Connect and Protect with Product Engagement
How consumer engagement programs can drive sales and secure your products
In the hyper-competitive consumer goods marketplace, you must identify and leverage every advantage possible to customers and build brand loyalty. Deploying effective customer engagement strategies can enable consumers to create an intimate one-on-one relationship with your products and build trust in your brand.
Vastly improve revenue and loyalty with consumer engagement
The pandemic underscored the need for initiating digital relationships with consumers. For the past two years, it has been problematic to rely on brick and mortar storefronts to enhance the buying experience and build loyalty. By engaging directly and delivering meaningful online, mobile, or website experiences, you can:
- Deepen customer relationships
- Differentiate your product from other brands
- Improve your market position
- Foster brand confidence
- Build loyalty
- Drive sales
In fact a case study that we discuss below shows just how much more traffic you get when you incentivize engagement. Typically, we suggest an approach that includes these two components.
- Authentication – The best way to engage with customers, and the way VerifyMe approaches it, is to authenticate the product as the consumer is accessing the value-added content they are seeking. This delivers valuable information back, such as confirming a serial number, region, and product details to help protect the consumer from counterfeit goods and identifying diverted product.
- Loyalty Programs – Added revenue from loyalty programs is another compelling point of consumer engagement. Our typical consumer engagement programs have ancillary products or other coupons or incentives when a consumer hits a landing page. These pages can be customized by location, product group, and more.
How consumer engagement works
Let’s discuss a real-world example involving a vaping product. Note that the elements of the case study can easily apply to any consumable products where there is a relatively frequent repeat purchase pattern.
Situation
Counterfeits of brand packaging were widely available on street markets and online marketplaces. While consumers might consider themselves savvy enough to spot counterfeit product, these fakes were extremely sophisticated with the entire package and vape cartridge quality appearing almost identical to the original.
To make matters worse, many of these fakes were found to contain dangerous impurities linked to lung illness. With great concern about whether they were buying authentic product, consumer confidence started to erode and sales were significantly impacted.
Solution
The company radically changed their packaging. In parallel with the new package changes, overt security features were implemented and communicated to consumers via the brand’s website. The new package used a specialized tamper-evident box seal to protect the consumer against re-used packaging and included a variable (dynamic) QR code allowing the consumer to scan the code with their phone and verify each unique package ID. The code then seamlessly linked to a rewards program to further incent consumers to engage and drive repeat purchases.
Results
Implementing the loyalty program with coupon incentives which the consumer accessed by scanning the smartcodes resulted in an impressive seven-fold increase in scan rate versus non-incentive based codes.
Since authentication was linked to this code scanning, the brand owner acquired valuable product insight. The new codes even opened a direct line of communication from the consumer to the brand to report suspected illicit material.
The changes also drove additional sales from the loyalty rewards program by offering redemption toward the brand’s merchandise and special promotions.
The VerifyMe platform helps you engage consumers
We provide the platform for consumer engagement and facilitate rewards and loyalty programs. We set up the entire solution including authentication and the information you want to display to bring the consumer closer, such as where to buy information and links for related products. We also make it easy to roll out limited time product specials and other promotions. Driving the authentication and engagement are dynamic QR codes encoded with individual serial numbers. All of these actions deepen the relationship you have with your consumer, increasing loyalty and promoting sales.
As you build your strategies to expand your footprint, make sure you are taking into account the threat that counterfeiting can have on your reputation and your bottomline. VerifyMe will continue to innovate advanced solutions, always keeping two steps ahead of counterfeiters. We can support your brand as you work to drive even more engagement with consumers–and we are uniquely able to provide other proprietary solutions to protect and engage your customers.