Five ways to deepen customer engagement and loyalty with web3

Engage customers and build loyalty: five ways web3 can help

What is web3, exactly, and why should you care? Web3 combines digital technologies such as blockchain with new ownership, incentives and community models. That matters because it allows your customers to more fully control, own, share and sell items like digital products, digital services and data. Offering more ownership and control can create better customer experiences and grow engagement, loyalty and lifetime value. Web3 can help companies achieve some valuable benefits.

• Meet customers where they are. Consumers are likely spending more and more time online and on digital platforms, which is where web3 thrives. PwC’s Global Consumer Insights Survey found that 43% of consumers plan to increase online shopping — compared to just 23% who plan to increase in-store shopping. Next generation consumers are especially likely to spend time online and to adopt web3 technologies and ethos. Many of these users may want to own their digital property, which they can do in web3, just as they own physical property today. 
• Create improved personalized experiences. Web3 technologies can empower your customers to selectively and securely share more personal data — so you can give them the personalization that they want. In our Customer Loyalty Survey 2022, 82% of consumers said they were willing to share some type of personal data in exchange for more personalized service. So in a web3 environment, for example, you could use a token to allow access to your online shopping data in exchange for a benefit or an improved loyalty point earn rate.
• Offer collaboration and community. Consumers often form communities centered around ownership of specific items such as brands of cars or homes in certain neighborhoods. These communities may include web-based forums or private social media groups. As web3 unlocks full ownership rights for digital items (including the right to sell and trade them), brands can encourage and deepen communities around their digital products and collaborate with these communities on new products and experiences.
• Reduce costs. Loyalty programs often create financial liabilities: in return for loyalty points, you promise to provide products, services or cash. With web3, you can create digital items whose value derives from their function as entertainment, collectibles or access rights to digital experiences. You may never need to redeem them for cash or costly real-world services.
• Build the future. When web3 scales, loyalty programs could be among the first movers. A loyalty program is, after all, a ledger — and blockchain is fundamentally a decentralized ledger that enables better user experiences, collaboration and automation of manual functions. Starting on web3 today can prepare you for the next generation of loyalty programs. It can also help you prepare your whole company for future web3 opportunities.

What web3 success can look like

With web3 for customer engagement, there’s no need to dive in at the deep end. It’s typical to start small. But as you build up your initiative, pilot by pilot and piece by piece, you could aim for a program that will eventually have certain characteristics.