White Label Loyalty Insight: What Is Headless Loyalty?
Here at White Label Loyalty, we like to offer you the insights into different terms heard in the world of loyalty. This week, we are talking about ‘Headless Loyalty’ and discussing why it is going to become more and more relevant in the next few years.
What Does Headless Actually Mean?
However gory the name might sound, 'headless' is simply a term used to describe a system that is without a customer component that is tightly integrated. The 'head' which is customer is therefore disconnected from the process.
For a long time, e-commerce platforms' front-end systems were heavily integrated with back-end systems. Things started to change in the early 2010s when e-commerce sites were vastly improving but it wasn't until 2015 that the technology became available to unlatch the back-end and front-end of a platform. This allowed brands to become more heavily customer focused and gave them an opportunity to provide a better customer experience. This is when headless functionality came to wider use.
Interestingly, according to Google Trends, the term ‘headless commerce’ reached their search peak in March 2020 in the US (and again in summer 2021 globally). This highlights the shifting focus of international brands to build digital systems that work efficiently and serve the company in the best and easiest way. Importantly, the aim sought was for these systems not to rely on outdated technology and be ready for the future of commerce.
What Is Headless Loyalty?
Headless loyalty programs can be simply described as back-end platforms. They are primarily designed to process any type of loyalty transaction in a manner that is disconnected from the customer-facing/front-end environment. Simply put they use API to deliver the loyalty capability that is desired.
The opportunity to disassociate the customer-centric functionality of the front-end platform from the back-end technology provides increased liberty for developers to create their ideal customer experience on the front-end. Headless loyalty therefore allows you to easily introduce loyalty marketing into a variety of sales channels using API.
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What Are The Advantages of Headless Loyalty For Businesses?
Now we know what they are, why is headless loyalty expected to be the future of technology for consumer brands? What makes them so different and sets them apart from other types of loyalty programs?
The overwhelming advantage of a headless loyalty program for businesses is its flexibility and agility. This is because headless functionality allows developers to be able to focus on creating scalable technical improvements that open their business to be able to respond to new market opportunities.
Another key advantage of a headless loyalty system is its cost effectiveness. The cost of building solution without an API-based headless system can be costly and not time-efficient. An API-first loyalty solution provides you to pick and choose components in order to meet needs for engaging customers.
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What Can White Label Loyalty Offer?
White Label Loyalty has a headless system as it is designed on an API-first basis. This means every aspect of it can be interacted with through an API connection, so there’s no need to build yourself a new app or site!
Our API-First system includes:
- Rewards API: This provides complete control in structuring your loyalty card however you like. This provides the opportunity to change how customers earn points as well as what rewards are available to them.
- Events API: Our events API allows you to define 'events'. Events are simply any actions that your users take such as a transaction or sharing a social media post.
- Users API: This is the database at the heart of your loyalty program. It gives you the power to register, list and retrieve users. It also allows you to look at certain customer attributes such as points balance, unredeemed vouchers or last active date.
- Venues API: Our Venues API allows you to create venue information for physical stores in one easy-to-access location. This can then be combined with other elements of API.
- Marketing API: This allows for a more active approach, giving you the ability to keep engaging with your consumer base. It can segment users based on their activity and attributes in order to create dynamic and engaging campaigns based on that data.
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Jack Rewcroft
Marketing Assistant
Jack was our Marketing Assistant. He helped with content creation including writing the blog posts you love to read!