennifer Landreth: So, to break this up a little bit, we wanted to insert this poll in here because I want to ask you all how many loyalty programs that you all currently belong to. I myself definitely am in that more than 10 category. I belong to a lot, a lot of loyalty programs. But I probably am only using a handful. Some of my favorites that come to mind are Nordstrom, Ulta, Marriott Bonvoy, but I’m curious, Emily, Alessandra, what comes to mind for you?
[00:04:57] Emily du Luart: Yeah, I’m definitely in the more than 10 as well, but certainly the two that I’m most loyal to: British Airways for my travel and Tesco Clubcard for, uh, all my food.
[00:05:07] Alessandra Jacques: I would definitely also be in the more than 10. I would say Delta Airlines because of everything they—everyone they partner with, it feels so easy to earn miles. Um, and Sephora. You know, I don’t even really want that much stuff from there, I just like the free samples, and they’re always tailored to me.
[00:05:20] Jennifer Landreth: [Laughs] Another great loyalty program out there.
[00:05:35] Jennifer Landreth: Okay, so, moving on and now that we’ve validated that you all are—are like the rest of us that are part of the—the majority that actively belong to countless programs but maybe aren’t using all of them because maybe they just don’t, uh, speak to you on a weekly, monthly basis. Uh, let’s rewind a second to those stats that I talked about earlier, um, and really what that poll even told us. And that is that loyalty programs aren’t necessarily failing, but in today’s economic landscape, collaborating with other leading brands can transform stagnant programs into powerful loyalty ecosystems. Really for consumers, when brands genuinely understand them and strategically partner with other like-minded brands, they’re not just implementing another strategy to get customers in the door, they’re really thoughtfully placing customer centricity at the forefront of their entire brand experience.
[00:06:33] Jennifer Landreth: So, now that we’ve covered the power of partnerships, we’ve talked about some compelling stats, and really understand that loyalty is really important in today’s market, um, I want to pass it over to Emily to go into some really tangible ways that you can collaborate and build that collaborative loyalty that we want to talk about here.
[00:06:54] Emily du Luart: Great. Thanks, Jennifer. And it’s great to be here. As Jennifer mentioned, I’m based in London, and what’s really exciting is that largely what we’re seeing here in EMEA is exactly the same as what we’re seeing in the US. So, excited to talk about some of the trends and ways that you can collaborate with partner brands. So, we’ve heard it on this webinar, we know it, loyalty isn’t new. Loyalty programs aren’t new. But this evolution towards what you do with that data and the customer lifetime value is the really key piece here. How do you keep people engaged once they’ve already signed up to your loyalty programs? And that’s where this collaboration piece really kicks in.
[00:07:33] Emily du Luart: So, brands realize that their customers are expecting more. By partnering with membership groups in the first instance of the group we’re going to talk about, this enables you to connect with customers who your customers are going to be interested in. By—by partnering with membership groups, it opens up a whole new interested customer base and creates a hugely positive experience for the consumer and for both of the brands involved: the brand and the membership club.
[00:08:00] Emily du Luart: So, how did we get into this collaborative loyalty piece? Well, in the first instance, a sports retailer here in the UK came to us. They wanted to be able to offer additional cash points to their loyalty base if you had an existing football club membership. And to clarify here, we’re talking soccer. So, if you’re a season ticket holder with Celtic Football Club, for example, they wanted to be able to verify this and offer you additional discounts on team kit and merchandise. In turn, the customer of course benefits, but the club also benefits because they were able to offer these additional perks to their members.
[00:08:37] Emily du Luart: So, why and how did we build this? Well, for SheerID, this was a really cool and unique opportunity for us to collaborate with our loyal customers and build a new product at the same time. As I mentioned, the retailer came to us with this idea, which we worked then hand-in-hand with them to bring it to life. SheerID already managed their student verification program, so we were a known partner, and they wanted to evolve what they were already doing with us to a wider network of members. So, they were looking for a trusted solution to build this out, uh, where they would—they would bring the data via the football clubs and we would verify against it. The retailer needed a way to provide targeted discounts and benefits to their loyalty program members based on your verified football club status. A program and a product that wasn’t in existence anywhere else at the time, so they needed to develop it with us. The seamless integration and user experience was key, but the most important thing was keeping that end consumer in mind. So, they worked with us as a design partner throughout, both as the trusted partner, but also ensuring that it was secure and scalable, some pieces that Alessandra is going to touch on later.
[00:09:51] Emily du Luart: So, we’ve seen this, um, as a single example that came to us originally. But since then, I’m having this conversation a lot on both sides of the pond. With the rise in run clubs, one of the things we’re seeing is—is them wanting to partner with retail brands so that localized clubs, for example, can offer discounts on their favorite brands, on footwear. Um, or in reverse, uh, retail brands are coming to us similar to the story I’ve just told about the football clubs, but wanting to partner retrospectively with the run clubs, sponsoring events together, opening up to a known interested group of—of customers that they didn’t necessarily already have access to. But this of course does go further than sport. Um, any membership and loyalty program can work together, and we’re seeing this, um, in a multitude of different ways as well. For example, a hotel chain like Marriott being able to verify AAA members so that they could get additional points off bookings, uh, really tying brand and membership pieces together.
[00:10:52] Emily du Luart: Secondly, we’re going to talk about brand and brand collaboration. And this is certainly more typical, I would say it’s been around longer. Uh, but really it’s a great way for two like-minded brands to offer—offer their products and their—their offerings to their customer bases. And with that, you are getting a known access to new members who are highly likely to be a valued consumer to you as well through shared interest. These partnerships in turn grow your loyalty further with your consumers who feel valued and heard, but also create that engagement. The piece that we’ve seen is the really important bit for customer lifetime value. It’s all well and good if I sign up, but by partnering with a brand that I’m going to be interested in as well, you manage to keep re-engaging me and get me coming back and being more loyal.
[00:11:42] Emily du Luart: When thinking about brands to partner with, you likely have some in mind, but a great place to start is to consider your own market potential partners who you either do or don’t already work with. Um, but if you don’t know where to start, come to us, we have lots of people we work with. Or a quick search on Google, LinkedIn is great for it, industry events, anywhere where likely and similar brands are going to meet you is a great way to start when you think about collaborating with these partners. When I think about the brands that I’m most loyal to—loyal to, these are brands that don’t just send me blanket offers, they’re sending me considered promotions which includes partners they work with that I’m likely to be interested in. And brand-to-brand partnerships are a great way of future-proofing your engagement with your consumers, to keep them coming back and to keep them engaged. It not only opens up access to new future loyalty members, but also acts as a great way of giving more to your existing base. As a very loyal British Airways flyer, as I just mentioned, um, I’m always interested in offers that they are promoting with their partner brands. The most famous of these is probably the—the Amex BA relationship, um, encouraging users to spend on your credit card to earn your Avios, which in turn you can redeem against the cost of flights. So, this of course drives brand loyalty for the two companies at once, but it’s also a really beneficial consumer experience to me. Ultimately, that’s a win-win-win scenario.
[00:13:11] Emily du Luart: And the third of these that you might not necessarily think about in the same way, but is brand and employee program collaboration. Something we’re talking about more and more at SheerID. A really unique way to—to partner and to work with other companies or other brands is to partner with their employee perk program specifically. So, either you are offering them—them their employees a perk, or a partner company might partner with you to be able to offer your employees a perk or a reward to a select verified audience list. This isn’t just about sales, it’s about strategic growth at the same time. By contributing to a broader benefits package, you’re empowering HR teams and significantly increasing your brand’s reach with future members of your loyalty program. They are a highly engaged and appreciative consumer base while feeling genuinely supported by their companies and by you as a brand. You can create a powerful win-win situation for your brand and for the employees that you are partnering with. A great example of this is a coffee company offering free drinks to verified employees of a beauty brand, who in return are offering the coffee company employees points and money off purchases. Another recent conversation I’ve had on this was with a telecoms company who were wanting to offer special rates to frontline employees of associated first responder agencies. There are a multitude of use cases here, and all of them create a sense of collaboration which goes beyond the wall of your existing customer base. I’m now going to hand over to AJ to talk about traditional methods of partnering.
[00:14:53] Alessandra Jacques: Thank you, Emily. So, as we saw with all the use cases that Emily presented, brand loyalty partnerships are not a new concept, but they are traditionally a fairly challenging one. From a technical perspective, every loyalty program is very different, from how users authenticate to how much data is shared. And this means that to create any type of—of synchronicity between the two, brands often have to put out a pretty significant investment. This investment could be having to hire third-party consultants which, as many of us have probably experienced, is pretty costly and does come with a host of downstream issues such as misalignment, loss of knowledge after the contract ends, etc. And the other option is to build it in-house, which directs resources away from other strategic initiatives. Additionally, data best practices do require very careful handling of that data and, depending on the partnership, a data clean room could be required. And clean rooms traditionally, they—they unlock a lot of different capabilities, but they can be a very costly solution that is overkill for a simple partnership.
[00:15:58] Alessandra Jacques: And then once you’ve solved the technical challenges of partnership, you then have to solve the data handling issues. And as both Jennifer and—and Emily mentioned, the most valuable asset a brand has is the trust of its consumers. So, at all costs you have to protect that trust. And in order to maintain that trust, you need to make sure that your data is of quality. So, any potential differences in formatting or type that come from connecting these various siloed systems have to be resolved before the customer can be affected. You have to create a—a very high stand—high standard of quality and it has to be created before you create error—before you start to have errors in targeting or personalization, which are marketers’ worst nightmares. You need to make sure that all privacy and compliance regulations are strictly adhered to for all of your relevant audiences. And almost most importantly, customers need to be extremely aware and completely in agreement that their data is being shared between brands. So, there’s a lot to this, right? And none of it is particularly easy to implement, and it can require months of back-and-forth to achieve a quality level and a safety level that will protect that ultra-important consumer trust.
[00:17:15] Alessandra Jacques: Of course, all this being said, once you do resolve these challenges, the end state is that your brand has a much more holistic picture of the consumer and it can engage with them accordingly. And so this is where SheerID comes in. As we would watch our customers struggle to solve these partnerships with other brands, the ones that Emily just went over, we realized that we could help. And so we built the Alliance Network to make that collaboration infinitely easier. So, let’s take a look at how it works.
[00:17:41] Alessandra Jacques: Let’s say you have a clothing company called Vertagear that wants to give special discounts to alumni of Barnett College. Traditionally, this would require going through the challenges of a partnership implementation that we discussed prior. But with Alliance Network, we take the—all the work out of it. So, SheerID will take care of all of the data handling and integration aspects and all that Vertagear and Barnett have to do is host a page dedicated to the promotion. From this page, customers can just hit “Get Started” and it will take them to a SheerID-hosted verification form. Here they’ll fill out all of the information that your brand would like to see, from first name, last name, um, year of graduation, major, etc., and SheerID will verify them against Barnett’s alumni records. Once they’re verified, all the customer has to do is click their email confirmation, and then that verification along with all of the collected data will then be passed through to the sign-in page for the brands to collect. After you log in, customers will see that special alumni offer on their Vertagear account. And so with this super simple flow, Vertagear can now better engage directly with a subset of their customers and create that trust and that loyalty by offering them very highly personalized content and products. And with that, Jennifer, I’ll hand it back over to you.
[00:19:01] Jennifer Landreth: Awesome. So, as we’ve taken you through, you know, loyalty, which you’re all familiar with, partnerships, which I’m sure you’re also familiar with, we want to understand if maybe you want to learn a little bit more about the Alliance Network. We can hop on a call, um, we can send you some more information, do any sort of follow-up that you need to—to learn a little bit more about this product. Um, definitely just answer in the chat and we will—we will follow up with you.
[00:19:34] Jennifer Landreth: Amazing. And now we have about 10 minutes for Q&A. Um, let’s see what we have coming in here. Okay. First question, I think this one is for you, Alessandra. Can any two brands partner together?
[00:19:54] Alessandra Jacques: Yes, absolutely. It’s really up to you what brand you choose to partner with, what makes the most sense for your business, for your business. And it looks like with our demo we had a little bit of a glitch, it wasn’t running through, but you can—it’s very easy to do. So, we take all that work out of it and all you have to do is just create some assets that show that there’s collaboration between the two, so maybe some—just a landing page with both of your logos on it. We’ll take care of the rest. We’ll direct those verifications, we’ll, uh, make sure that the—the data pieces verify against each other. You just worry about what makes sense for growing your business.
[00:20:25] Jennifer Landreth: Awesome. That sounds great. And just to note, too, um, what Alessandra said, there was a slight glitch with the demo, but we—we can send you a demo in that follow-up so you can see exactly how easy, uh, the Alliance Network is and really kind of get a feel of what it would look like for you and whatever brands you choose to partner with. So, we can definitely follow up with that. Um, let’s see. Here’s another question, um, Emily, Alessandra, feel free to tackle as you want. Um, do we help brands find partners and do the brands need to be SheerID customers?
[00:21:13] Alessandra Jacques: That’s a great question. So, as Emily mentioned before, you—we can definitely help. We have a whole host of clients, we’re very familiar with our clients, we know how our brands operate, we know their loyalty programs operate. But that—they don’t have to be SheerID clients in order to participate in the Alliance Network. So, if you have a brand that you are interested in participating with and you know they’re not a SheerID customer, let’s talk. Let’s talk to them, it shouldn’t be—that will not be a blocker in any case. Emily, I don’t know if you want to add anything to that.
[00:21:43] Emily du Luart: No, I think that’s a great summary.
[00:21:47] Jennifer Landreth: Great. I have another question that I think, Emily, you might be able to answer. I think this is in your wheelhouse. Um, and that’s really what kind of conversations are we having currently? I know we have a lot of different use cases for this product, so I’m sure you’re having a lot of different types of conversations out there.
[00:22:04] Emily du Luart: [Laughs] Oh, you are putting me on the spot now. Um, I think that customers and that we’re speaking to, prospects we’re speaking to, are interested in niche-er and niche-er audiences. Like, how much more data can they gather—gather? Um, how can they know what platoon of the army you’re in, not just that you’re in the military? How can they know that you’re an alumni, not that you’re just a student? How can they know that you’re retired, not just that you work as a doctor? So, everything going a step beyond what we have done historically and to date is really what we’re seeing in the questions we’re getting asked. And it’s really exciting now that we can open up the conversation and say, yeah, let’s go look at it, let’s discuss with Alessandra’s team, let me take that back to our product team. As opposed to before, we were more confined to the existing audiences we had, which we verified very well, but now we’re able to open that up to a multitude of new and much niche-er audiences. Because customers never seem to surprise me with the request that they get for, can you verify this person or this person?
[00:23:22] Jennifer Landreth: That’s great. Yeah, I love what you said right there. And I think that’s an important kind of factor if you kind of think about it. If you are a SheerID customer currently, or if you know our product, um, it’s basically similar to verifying an audience—our Alliance Network, but it’s really for those niche audiences. It’s almost like a custom data source that you’re bringing to us where you want to really get super targeted and super granular with it. So, really the opportunities are endless, like Emily said.
[00:23:38] Jennifer Landreth: I’m not seeing any more questions popping up. Um, if you guys in the next three minutes have anything that you want to—to throw into the Q&A, we’ll be happy to answer that. Um, but otherwise, that’s all that we have for today.
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