Data is king, even at the local merchant level, and when incorporated into a digital loyalty platform, merchants are discovering how to increase frequency with a growing loyalty base. By accumulating, analyzing and reacting to the gathered data, companies are tangibly influencing the bottom line. Even a small increase in customer retention rates by 5 percent can increase profits by 25 to 95 percent. As a result, loyalty programs have grown by more than 25 percent in the past two years, according to the 2013 COLLOQUY Loyalty Census. Additionally, 28 percent of marketers report cutting advertising spending to fund digital marketing activities.

"Customer retention through digital customer loyalty platforms is creating a paradigm shift inside a merchant's four walls," explains Randy McCoy, CEO of GetOne Rewards, an emerging leader in the digital rewards category. "Merchants are capitalizing on the real-time and geo-targeting capabilities of cloud-based loyalty platforms. Incentives and rewards are the foundation of any loyalty program, but retaining customers and understanding why new ones are entering your store can be the difference between surviving and scaling a business."

Through digital loyalty platforms, merchants can track customers' daily behaviors using data points to measure everything from in-store visit frequency to loyalty program levels to social media engagement. The platforms have the sophisticated software to evaluate this data and develop customer insights that merchants can use to improve customer retention, all with little effort on the merchant's part.

Averaging 1,000 customer sign-ups per store front, GetOne Rewards Inc. has emerged as a trailblazer in the merchant-first approach to customer loyalty. While traditional loyalty platforms focus on customer retention through rewards, GetOne's platform allows merchants to identify their best customers as well as those with whom they would like to develop stronger relationships. GetOne users can also view trends over any time frame -- what locations are performing the best and when, for example--and filter out the clutter. The results are dynamic enough to enable a store owner to examine single store trends while the CMO tracks companywide behavior.

"The data you collect from loyalty programs offer important insights to guide more successful and more frequent marketing and messaging decisions," says Justin Michela, co-founder and CTO of GetOne Rewards. "From listening to and educating our merchant customers, we have seen firsthand how a fully integrated loyalty program can drive new customers to the storefront and entice them to return."