Loyalty in retail isn’t just about discounts anymore — it’s about creating experiences customers remember. In this episode, Catherine Erdly talks with Charlie Casey, CEO of LoyaltyLion, about what loyalty means in 2025.

You’ll learn:

Why discounts alone don’t drive loyalty

How experiences like VIP drops & events keep customers coming back

Real examples from brands using loyalty to boost sales

Why loyal customers spend 4× more in tough economies

How to balance short-term sales with long-term trust

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Loyalty Lion
• Never Fully Dressed
• Represent Clothing
• The Inkey List
• John's Crazy Socks

Links referenced in this episode:

• loyaltylion.com
• resilientretailclub.com

Mentioned in this episode:

Stock doctor

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Loyalty isn't just about discounts anymore.

It's about building real connections.

What brands need to do is they need to develop deep, meaningful relationships with their shoppers.

It shows them that you understand who they are, what they like.

From why experiences now matter as much as money.

Off to the simple ways brands can recognize and reward their best customers.

Charlie shares data, stories and practical steps you can take to turn repeat buyers into lifelong f. If you've ever wondered how to balance short term sales with long term loyalty, this one's for you.

Welcome to the Resilient Retail Game plan.

I'm Catherine Edley and in the next few minutes you're about to get powerful real world retail strategies from insights shared both from my guests and myself, backed up by my 25 years in the retail industry.

Keep listening to learn how to grow a thriving, profitable product business.

Let's jump in with this latest episode.

So Charlie, we are talking all about loyalty today.

Absolutely.

Tet it's 100% all about experiences as well as discounts.

Way back Lord's programs were just all about discounts, but now they're involving experiences and they've got lots of data back that up.

Our research shows that almost 90% of consumers want a financial reward, so nothing's changed on the discount side.

It's still an important benefit.

It likely always will be.

But 85% say the same about free shipping now and free product Rewards at around 70% want early access to sales and early access to new products.

So it's clear that shoppers don't just want discounts anymore.

They want a Lord's program to offer experiences that can help connect them with the brand.

Whether that's simple things like being the first to know about a new drop or more advanced initiatives like in store events.

And I've got a really nice example here.

Never fully Dressed which is a female founded fashion brand that uses Lord one.

Yeah, they use the Lord program to invite some of their top tier customers to a concert.

Oh wow.

Came to the yes.

Really neat.

So they all came to the venue in like never fully dressed branded taxis, all wearing a never fully dressed outfit.

And it was all done to thank them and make them feel special and part of the community.

One that I really like represent clothing.

They got booming store in La and they've got a Lords program, it's called Prestige and it's literally at the heart of everything they do.

So it's really well connected.

They came to Lords one in a bit of a panic.

They needed to change Lords program provider in a matter of weeks because they had a new product drop.

And the reason that was important is because product drops are literally at the crux of their prestige program.

It's what makes it work.

It's all about exclusivity and access to those releases.

So the way it works is like the VIP tiers give members access to products that non members can rarely get before they sell out.

The tiers allow them to offer those all important like experiences.

So you can see they've got like this tier program.

It's all about exclusivity, it's all about drops.

It's fully integrated in store as well.

So giving members like reasons to shop in store like events and Q jumps.

And they've also got this resale platform with secondhand items.

So more environmentally conscious and they can earn points on that.

So I just think it's a really good example of a Lord's program that across the whole company strategy is always thinking because it's looking at the environmental aspect, it's got the experiential element to it or exclusivity to it and it drives a huge percentage of the annual revenue.

20%.

Oh wow.

Yeah.

The annual revenue comes from the stores program and the members have a full time tire ltv.

And I've got one more Inkey, it's called the Inkey list and they have this thing called Inky Insiders week.

It's really cool idea.

It runs once a year, seven days.

It's just for the insiders which is their launch program members and they've got exclusive offers, prizes and perks.

It's got some discounts but it's also got early access to new products, chances to win back the cost of your order.

Which I thought was pretty cool.

Oh that's fun.

Yeah, yeah.

So they do it, they, they really hype it.

Then it's a marketing and an additional sort of campaign in their marketing calendar is.

But it's only for their VIP list.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I've seen that somebody a company called John's Crazy Socks in the US What I really liked because it was a US brand and obviously Black Friday is in Thanksgiving week.

So instead of doing Black Friday what they did was they did, it was like giving thanks to their loyal customers and they turned the Whole of Thanksgiving week into this sounds something similar like giving back to the most loyal customers, which I thought was a really nice spin on it.

And also because you know, in the UK we're so used to Black Friday, but actually in the US it's Thanksgiving.

Is that's where it came from?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, I like that that works well.

The plan, everything around it.

And then is it also, I guess an opportunity to drive people to, to their program?

You're right.

Actually they get it's almost a 400% increase in sign ups to the loyalty program in that week.

They're still going to be acquiring new customers and then it's just going to be advertised on the store.

Also they'll have a whole bunch of customers who haven't created accounts with them and obviously the marketing team will spread the message and people come and think, okay, right.

I just think now's the time that I create an account and build a deeper relationship with you because this insider swing sounds pretty cool.

I think this is the thing I find really fascinating about loyalty and I'm glad you mentioned the difference between the discounts and the experiences is that I think sometimes brands forget the benefits of saying thank you, of recognizing and acknowledging repeat purchases.

I'd love to know what your thoughts are about this.

I love that example.

So never fully just sending people to a concert in branded tax season, I mean, how amazing would you feel to be picked to be part of that?

I also think just even the fact of being recognized as more than just.

Another customer, we see loyalty as like it's, it's a strategy, it's a tool.

But really what brands need to do is they need to develop deep, meaningful relationships with their shoppers.

Loyalty and loyalty programs are one method to enable that.

And in particular those experiences, you're building a bond with your customers that shows them that then it's not just a transaction, a face source transaction.

It shows them that you understand who they are, what they like, that you want them to be part of your journey.

And that's what's differentiating brands these days.

Like you've obviously got the fast fashion brands coming out of China and they're all about cost and low cost.

But on the other end of the scale, the brands who choose law to land, they're trying to build a brand, a community, a relationship.

And only through using the Lords program and weaving in those experiences do they actually get to talk to the customer as a person and appeal to the emotional side.

So absolutely, yes.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

And so you said 90% of customers do still want though the kind of yes they do financial.

It's quite funny actually.

When we first started Loyaltyline, which was a long time ago, over 10 years ago, I was adamant that we weren't going to include discounts.

Obviously we provide the software that powers the Lords program and we make it really easy to create the reward types.

And I said at this point it was just two of them.

I said to my technical co founder, I don't want discounts, I only want like experiential rewards.

I think this is how it should be.

I think it should all about be about exclusivity and making people feel special.

It should be about status and elevating beyond discounts.

And then literally every single brand that we talked with said we need discounts.

I was like, okay, fine, you can have your discounts, but please, let's get to these experiences.

You said that it just keeps growing, that just keeps going up.

The number of people who want that as well.

Yeah, absolutely it does.

And brands are being really creative with it as well.

And it doesn't just have.

It can't always just be a concert, it can be related to products as well.

So it doesn't just have to be money off with all the discount.

Then there's kind of like a stage in between where you stock that you can use for rewards or like I said free shipping as well or exclusive access to something.

Doesn't have to always be as extreme as a concert.

I think customers really enjoy being involved in the brand journey.

So like participating in like design sessions as well.

I think that they really enjoy those sorts of things.

If a new store opens, being invited to the opening of the store.

And what do you think about just simply kind of sharing their opinion?

Yeah, one of the things that we've become aware of is actually only the data side of things.

Obviously consumers are more and more careful with what data they share.

But actually if you use a loyalty program, 78% of consumers say they would complete a quiz to earn points, as 70% said they would sign up for a newsletter.

So these are all ways you can use the loyalty program to get consumers to share their opinion.

And they're willing to do that because they're earning some points and reward in return, which then they can use for something else.

So obviously you've got the brilliant bird's eye view of being able to kind of oversee everything the brands are doing in the, in the loyalty space, which is such a powerful insight.

But what mistakes do you think that people or Brands are still making when they're trying to build loyalty.

Yeah.

What is actually interesting about Lord's programs is as a concept number they've been around for decades in the online world.

Actually it's only brands who are above 10 million where you're seeing high levels of adoption.

Now probably about 40% of stores on Shopify above 10 million GMV have a loyalty program and below that it's a, it's a smaller percentage.

But what's interesting is that was 0% when we first started.

The adoption is really picking up and it's at a tipping point.

But the mistake that those entering it or some of those doing it are still making is thinking that loyalty is fluffy and it can't be measured.

And it absolutely can be and should be.

You are spending money on this, you should be able to measure it.

So it's the same as any other marketing activity.

You should always be questioning the ROI of the Lords program.

Otherwise it's truly impossible to know how much you can invest in your program and also what you need to do to optimize it.

We've got some AI powered insights that go even deeper because what we found is marketers are time poor.

They don't want to interpret all these dashboards.

We can use our AI powered insights to interpret the charts for them and produce like a bit of a narrative to say like this is what your builds program has delivered in the last three months, six months, 12 months.

So they can just read off the script and have the charts.

This makes life a lot easier for a marketeer because obviously they're going to have those hard conversations with the finance team and they can just go to the finance team and say look, concrete evidence this is the impact that the loyalty program is driving.

Then they can have another conversation and say, look, can we have more money to invest in experiential rewards?

Yeah.

I mean it's wild to me that anyone would ever consider loyalty to be fluffy, to be honest.

Because one of the points that I'm often trying to ram home to people about building their businesses is that when you talk to people about growing their sales, often what they're talking about is getting more people to come, getting cold traffic, effectively getting more eyes on the business.

And you talk to a lot of businesses and they'll say, oh, we need to grow our presence, we need to grow our audience.

And I think for me what the big conceptual shift that really helps people is when they realize, well actually the money you spend on treating your best customers is just generally the roi I'm imagining must be so much greater than on acquiring cold customers because your customers that you've already bought from you are the ones who are going to advocate for you are the ones who are going to spend more, return less, recommend you to their friends that you mentioned, you know, refer out with codes and things like that.

It just makes so much sense to me to spend that money and time and effort on that warm part of your audience as compared to trying to bring in people from the outside.

And I'm sure you missed see the same from your data.

What we see is brands go on a bit of a journey.

They typically start life in customer acquisition mode, spend a lot of money on Google and Meta and et cetera to acquire customers to their store.

It's really easy for them to measure and to prove that they brought in customers.

So everyone gets a bit hooked on that.

But they should never stop to be honest.

Like you still need to be bringing in new customers.

But there comes a point where they start to look at the return on that investment.

Maybe the space that they're in gets more competitive.

Maybe that the price of getting customers in increases because they've already attracted the ones who were most readily willing to come to their store via paid ad.

So the cost to acquire customers goes up and then they see that equation tip, like the customer acquisition cost and a lifetime value, they don't quite make as much sense as they did initially.

So then they move into the other side of the equation, which is lifetime value, which is where we see it, loyalty and retention.

And they say, okay, right, if we can increase the lifetime value, then we can go back and spend more on ads and continue to acquire customers.

So it's a bit of a journey that a brand goes.

And we typically see it's after they've been in business for two years that they go, ah, now I need to increase my lifetime value.

Then they look at loyalty and retention strategies, loyalty programs, and then they go back and because they've increased their ltv, now they can outbid all their competitors on ads.

They both work hand in hand.

That's such a good way of looking at it.

So drive your lifetime value and then your cost of acquisition, because it's all about your cost of acquisition being lower than your customer lifetime value or I would argue your customer lifetime profit is what you really want.

Further down that journey.

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One of the things that a brand does after they've adopted loyalty and they've implemented a loyalty strategy and they're doing their normal discounting as they mature in that they start to think to themselves, well, what else?

And it's all about having a Lord's program integrated across the whole tech stack as I mentioned, like SMS and your mobile app and your subscription.

But the thing I like the most is when they integrate it with their product strategy.

And that wouldn't necessarily come to the front of mind.

You wouldn't think, oh, launch program, product strategy.

But they work really well together.

And some of the ways to make them work is the access to products as they launch, running double point promotions on products that potentially you're overstocked on, or giving exclusive access to products that potentially have a nice high gross margin on them.

Tying your loyalty tiers to new product drops.

I've seen this work really effectively.

It's very cool.

So you're talking about if you've got a certain level, you get access on a certain day, is that what you're saying?

So if you've got a new product drop, so something's coming into the store, it's the first time it's been there.

If you're in, let's just say it's at the top tier.

You get access to that on the first day and no one else does.

For some of the brands that we work with will mean that you're the only person or the only people who get access to this because it will sell out because it's such a hot item and it's a really cool way for like product to collect insights as well because they can see who's buying what and collect that useful data for product development.

I like it when brands do that because it all plays into the exclusivity element, the experiential element.

It's way beyond discounting still.

One of the brands that does this really well is a vodka.

They're premium vodka company using Norton and they do exactly this like early access to product launches using the Lords program and what happens, which I think is pretty cool.

It's like it causes their Instagram DMs to get flooded with people saying like, how do I Get the password to this.

How do I get this thing?

And they're like, well, it's hard.

The Lords program, it's, it's in the top tier, like, but it just shows that people are like knocking at the door and that they recognize that there is like this other part to the business, that it's like a club and there is exclusivity in.

They could get in one day, but kind of makes the brand a bit bigger.

And do you think it's important to be transparent then for them to say, like, this is how you do it, or do you almost think it's nice to have a slight kind of mystery about, like, well, just keep buying the vodka and maybe you'll get into top tier.

There are brands that do keep it a bit mysterious down there.

They won't ever confirm whether or deny whether something exists.

I think it's important to just pick whichever marketing strategy reflects your brand.

Don't try and be something that you're not.

But if they part of who you.

Are, then, I mean, there's probably arguments both ways.

I mean, I guess it depends.

But I do also know people, for example, who will have that you unlock free shipping for life if you've ordered five times, for example.

So once somebody's ordered four times, then they'll say to them, oh, hey, by the way, just so you know, if you order a fifth time, you're going to get free shipping for life.

And that in itself can be a really good trigger for purchase because then people are like, oh, okay.

That level of transparency just helps people understand the journey that they're on.

And actually lots of programs used to get a bit of flack many years ago for just being highly unclear and also really hard to earn any sorts of rewards, especially like airlines.

Like a normal person can't manage an airline program.

So yes, you're right.

Bringing that level of transparency to program helps shoppers understand where they are in that journey, what they can earn.

And we always say to brands like, make sure that every customer can earn a reward with their first interaction with you.

So you've already started that virtuous cycle.

So if you sign up, obviously it's important to but and you make a purchase and obviously we'll know the average purchase amount.

Make sure that they get a reward then, because then you start that journey with positivity.

I feel a little bit like that about Nectar sometimes.

Sometimes I'm like, I spend so much money in Sainsbury's.

How have I accrued £2 50 worth of Nectar points like I know you said if it sells really fast, they may end up being the only tier of the only people who ever get to buy something.

But you ever see people saying, right, we're doing this collaboration or something exclusive?

We do.

The thing is with the top tier Lord prefer members, they're the ones with your highest ltv.

So brands typically will put something that's actually quite expensive in there.

Like a lot of people think, oh, I need to keep discounting, but that's not true.

Your top tier Lauder program members are the ones who spend the most with you.

You can make exclusively available to them the premium end of your, of your catalog and that's what we see happening.

Actually.

No, I totally get that and I think that makes total sense because also you're going to have the least resistance.

I mean, who's more likely to buy an expensive item from you?

Is it going to be the person who's literally just come across your brand or the person who's, you know, bought from you multiple times, had a great experience, love that product.

It makes total sense that they would be the ones who would say, all right, yes, this is maybe more than I would normally spend, but I trust them, I'm going to go for it.

Trust, I think is such a huge part of it as well, isn't it?

And that comes back to your point earlier when you talked about, well, it's surprising to me that anyone would think a lot of the program is fluffy.

And you talked about those existing customers being the most profitable.

Well, that's a prime example of how profitable they can be because they already have that relationship with your business, they already trust you.

And when you release something that's exclusively available to them, they're actually, they're going to be happy to buy it and they will buy it.

When you look at loyalty sometimes the conception that you said it can sometimes get flak for for various different reasons, but sometimes it's seen as kind of a long term strategy.

But how do you see brands balancing short term sales goals with long term loyalty building?

Or do you believe it's a long term strategy or can it be short term?

Research has shown us is that consumers actually lean on loyalty programs when confidence is low.

So 71% are more likely to join a lawsuit program during times of economic uncertainty and 64% will prioritize shopping with brands that have lords programs.

That's quite okay.

That's interesting.

I was going to ask you if you had any stats on that.

So 2/3 nearly of customers will prioritize a brand that has a loyalty program.

That's really interesting.

Especially during this period of low confidence.

Yes.

And so that would be now we did our own research actually with our in house data team.

We looked at data from 3,000 brands, 200 million orders and compared the behaviors during a period of high confidence and low confidence.

And what we found was in periods of low confidence, active Lords program members are four times more likely to repeat purchase.

So I think that plays into that 2/3 point that we just mentioned that they will prioritize those with Lords programs.

But yeah, it really does show you that during these periods the customers who have enrolled in your laws program are the ones worth nurturing and putting your arms around.

Really?

Because that's where a lot of revenue is going to come from.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

When we talk about times of economic uncertainty and low consumer confidence, it's such a good reminder that when anyone has low confidence in anything even completely unrelated to economics, you know, if somebody's doing something and they feel less confident, then they need an additional amount of reassurance and trust and encouragement.

And I think that, you know, with sales you almost have to think about that too.

Right.

When the consumer is feeling less confident, they're going to need extra reassurance and extra incentives effectively or encouragement to purchase.

And it sounds like from what you're saying from the data that that's really where, you know, you're seeing that with the loyalty customers.

That's absolutely what we see.

On a longer term basis A loyalty program does take time for shoppers to accrue points, but if it's set up in the way that we advise that, like I said, that is just one transaction.

So you started building points and rewards in that positive relationship quite quickly.

But in a longer term sense our advice would be to make sure the lotter program is fully integrated with the tech stack.

It's integrated with the sms.

If you have a mobile app integrated with that too then you can take advantage integrating into your comms strategy across email, SMS push notifications.

You can pull in your loyalty data over time which will obviously get richer.

So you can personalize those messages and tailor them to individuals.

I think that's a good way to maintain kind of like that long term peace.

On the short term side, Lord, throw into great light surprise and delight tactics.

So bonus point promotions to get people to come back on a regular basis and have purchased sooner.

All of this takes a lot of effort, takes a lot of headspace for a marketeer.

And I spend a lot of time talking to brands and I want to save them that time.

So something that we're working on like everybody else, is involving AI inside of loads of and kind of taking away some of this lift.

So helping brands identify a segment of shoppers and giving them a suggestion of what to do to them so that they can act on those opportunities and grow revenues from those members without having to kind of crunch the elders themselves and come up with all the ideas.

The AI will be there to kind of say, look, here's a cohort and here's something you could do.

Oh, that's brilliant.

So you're basically using the fact that you've got these thousands of businesses that you can see everything that they're doing and using the best practice effectively, say, here's a cohort, here's something you can do.

And then that way it's something that, like you say, reduces that lift.

For the marketeer.

I wanted to just quickly ask you one question.

You talked about Tech Stack and one of the questions that I get asked quite a lot is I work quite a lot with independent retailers, with physical stores, and it's working out the kind of process of integrating the loyalty in person and online.

I don't know if you had any thoughts about that.

When we first started law to lab, one of the principles that underpinned how we designed it was it needed to be as seamless as possible.

Historic.

Lord's programs have too much friction and it just deters people from using them.

And Lord's programs are supposed to be fun as opposed to be something that makes you happy and build a positive relationship.

And nobody likes friction.

So what we've got Lord's learn is we integrate with Shopify and Shopify pos, it's already there and it's already seamless.

If a shopper walks into the store, the employee working at the till will just ask them, okay, what's your name?

What's your email address?

And they just type it into the Shopify POS system and up comes the shopper's history, including the loyalty information.

So there's no friction on the customer's power.

At that point, they don't have to get out the phone, they don't have to scan anything.

I think that's quite good.

Then what we've also got is an integration into Apple Wallet.

So brands like Represent Clothing.

We have like a store in LA and a couple in the UK too that really well they're integrated into the Apple Wallet.

So you can just pull up your rewards there and redeem Them.

My advice is if you are operating a little forum make it as friction free as possible.

The ideal would be that it's the person behind the till knows you.

That's really what you want.

You want someone to come in and say oh hi Charlie, it was great singing a couple of weeks ago.

How did you get on with the jumper that you purchased?

That's what you want.

And so you just try and move as quickly towards that as possible.

Final question then looking forward.

If you could give retailers one action to take right now to future proof their loyalty strategy for the next three years, what would it be?

It may not come as a surprise that my first answer would be give them a loyalty program and they will use it but only if they know about it.

And actually that's where we see businesses making a few mistakes.

So make sure they know about it.

So the most important action you can take right now is to ensure that your lords perennial drives the biggest possible impact on growth for the next three years is to ensure that it's embedded everywhere.

Make sure that the points, balances and tier statuses are embedded in email and they're embedded in sms.

So you're constantly reminding customers of the program between transactions.

I've already talked about how it can be integrated into the mobile app.

Points and rewards can be there but also you can reach them on their phones push notifications.

So that's something in checkout and it's part of your strategy and not just like oh it's something that marketing does.

It can't be like that.

Like loyalty is an organization wide strategy so your loyalty program must sit across everything in the organization too.

And I love that about what you said about the product strategy.

So building it, baking your product strategy around your loyalty program product is a.

Bit of a passion of mine so probably that's why I bit more than normal but yeah it is a really good way of doing it.

And then yeah that's like Lord's program members they do repeat purchase a lot more often as we were talking about it's I think it's two, seven times more to guiding them through like you've acquired them through Google or whatever and then to come to your store, get them to enroll in the launch program, start that journey once they become redeemers and they'll be on track to have a higher lifetime value as we talked about and then you can spend more acquiring customers because you'll have a higher LTV and then you start that like virtuous cycle.

Don't be intimidated by AI Just the more you can lean on AI to kind of do the heavy lifting for you and identify the actions for you, the more time you can dedicate to solving other challenges that you didn't really know were going to cross your desk.

So embrace it as much as you can.

Given that we have been in business over 10 years and we've got over 250 million shoppers active at all times, we've got lots of data so we're able to see just how much revenue a brand does generate from a lot of programs.

We've actually got benchmarks.

These aren't forecasts.

This isn't saying this is what you could make, this is what brands do make and we've got it pretty much every vertical and multiple sizes.

So if they help to the website it's lordsman.com at the bottom.

There's like revenue forecaster down there.

They can really see the impact that a lot program can have on their business and take a look at the stats.

Also there's lots of advice on how to who ran onto programme there.

Amazing.

And we'll put that in the show notes as well so people can link into that.

Thank you so much if you enjoyed this conversation.

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