Wildfire CEO Jordan Glazier: Lessons From 60,000 Customer Loyalty programs

Loyalty and rewards programs are a great way to engage consumers while helping them save money in times of economic turmoil. A win-win.

But unless you are a goliath like PayPal, Honey, Capital One Shopping, or Rakuten, you probably cannot afford to build your own loyalty program, so who do you call?

Jordan Glazier, Founder & CEO of Wildfire, joined Website Planet to explain how Wildfire builds white-label loyalty and rewards programs that enable millions of consumers to save and earn money when they shop, and how they plan to address the upcoming changes in shopping behavior.

A must read for everyone interested in using shopping rewards programs to increase trust and customer retention without having to build everything from scratch.

What are the key challenges in your industry right now?

Our industry is full of opportunity right now, as consumers are now more than ever anxious to save money when they shop. The rewards and loyalty programs we typically build for clients like Royal Bank of Canada, Citi, and Visa are the perfect solution to reward their customers while driving loyalty and customer engagement.

The opportunity that presents itself to us now is that these programs are gaining in popularity. Online shopping rewards have become mainstream, and consumers have come to expect them from the brands that they love and trust.

However, the challenge is that the enterprises that want to deploy these rewards programs to their customers have a core business already, and it isn’t creating loyalty and rewards programs.

So how does a bank deploy a rewards and loyalty program?

They can’t do it themselves without a lot of time and energy at something that isn’t their core business (banking!), so they seek a partner to do it with them.

How are people trying to solve these issues, and why are these solutions not ideal?

Most online rewards programs that people are familiar with have been around for a while and were sort of the first wave of digitizing old behaviors like coupon clipping. We are taking a fresh look at it with technology that enables consumers to find savings while they shop online as they normally would.

Our technology presents cash back and coupon opportunities right in the flow of their online shopping journey. This is a new generation of technology that you see from partners that Wildfire powers (Citi, RBC, etc.) as well as other industry leaders, like PayPal Honey, Capital One Shopping, and Rakuten.

Here is an example of the technology we are building: Citi Shop Browser Extension:

How do you solve these problems in a better way?

The other examples I mentioned (Honey, Capital One Shopping, Rakuten) have bought or built their own programs. But for every other business out there that wants to offer online shopping rewards to their customer, Wildfire provides a completely branded solution, including relationships with all of the online merchants where savings can be had, the customer experience, and all of the infrastructure to track and pay out these rewards. This allows our clients to deploy shopping rewards programs for their customers without having to build all of this from scratch, which would be very hard for them to do.

This is a really clear opportunity for partnership rather than something a business like a bank would want to build themselves, while also making sure that checks clear, your credit cards swipes properly… Basically, these programs are very hard for banks to build while still doing all the things that banks and other enterprises normally need to focus on (like their own technology, systems, and customers.)

What new challenges and opportunities do you see coming in the future?

There has been a dramatic shift in consumer shopping behavior over the last five years. In large part due to the pandemic, consumers made an abrupt shift of their shopping towards online purchases, and we see that as here to stay. In fact, we see it continuing to increase as a share of consumers’ wallets.

We strive to work with both online merchants and offline merchants / local merchants. And so some of the greatest challenges and innovations are going to come from building out programs to drive loyalty for not just the online merchants where we focus today, but also for local merchants and “IRL” shopping experiences.

How do you plan to adapt to these changes?

As consumers continue shifting their spend online, growing the range of savings opportunities for consumers is one way we are adapting. We’re approaching 60,000 online merchants where people can earn and save money when they shop.

We’re also seeing a diversification in peoples’ shopping preferences, away from the obvious large merchants. People, of course, spend a plurality of their money at large players like Walmart and Amazon and other big retailers, but we’re seeing increasingly more people shift to shopping at smaller or specialty online merchants and direct to consumer brands.

So it’s really important, when we think about delivering value to online shoppers, to make sure that we don’t just have Macy’s as a place to buy shoes, but we also have brands like Allbirds, Spring Step Shoes, and Bearfoot Shoes.

Since shopping rewards have become mainstream, our goal is to make sure that we build great programs for our clients so they can deploy these benefits to their customers, and deliver more ways that consumers can save and earn money when they shop. Finally, we also want to make sure that it works for our merchant partners as well, by helping them acquire new customers and drive their business with incremental sales.