Making a point: why loyalty is key for Seasalt and SQLI

The clothing brand revealed a 50 per cent customer sign-up rate to its Seasalt Rewards programme in its first few weeks, while its email customer base grew extensively.  

Loyalty strategies have become a major focus this year, as brands look beyond transactions to build longer-lasting customer relationships. 

So, what makes a good loyalty strategy? Where should brands start? And what should be their objectives? 

Here, SQLI talks to Briony Martin, Seasalt’s Senior Customer Strategy Manager, about the brand’s vision. 

What can your customers expect from the scheme?  

We launched a mobile digital wallet card called Seasalt Rewards on the 1^st May designed to give customers something back every time they shop. 

We’re focusing on three core benefits. First, customers earn a point for every pound spent, both in-store and online. Once they hit 100 points, they get £5 off - no thresholds, no restrictions, just straightforward rewards. 

The second perk is a £10 birthday treat, sent to them on their big day.  And third, members will get early access to sales, new collections and member-only competitions. 

What led the business to this point? 

Our old loyalty scheme was only available in-store as a stamp, coffee-card-style, offering. 

As a business, we saw the impact this was having with our shop-only customers - driving repeat purchases, increasing satisfaction, and customer lifetime value. It was clear that scaling the programme would deliver long-term value for the business. 

We launched our ‘voice of the customer’ programme back in 2020, when the CX department was first created. Over the years, customers have consistently told us they want loyalty online. It became a major pain point we had to address and the case for an omni-channel approach grew stronger over time. 

What were Seasalt’s objectives when undertaking this project? 

Our key metric is around customer lifetime value. So that includes frequency of spend, value of spend and experience metrics as well.   

We wanted to address the issues shown in our CX metrics and turn the experience into one customers would recommend and support.  

Another key aspect was really understanding the membership behaviour. It was about growing our email base so that we’d have that contact-ability and data capture. The customer gets rewarded through those communications as well as through earning points - a key part of driving engagement and meeting our goals. 

How long did it take from concept to launch? 

It took over a year, although we started planning earlier. 

What advice would you give to other brands thinking of following suit? 

Start with understanding and mapping the customer journeys - which we did a year in advance of starting the project.  

There are so many internal operational and technical elements to a scheme like this, but ultimately, unless you deliver what you need for the customer, you won’t succeed. 

While we can guide and support the experience, it’s the customer’s response that determines how well the programme performs. 

Can you talk to us about what SQLI brought to the table? 

This project was a close collaboration between the SQLI and Seasalt teams, who developed a tailored integration for our Adobe Commerce platform and in-store systems. After seven years working together, our partnership has grown into a solid working relationship that delivers consistent results. 

SQLI offers more than technical skills, they provide practical insight, helping us understand the true impact of our goals and identify challenges before they arise. 

They understand how our business operates and, like any company, we face unique system and integration challenges. Their knowledge in breaking down user stories and focusing on clear outcomes has been key to our success. 

What’s next for the loyalty scheme? 

There are three elements planned. We want to utilise the reward structure and understand whether we can drive certain categories or promotional offers through that engine as opposed to a discounted price that you'd traditionally do. 

The second area is leveraging virtual in-person experiences. Making our members feel like members rather than something functional and transactional. 

And then thirdly, it's around driving the communications because having that data capture as part of the scheme allows us to personalise and segment experiences.  

How do you sum up the scheme and experience? 

We’ve launched an omnichannel scheme that addresses key customer experience challenges and underpins our core customer metrics as part of Seasalt’s growth plan. 

The Customer Experience industry has grown significantly over the last five years.  COVID turned the world upside down and the customer expectation changed people's priorities. We know that as soon as a customer has had one customer experience, whether that's with Vodafone or a fashion retailer, their expectations are at that level with any other company. That becomes the benchmark.  

To have this constant competitive nature where you just cannot stand still, loyalty, which is based on human behaviour and emotion, is so important to lock customers into the customer lifetime value. Without it, customers can easily be swayed by marketing and shop elsewhere.  

If you lock-in loyal behaviour, that brand becomes a key part of that customer's portfolio and they're less likely to be enticed by another brand. To have that real connection to a customer gives a brand the best chance of that customer continuing to shop with them and recommending them to others.