Tell Me about NFTs without Telling Me about NFTs

At Hang, we enable brands to create bespoke NFT-powered membership and loyalty programs.

Now, bear with me — when you hear the word NFT, you probably immediately think of expensive monkey pictures and Ponzi schemes. NFTs have (rightfully so) gotten a bad rap in the past few years.

Before we dive into what NFT-powered loyalty programs are, the first thing that we want you to do is to forget about silly JPEGs and scams for a moment.

Forget the word NFT altogether. It’s just technology that enables new customer experiences. In its simplest form, NFTs are just unique, ownable assets.

No customer asks what programming language an app is built with. They don’t come to your website and ask if it’s built on HTTP. What they care about is their experience while using the product, not the nitty gritty details of how it’s built. The same principle applies here — customers care about a brand’s products, experiences they can have, and how the brand makes them feel. They don’t care how these things came to be.

Unlocking New Experiences

With a loyalty program built on Hang, brands can offer all of the same earning moments and benefits for their customers that they can with a standard loyalty program. Customers can do things like earn points for their purchases, unlock point multipliers, and participate in promos for bonus points, all by taking actions that the brand wants them to take (beyond just transactions). In return, brands can offer discounts, exclusive products, early access, and more to members of the loyalty program.

However, customers have limited attention for mediocre rewards. Where it really becomes interesting is the new experiences that brands can offer their customers through a Hang loyalty program. With an NFT-based loyalty program, the customer now owns their loyalty status. This means that customers can now bring their loyalty status with them as they move across both the digital and physical world; and by unlocking new benefits, they’re increasing the value of an asset that they now own.

Customers are no longer locked into one site to use their loyalty status, which enables brands to seamlessly create powerful partnerships and offer rewards to other loyalty communities outside of their own.

Benefits can now be highly personalized and three-dimensional.

An eCommerce fashion brand can work with a coffee shop to create a custom drink for members — and they can reward customers with points for both brands when they purchase that drink. Think tickets to exclusive sponsored events, points multipliers for shopping with preferred partners, or rewarding a customer with a cocktail at their favorite neighborhood bar.

And all of this happens seamlessly for the customer — they don’t even need to know that their membership is an NFT.

The opportunities for new experiences that NFT-based loyalty programs enable are endless. For more on this topic of partnership ecosystems, check out our recent piece on Multiplayer Commerce.

We’ve graduated from chunky discount codes and birthday emails. A modern loyalty program brings excitement, surprise, and delight to your customers.

Beyond increased customer sentiment, NFT loyalty programs also enable you, as a brand, to gather far more information about your customers, and therefore develop a closer relationship with them, than ever before.

Hang’s Process

In building your customer loyalty program, we encourage you to identify the overarching business goals. Are you looking to increase customer LTV? Acquire new customers? Run partnerships? Encourage referrals? Or even just do something exciting for your customers?

By setting these goals, we can now identify what actions we want to incentivize your customers to take. Using these desired actions as our guiding star, we work with brands to build out an optimal loyalty program.

You now have the opportunity to create unique, personalized, and never-before possible rewards for your customers. Want to encourage referrals? Create a “lunch on us” reward to give customers with 10 referrals lunch at a local restaurant. Want to increase LTV? Offer an all expenses paid trip to your highest spender for the year and display a live leaderboard so people know where they stack up.

NFT-based loyalty is the future of customer retention & engagement for brands. Don’t just do it to say you have NFTs — do it to truly unlock a special relationship with your customer base.

Ready to build your program? Get started today.