The Loyalty Shift: When Thank You Beats 10% Off

Traditional loyalty tactics, points, discounts, gift cards, aren’t just losing steam. They’re actively diluting brand equity.

That was the core message of “The Loyalty Shift”, a breakout session at CommerceNext featuring Tal Keshet, VP of Loyalty Solutions at Snappy, and Matthew Bourgeois, Head of Growth at The Long Drink Company. Together, they explored how brands are rewriting customer acquisition and retention strategies by leaning into emotional loyalty and why physical, personalized gifts are delivering returns that outpace cash incentives and coupon codes.

Keshet began by illustrating the gap between how brands think loyalty works, and what actually earns long-term customer commitment. “If you asked your CFO for more customer acquisition budget today, would they say yes?” he challenged the audience. “Of course not. CAC is rising. Budget is tight. That’s why emotional loyalty has become critical.”

According to Keshet, emotional loyalty isn’t about frequency or recency. It’s about how customers feel about your brand and whether they’re willing to advocate for it. “Talk to me like you know me,” he said, describing what today’s customer expects. “Personalize. Surprise and delight. Reward me with something I want, not just something I need.”

Snappy’s internal data, shown during the session, backs up that claim. Rewards like experiential gifts and hedonic merchandise drove significantly more emotional impact and cost efficiency than cash or generic discounts. One of their core insights: you can achieve 2–3x the lift with the right experience at two-thirds the cost of traditional rewards.

To ground the concept, Bourgeois shared a case study from his time leading growth at Arccos Golf, a company that uses on-course data to help players improve their game. “We were hitting diminishing returns on traditional paid ads,” he said. “Meta, swag, even in-store placements, they were all getting stale.”

Facing rising CAC and falling engagement, Arccos turned to Snappy. The solution? Gifting rounds of golf. “Arccos is only useful to someone playing golf,” Bourgeois explained. “So why not literally get them on the course?”

With Snappy, Arccos launched campaigns that gifted potential customers items like rounds of golf or branded Yeti bottles, tangible, high-perceived-value rewards that also reinforced the brand’s relevance. The results were striking:

But one number stood out above the rest: 85% of gift recipients who sent a thank you message were retained, no need to reacquire them later. “That’s emotional loyalty,” said Bourgeois. “No discount ever got us a thank you note. But a well-chosen gift did.”

Keshet emphasized that gifting doesn’t just work at the top of the funnel. When applied across the customer journey, from activation to re-subscription to surprise-and-delight moments, emotional loyalty becomes compounding.

He shared a second anecdote involving a CMO at a Fortune 50 brand. The company had spent hundreds of thousands on Visa gift cards for acquisition, yet received zero thank-you messages. In contrast, Arccos campaigns using Snappy’s gifting platform consistently saw gratitude responses north of 50%. “When your customers are thanking you, they’re remembering you,” Keshet said. “They’re advocating for you.”

In the Q&A, one audience member asked for examples of gifts that truly resonate. Keshet stressed personalization: “If you know I’m into mountain biking, and you gift me a trip to British Columbia, I’ll claw my way there.” Bourgeois added: “What can you offer that money can’t buy?”

For Long Drink, that meant creating once-in-a-lifetime experiences like flying a customer on a private jet with actor Miles Teller to play golf at Augusta. “It cost us nothing,” he said, “and gave us priceless earned media and brand sentiment.”

The session closed with two sharp reflections:

The future of loyalty isn’t transactional. It’s relational.
And the brands that remember that, literally, are the ones their customers won’t forget.

ClickZ is a ClickZ Media publication