Belly’s Updated iOS App Boosts Customer Engagement

Offering customers rewards for loyal behavior is seen by many retailers as a good step toward repeat business. Knowing who to give those rewards to, however, can be a little more difficult.

Fortunately, for brands using Belly, the Chicago-based rewards startup announced Thursday (Dec. 17) that it is opening up a whole suite of brand-facing tools to help retailers boost their consumer engagement scores. Logan LaHive, founder and CEO of Belly, explained that the move will make for deeper relationships between Belly and its clients, as well as, and more importantly, between those clients and their customers.

“Business owners need a simple way to automate their marketing. By tapping into the customer data their loyalty program already provides, we can run more effective and engaging marketing campaigns automatically on behalf of every merchant,” LaHive said in a statement. “With the release of our first merchant-enabled app, it’s easy for businesses to manage their campaigns the same way their customers are engaging with them — mobile-first. We are empowering business owners to connect with their customers, no matter where they are.”

While the move should come as a boon for retailers across the board, TechCrunch explained that Belly’s retail clients weren’t totally bereft of consumer engagement tools before the announcement. A software suite known as “Auto-Engage,” a function that helped retailers identify and communicate with repeat customers to drive up traffic, was released in 2014. Belly says that Auto-Engage aims to reclaim 10 percent of shoppers who have diverted from normal behaviors, such as failing to make a purchase in an extended period of time, and purports to turn anywhere from 50 percent to 60 percent of initial customers into repeat ones.

If Belly can show retailers that adding even more data to the Auto-Engage tool can make their lives easier and their business more profitable, they might send more than a few brands to the App Store looking for updates.