Expert Encounters: A Conversation with Jacqui Solly

A couple of months ago, I attended the Melbourne Marketing Forum where I heard Jacqui Solly speak. I was immediately inspired by her passion and knowledge for loyalty programs and Lifeblood as an organisation.

Jacqui is the Loyalty Manager at Lifeblood, where she manages their nascent loyalty program and future loyalty strategy.

Fortunately she agreed to have a longer conversation with me in which we explored her career path, what makes an effective loyalty program, how she's achieved success at Lifeblood, and her predictions for the future.

Take a look at the full interview for some amazing insights:

Jacqui's Journey to Lifeblood

NM: Let’s start with the basics, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your background?

JS: I am the loyalty manager at Australian Red Cross lifeblood and I've been here for 15 months. Prior to that, I managed loyalty programs at Suncorp across four or five of their big brands. Before that, I was in digital performance acquisitions, mainly SEM and performance display, and then before that in customer life cycle. On the personal side, I am painfully authentic, which sometimes gets me into trouble, but most of the time it serves me in pretty good stead. I've got a young family, my happy place is outside camping with no phone reception, and the closer I am to a body of water, the happier I am.

NM: Amazing, I’d love to be on the water at all times as well. I’m curious - as you mentioned, your career path has not been linear at all. When you started in your career, did you have an idea of where you wanted to end up at the end or did you just go with the flow and luckily ended up somewhere you love?

JS: Definitely the latter. When I went into the marketing industry as a junior the industry was in a real state of flux because it was kind of the start of the digital age. When I was at university, digital marketing wasn't spoken about, websites were spoken about and content was spoken about, only in terms of words on a website. But it's just changed so much and I think I kind of knew that at any given time, the job that I would have in 10 years probably didn't exist at the time.

And I had a mentor who gave me some good advice very, very early on. He said while you're young, just do as many different types of marketing jobs as you can, because it doesn't matter, you're just learning. The worst thing that would happen is that you'll just find out all the things that you don't like. The best thing is you might find something that you like, and that's pretty much what I did.

So that's how I ended up at Suncorp, and then I just said yes to stuff. With some thought behind it, but if it sounded interesting and challenging, and it put me in a different part of the organisation that I hadn't worked with before, I just said yes.

NM: That seems like the best way to go about life in general. So how did you end up at Lifeblood from there?

JS: I ended up in a loyalty role at Suncorp (because of saying yes to things), and I found I really enjoyed the Venn diagram between providing as much value as you can for a customer, while also being able to build stuff in terms of developing and integrations. I always knew that I wanted to move into a role with a bit more purpose. But again, I knew that I couldn't be successful in that if I didn't have kind of that steady background and the ability to learn. So, when the Lifeblood role came up, it was kind of like, OK, yup, this is my chance.

NM: When you started at Lifeblood did you feel “this is everything I’ve ever wanted,” or did it take some time to grow on you?

JS: A little bit. I think I definitely had a lot to learn coming from that really heavy, classic corporate place. I was used to there being a team or system for every single thing I could possibly need. When coming to Lifeblood, they hadn't really done anything in the loyalty space before. They'd done some trials, so they had some good data and some good research, but the concept, and certainly the setting up of it, was quite new.

But given my personal connection to Lifeblood as a long term blood donor and then having family members as direct recipients, that was that I guess goosebump-y feeling to be like, this is the place that I can use the things that I’m good at from a professional point of view for something that is very, very meaningful to me personally. Sometimes I really have to stop and pinch myself to be like how did we end up here?

NM: So jumping more into the loyalty discussion, you’ve only been at Lifeblood for 15 months and you have this amazing program in market, how did that happen?

JS: I joined Lifeblood about 3 months before the program was launched, so there had been a lot of work done across the business already, and a trial that had already concluded. Launching has been fantastic, but coming into the business as the first loyalty role it’s been great to create more confidence, more understanding, and more excitement about rewarding and incentivising our donors in the right way. For me that would be a bigger achievement than launching the current program, because it sets Lifeblood up for success long term.

The other thing I'll say to that too, is while I'm the only person in the organisation with loyalty in my job title, I'm not the only person that does the work. I am part of a virtual team across the organisation, which I which I think is a really fundamental part of any loyalty strategy.

9/10 times, loyalty as a function will sit in a marketing team because it’s customer facing or part of a communications or lifecycle team. But it could also quite easily sit in a tech or a digital team, or, a product or an app team, because it spans the end-to-end user experience - if it's done in the right way. If you work in loyalty and you're not dealing with people outside of marketing day-to-day, you probably need to have a look at how you're doing it. I speak equally to the Director of Operations as I do to the Director of Marketing, because the program has to integrate through the entire customer journey.

The Challenge With Loyalty Programs

NM: That leads perfectly into my next question, which is what is the core of a successful loyalty program? You just answered how you do that internally, but for the end user what is the key to creating that success?

JS: This is a really important question.

If you think about any of the reward programs that you interact with, anything from a stamp card, through to an online point of sale, or "buy this many things"/"get that many things" promotion, it fundamentally needs to feel like it’s part of the experience, not just bolted on.

Retail has kind of lost its way a bit in terms of how it integrates a reward structure into its value chain. What do I mean by that? Every time you buy something, certainly physically at a point of sale, it's like, “oh, what's your phone number we'll put you in our rewards program.” But there’s no concept about what value that is. What do I have to do to get enough points to redeem something? Or it just means that they can send you a $10 birthday voucher when everything in the shop costs $100 at least.

I think the most successful programs work in a way that what they're offering from a loyalty point of view enhances the end-to-end experience and it’s not just something tacked on at the end. It’s clear how a customer earns, what they need to earn for rewards, how to redeem the rewards, and most important it actually provides value to the whole customer experience.

But that only happens if it's done in that very integrated way. The digital marketing vernacular always mentions seamless experiences and seamless integrations, which is all great from a technical design point of view, but it has to also ring true in the actual customer's experience. Even if digitally or technologically it's seamlessly integrated, does that actually mean that the customer feels that? So that's my baseline, if nothing else: make sure it's completely integrated into your customer experience and it makes sense and it's actually driving value for the customer.

NM: The amount of random "points" I have at different stores that I'll never touch is ridiculous, and I signed up for it all! I just made an order at a large clothing brand yesterday, and after I got an email saying “You moved up a tier,” but I didn’t really know what to do with that.

JS: That’s a really good example of what I’m trying to explain. What does that mean? What is it? The user should know that there's a program and in your shopping experience it should be highlighted before you even select a product. Somewhere it should say “hey Nava, if you buy this many dollars of things today, you're gonna move up to the next tier” because you're more likely to buy that amount if you know you’ll move up.

But the fact that they just told you that afterwards is wild to me. That's not incentivisation. That's lovely, it's a nice surprise, but what if you spent $10 less than that? Then they would have missed the opportunity to get that extra $10 from you.

NM: It’s also funny, because they sent me a 15% coupon immediately - usually I may go back right away and buy something else, but I couldn’t use it because they have their annual sale on.

JS: This is a really interesting thing too. This drives me wild from a capability point of view. That brand is pretty sophisticated in what they do, right?

They should know (or their website system should know) that they have a sale on if they're going to send a 15% voucher to someone who is spending enough money with them that they are moving up tiers.

Don't give you a 15% discount that you can't use because there's a sale on, because it actually erodes your relationship with the brand, which we can clearly see by you talking to me about this, and it is such a simple thing to manage.

This is the sort of stuff that drives me mad, because there’s still a belief that if you do things like that (as in, putting tokenistic discounts in front of people) it brings them back on site and then they go into a retargeting pool. But there’s no point. Send them an e-mail saying, “hey, we noticed you've just made a purchase. Thank you very much. Are you aware that we also have all this stuff at 50% off?”

It's just old school marketing - thinking of how to put an offer in front of someone versus what their overall sales strategy is. I feel like there's a real disconnect.

Can Brand Loyalty Truly Exist?

NM: Once again, this leads perfectly into the next question I have. How do you view and manage churn* when you’re running a loyalty program, and how do you attempt to get past it? (scroll to the bottom for some marketing definitions!)

JS: This brings up a really interesting conversation in that there's churn, there's loyalty, there's retention, there's reward, there's incentive. And while they are all closely related, they're all quite different.

Strategies for reducing churn differ from those for building loyalty, rewarding, incentivising, or retaining customers. While retention and churn are closely related (as inverses), their approaches vary significantly. Churn prevention targets disengaged customers who've had negative experiences or reached their brand lifetime, requiring a win-back approach.

From a retention perspective, strategies must be proactive and meaningful, as retention connects more closely with loyalty than churn does. Effective retention means consistently delivering value and seamless experiences to prevent customers from disengaging.

Retention requires deeper strategic thinking - churn is reactive while retention is proactive. Loyalty spans the retention space, though I struggle to call it a "loyalty program" since true loyalty involves emotional connection. The question becomes: are you building a retention, reward, or incentive program?

NM: How would you classify what you’re building at Lifeblood?

If I look at what we’re doing now, it sits more in the reward and incentivisation categories of a program. Now given what we do and why we do it, loyalty absolutely is a part of that because people will be loyal to donating because of very personal altruistic reasons. So yes, there is an element of loyalty, but that's quite rare.

I get asked all the time "what's the brand that you're most loyal to?" But I don't have brand loyalties. I repeat purchase based on quality of product, or price of product, or even how quickly that product is delivered or based on the experience that I have with them.

Or, maybe if I have points locked away with them - that's the dark side of a loyalty program. If you give someone enough points, it might deter them from shopping with any of your competitors, but it doesn't necessarily mean they're happy about it. They're not going to take their money elsewhere. So from a bottom line point of view, that's good. But have you actually built any loyalty?

NM: I’ve never thought about it in that way. As an emotional experience, it’s not measurable. Instead you have to measure retention and repeat purchases, package it up and say they’re loyal if the numbers are going up.

JS: Exactly. That's it. I think you know to put kind of a bottom line against that, the advice to businesses would be - if you think you need a loyalty program, the first thing you need to do is work out: is that because you need to reduce churn?; is that because you want a reward?; is that because you want to incentivise repeat purchases or higher cart value etc.?; or is it because you want to retain your customers and lock them down?

You can have something against all of those categories, but they will be treated ever so slightly differently. Make sure you're thinking about them as those categories of outcome, rather than just “we need to drive loyalty.”

What is the Future of Loyalty Programs?

NM: So much to think about! Every single store has a loyalty program now, so what do you think people actually look for? Have you noticed any change in user behaviours in recent years?

JS: Just from observation, I think the next generation of consumers are very savvy. Not only are they knowledgeable, they know how to get information very quickly. What I mean by that is they’ll sense check a personalised offer with their mates. They can work out how to gain the system, they know how the algorithm works, and they know what's inside the black box.

They're not looking for stamp cards to get the 10th one for free. They're looking for meaning and connection. There's so much research out there across all sorts of industries that talk about the under 30 cohort craving connection and meaningful relationships. And I think that's going to translate to brands and experiences and how the next generation of consumers interact with brands.

I don't necessarily have the answer, but I think with the concept of value being more important than ever because of the cost of living, combined with the savvy knowledge that people have - it's gonna be tricky for brands to work out how to find the happy zone between those things.

NM: Well my next question was around industry predictions, and you’ve just answered it, so that’s perfect.

JS: On top of that, all this sort of stuff is cyclical. Everything that was old is new again. There's such a saturation in the market of loyalty programs. Which creates another unique challenge as a program manager: you are not only competing in your industry, you are competing with other loyalty programs.

Even though Lifeblood technically doesn't have any competitors, if we're going to spin up a loyalty program, we are immediately competing with all other loyalty programs. If we're going to give points and have donors redeem them, or we're going to give items away - whatever it is, it has to be meaningful enough that they care about earning that value and then redeeming it on something versus putting their time and effort into earning, say, more Velocity points.

It opens up a new layer of competition, and that goes back to needing to have a compelling enough value proposition in your program so that customers want to interact with your program as well as with your brand.

Loyalty Saves Lives

NM: To wrap things up, I can’t miss the opportunity to ask you to share why people should donate blood and how important it is.

JS: The pitch for why people should donate is different for everybody. It is totally legitimate to donate blood for the party pies and the Nippy's milk. That is perfectly OK. The snacks are a very important part of the donor experience!

Why it's important is its fundamental to Australia's healthcare, and I think that's the part that I didn't quite have a grasp on until I started to work here. If you think about any of the incidents that you see on the news locally in Australia, that has a direct impact on our supply.

• 1 in 3 people will need a blood product in their lifetime, but only 1 in 30 will donate.

• Of that 1 in 30, 40% of them won't come back and do it again.

• About 2% of the population fulfils the needs for 34% of the population.

If you can donate and it doesn't freak you out, then the question almost becomes why aren't you? While that might make some people feel uncomfortable, it's like, "Oh yeah, why don't I?"

There are many factors that we know impact people's decisions to put aside an hour of their time to donate. It becomes a discussion around people's priorities and that's where the discomfort comes in, because then it almost forces people to acknowledge, yeah, I'm prioritising watching Netflix. I'm prioritising going out for wine with my friends. All of those things are perfectly good things to do, but the push from us is how do you find an hour within those things that you do to give back to the community?

In support of Lifeblood’s mission, Revium is offering all employees 1.5 hours of paid company time to donate blood in August. Find the closest donation centre to you here.

Glossary:

Churn: The rate at which customers stop doing business with a company over a specific period.

Retention: The strategies and efforts a business employs to keep existing customers and encourage them to make repeat purchases or continue engaging with the brand.